Selling Science Fiction Cinema

J. P. Telotte is a professor emeritus of film and media studies at the Georgia Institute of Technology. He is the author of Animating the Science Fiction Imagination and Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps and a former coeditor for the film journal Post Script.

• Acknowledgments Chapter 1. Marketing and Making Science Fiction Chapter 2. What Is This Thing? Framing and Unframing a New Genre Chapter 3. Pondering the “Pulp Paradox”: Pal, Paramount, and the SF Market Chapter 4. Moppets and Robots: MGM Markets Forbidden PlanetChapter 5. Another Form of Life: Audiences, Markets, and The BlobChapter 6. Selling Japan: Making, Remaking, and Marketing Japanese SF Conclusion Notes Select Filmography Select Bibliography Index

J. P. Telotte offers a thoughtful, well-researched overview of how these films were marketed to audiences at their height in Selling Science Fiction Cinema...Telotte also offers a thought-provoking look at contemporary sci-fi marketing approaches during such a fascinating time in which so much content is available to users via streaming platforms rather than the past 'traditional' approach of attending the cinema.(Hometowns to Hollywood) Focusing on various promotional campaigns, publicity strategies, and cultural products, this fascinating study offers a material-based history of the selling of mid-20th-century science fiction cinema...Deploying precise critical insight and drawing on an array of archival findings, Telotte considers the marketing of such films as The Thing from Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954), and he adroitly generates new insights and readings of these films and their significance to history and culture. Considering the discourse circulating around science fiction film’s place in literary fan culture, the genre’s position in society, and the shifting attitudes toward speculative cinema of studios in both Hollywood and Japan, Telotte’s work emerges as an engaging addition to film studies. (CHOICE) By focusing on how [science fiction] became legible as a film genre, and in particular as a set of aesthetic andnarrative expectations sold to an audience before they even see a film, Telotte offers a fresh perspective on one of [science fiction] film’s most derided eras. (Science Fiction Studies) For anyone interested in the origins of American sf cinema and the film industry’s attempts to grapple with marketing a new and unfamiliar genre in the postwar period, Telotte’s thoroughly researched and well-cited monograph will prove an invaluable resource. (H-Net)