Despite the modest budget, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus hoped Superman IV would function as a blockbuster for their independent company, Cannon Films. Superman IV, along with the Stallone vehicle Over the Top (1987), were Cannon’s highest budgeted films of 1987, at around $25-$30 million including prints and advertising costs. A quasi-”mini-major”, Cannon specialized in cheap action films typically budgeted at around $5 million, featuring action stars like Chuck Norris and Charles Bronson. Cannon’s stated production strategies centered on supplying the international market with American films that could be sold abroad based on star recognition. Moreover, Cannon did not rely on a few pricey films as most of its studio competitors did. Instead, the company released as many as 30 films a year, banking on quantity over quality.  Superman IV’s higher budget, though modest by industry norms, was a departure for Cannon.

For Superman IV, Golan and Globus purchased rights for the film from producer Alexander Salkind for a reported $5 million. Cannon was also able to sign on actors Christopher Reeve, Gene Hackman, and Margot Kidder for the fourth film, no small feat considering Reeve swore off all Superman roles after Superman III (1983). Golan and Globus convinced Reeve to star in the film by allowing him creative input; Reeve received a screenwriting credit and Golan and Globus agreed to produce Reeve’s personal project, Street Smart (1987).

Cannon Films was infamous in Hollywood at the time for their unconventional methods of financing. For one, Cannon was one of the first independent companies in the 1980s to exploit the growing home video market, as Frederick Wasser has noted. Moreover, Cannon took a particularly aggressive approach to pre-sales of theatrical, TV, and home video rights, focusing on foreign sub-distributors. In fact, pre-sales covered as much as 90 percent of Cannon releases’ negative cost, often before production was completed. As one might expect, Cannon had a particularly prominent, sometimes infamous, presence at industry sales events like Cannes and MIFED, where Golan and Globus shopped finished films as well as promo reels of films in production. Yoram Globus summed up Cannon’s strategy in a 1986 interview in the Los Angeles Times: “Cover the downside, dream on the upside and run it as a business.”

Golan and Globus funded much of Superman IV through pre-sales agreements. In April of 1986, Cannon secured a contract of over $100 million with Viacom International, parent company of Showtime, which gave Viacom exclusive broadcast rights to select Cannon films, including Superman IV, not yet in production. Cannon also struck a deal with Warner Communications, Inc., in 1986. Warner purchased all domestic distribution rights–theatrical and ancillary–ain U.S. and Canada. Pre-sales agreements such as these provided the funds to amortize production costs and saved Cannon the $3-$5 million cost of prints and advertising which Warner, as domestic distributor, would pay.

Superman IV performed fairly well on opening weekend in July of 1987. In the U.S., the film opened on a whopping 1,500 screens and brought in around $5 million, ranking fourth at the box office that weekend. In the UK, the film fared slightly better, opening at number two. In the long run, however, the film’s earnings were less than impressive, bringing in $16 million domestically and ranking 69^th among the domestic highest-grossing films of 1987. Abroad, too, distributors complained that they would likely not go into profit with the film. Reviews were also lukewarm. Janet Maslin of The New York Times criticized the special effects as “perfunctory” and “chintzy” and the cinematography “sloppy.”

By 1987 and 1988, Cannon was in dire financial straits due to many box office misses, including Superman IV, a series of risky investments in UK theaters, and bookkeeping practices that overestimated earnings from ancillary markets. As a result, Cannon was more than $200 million in debt and nearing bankruptcy. Warner bailed Cannon out in 1987, purchasing much of the company’s library as well as common stock. Rights to the Superman franchise, licensed to Cannon, were returned to the Salkinds at that time as well. Superman IV was in many ways a smart buy for an independent like Cannon, allowing Golan and Globus to exploit a well known property and star. Though Cannon was able to cover costs through pre-selling the film to domestic and international distributors, pre-selling subsequent rights diminished the company’s ability to reap profits.  Moreover, disappointing opening weekend box office suggested that ancillary markets would likely not make up for theatrical losses. Even Clark Kent couldn’t save Cannon from years of  risky expansion and low-reward pre-sales ventures.

It seems a familiar narrative: the storyteller as maker of worlds, as God. Narrating has always been a way to create, with naming as a particularly generative power. What I find surprising, then, is not that today’s storytellers engage this trope, but how they have chosen to do so. Rather than merely acknowledging how writers are not only Gods of their own universes as they create fictional worlds, there is a strong sense in some recent instances that argues that writers create reality as well.

In recent weeks there have been two plot lines in completely different shows taking up this narrative, and it makes me wonder about our fascination with the auteur and his authorial “Godlike” control. More, it makes me wonder about the ease in which both writers and academics privilege text over action in ways that make our lives of words as, if not more, important as a life of action. This is not to diminish the importance of critical analysis or the awareness that words matter. It is, however, an attempt to question our eagerness to foreground the mode of engagement we have mastered and with which we are most comfortable.

In the recent Doctor Who episode “The Rings of Akhenaten,” the monstrous antagonist eats people’s experiences and stories of the past. When even the Time Lord’s immense past cannot feed it, his companion Clara instead feeds it the potentiality of future story lines: “It’s full of stories, full of history. And full of a future that never got lived… This leaf isn’t just the past. It’s a whole future that never happened.” What is foregrounded here is the infinite potential of imagination and possibilities. Though, as a fan, I couldn’t quite help wonder if Moffat was celebrating the potentiality of the many worlds spun from the reality of Clara’s mom’s life and, by extension, the show or if we fans were rather the nearly insatiable monster wanting ever more stories. Maybe both?

Likewise, the recent Supernatural episode “The Great Escapist” features the new character Megatron, who is the scribe of God, in charge of the Word. The Archangels, he describes, decided “they take over the universe themselves, but they couldn’t do anything that big without the Word of God.” Megatron went into hiding, instead spending his time reading human stories. And he revels in his description of these stories (both history and literature clearly): “It was something to watch, what you brought to His earth… But really, really it was your storytelling… When you create stories, you become Gods.”

Again, humanity’s largest potential is framed not as our achievements, inventions, and discoveries but as our potential for imagination and storytelling. In fact, even when Dean and Sam berate him for his inaction in the war between demons and angels that has caused so much human suffering, the action yet again is an act of writing: “I am the scribe of God. I erased it,” he responds when asked how he overcame the obstructions the King of Hell had erected.

Words becoming actions – ideas creating reality is a trope nearly as common as the author as God of his fictional universe, but somehow combine these two, and the storyteller, the showrunner, becomes something more than an authorial voice. I am reminded of the Derridean il n’y a pas de hors-texte, which became central evidence in accusations of deconstruction as nihilist. But even in an interpretation where acknowledging that any thing is ultimately a text, can be read and analyzed as text, the political message remains problematic.

For me, personally, it is a matter of necessary versus sufficient propositions: To change the world, it may be necessary to be aware of language and ideology, of the cultural text and those who creates it, but I am very doubtful that it is sufficient. In other words, material alterations always contain textual elements but awareness of and changes in ideology do not guarantee real-life changes. And this is regardless of whether the self-importance comes in the guise of academics or showrunners.

1) This installment starts with news that that I’m sure no one missed. Iron Man 3 made its worldwide debut, but all eyes were on China, which put up a respectable $21.5 million on opening day. In North America, our $68.3 million opening day brought IR3 within striking distance of a half-billion dollar box office after less than two weeks of release. Keeping all of that in mind, can you really blame RDJ?  But life’s not all about the Benjamins, friends. Apparently, Tony Stark is doing good business (“business”?) among pirates, who elevated IR3 to #3 on TorrentFreak’s list of the most illegally downloaded films. Haven’t seen the movie yet? Here are some other ways to enjoy the atmosphere: becoming Iron Man, keeping up with Robert Downey, Jr., on Sina Weibo, or basking in RDJ’s charisma.

2) Speculation about NeXtBox – can we make this a thing? – is picking up ahead of a launch event set for May 21. Exact details about the release date, price, and specs are yet to be revealed, but as I get on in years, I find what matters most is that I be allowed — encouraged even — to play alone. What do we know about NeXtBox? Well, apparently it supports a projector system capable of making you wish that you didn’t have so much furniture. Don’t invest in a blank wall yet, however; Illumiroom may not be ready for Microsoft’s next-gen rollout. If you’re not on Team Microsoft, there’s always the PS4 to look forward to.

3) The future is arriving at the speed of time, and next-gen gaming systems are just the start. San Francisco played host last week to the first NeuroGaming Conference and Expo, where “ineluctable modality” was just a string of cool-sounding syllables. Commercial potential for games that track player heart rate, brain waves, pupil dilation, and a host of other physiological data is still slight, but Google Glass may help start-ups find a direction. We all saw Strange Days, right? Less pie-in-the-sky are developments in controller design. Thalmic Labs’ Myo promises “effortless interaction,” bringing us all one step closer to living out our childhood fantasies or five steps closer to saying, “Remember when…?” Also, this exists.

4) Let’s pretend this is a surprise. Google Glass is coming, presumably for people more interesting than myself, and some of the source code has been released, so developers have been put on notice. What are the possibilities? Where to start: wink-based photography, making Vine videos, making and uploading YouTube videos, ARG gaming (a covert valorization of early adoption?), Facebooking, and updating your software. But it’s not all sunshine and rainbows; get a head start on worrying about surveillance, privacy, basic social interactions, keeping expectations realistic, and not looking like a jerk. And you don’t have to be excited about the tech itself to enjoy the ad campaign. White Men Wearing Google Glass has made a game of tracking down the instrument’s target demographic. So far, though, I’m most concerned about a different set of would-be users. Finally, I’m going on record. Google Glass is still only playing second-fiddle. The Large Hadron Collider (or any particle accelerator) exists; for the rest of us, there’s Google Glass.

5) First, some context: The Syrian Electronic Army has been around the digital block a few times, becoming something of a nuisance for high-profile critics of the Assad regime. The group’s latest target was The Onion Twitter account, where it posted a number of pro-Assad and anti-Semitic tweets just because they couldn’t take a joke. The Onion responded as you’d expect: one news story poking humor at the hack and another announcing tighter security. (When connectivity is a weapon, I feel compelled to point out that feelings of levity should be brief. See the end of the WaPo story for evidence.)

6) How are things at DreamWorks? Awesomeness abounds.  It’s overflowing even, so they’ve sent some to China. But is ‘awesome’ for DreamWorks ‘awesome’ for everyone? It may be for a selection of YouTube content providers. Subscription channels are coming. Big Bird may be involved, but WWE isn’t biting (for now?).  As much as things change, other things remain the same…unless this happens. That would be a fairly significant development.

7) Netflix’s streaming service lost almost 1,000 titles on May 1. Users and the media took to calling the event Streamageddon, but I was partial to Apocaflix. Netflix (see, it’s right there in the name!) has begun testing new layouts, which makes me wonder if Facebook has conditioned us to complain. Then again, Netflix has its competitors to think about, and they do seem to be cropping up. If the market gets tight, there’s always money in the banana stand.

8) A smattering of stories about trademarks and copyrights… Instagram has the dubious honor of having its name informally tacked to recent British copyright legislation. Do you think Warner Bros. performed a “diligent search” before being sued for its unauthorized use of Keyboard Cat and Nyan Cat? Barry Diller is calling broadcasters’ bluffs over Aereo, and Fox is doing its best Shredder impression, claiming the court battles are just beginning. For what it’s worth, Aereo is taking steps to keep that from being the case. Also, who has the heart to argue with Harper Lee? If Gregory Peck were still around, I bet he’d get involved.

9) What’s killing cinema? Steven Soderbergh has the answer. “[F]ive and a half hours of mayhem,” you say? It sounds so Shakespearean, but I expect it signifies more than nothing. Don’t worry about Soderbergh, though, he’s got a Plan B, available for your enjoyment here.

10) What else is there to talk about? Rest in peace, George Jones, Deanna Durbin, and Ray Harryhausen. In case you’re unfamiliar with any of them, here’s the greatest country song of all time (by some accounts), an appreciation and analysis of fan appreciation for Durbin, and a primer on Harryhausen’s work. (The pay wall won’t block the videos, so click on through!) Ender’s Game is on the way. To my father’s great shame, I’ve never read it. As for Mr. Card, he depresses me too much to make a joke. Star Wars day happened. Nielsen says welcome to the family. And get ready for some AIP remakes!

11) What?! That’s right. ELEVEN! One extra for the art and science that caught my eye. Here’s a stop-motion movie using atoms as pixels, meaning there’s at least one digital format with resolution superior to 35mm film. Roger probably would have stood his ground on this one. I know people who actively change the typeface of their handwriting every few years. Earth driving is easy. The mysteries of the cosmos are out there to be discovered, but don’t forget that people can be pretty gosh darn cool, too.

“Stooge of the Night” may be pretty feeble stuff when compared to the biting progressive satire of Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert. However, when considered within the context of network late night television, the segment is startlingly bold. Unlike Stewart and Colbert, who preach to the choir, network host Letterman’s audience is a demographic mix that skews much older and more conservative than Comedy Central viewers. Late night talk shows tend to avoid overt commentary on political policy, particularly in such a direct, cringe-inducing manner. For “Stooge of the Night,” the senator’s official head shot and Twitter feed fills the screen for at least a full minute, an agonizingly long interval during which Letterman offers a few tame riffs (“[Iowa senator Chuck Grassley] enjoys ceramics, big band music, and his ‘A’ rating from the NRA”), but is also content to let the audience sit in awkward silence. (“Let’s just leave that up there a little longer,” Letterman says of the photo of Sen. Jim Inhofe’s rictus, as the audience titters nervously.)

In a sense, Letterman’s decision to enter this particular debate should be uncontroversial, as an estimated 90% of Americans support background checks on gun buyers. However, recent polls also suggest that only 65% of Americans believe the Senate should have passed the Manchin-Toomey amendment. And indeed, “Stooge of the Night” has drawn the ire of the conservative blogosphere. However, Letterman has already been targeted by conservatives for his alleged liberal bias, a charge that dates back to a 2009 monologue joke about Bristol Palin and Alex Rodriguez, which Sarah Palin (most likely willfully) misinterpreted to be a “sexually perverted” joke about the “rape” of 14-year-old Willow Palin. After that exchange led to Letterman’s vilification by the conservative media, the host has continued to aggressively confront right-wing pundits like Bill O’Reilly and Donald Trump, while fawning over Rachel Maddow. (Having said that, Letterman has also not shied away from criticizing Democrats, for instance recently challenging Al Gore on the hypocrisy of selling Current TV to Al-Jazeera.)

With “Stooge of the Night” Letterman operates from a position of power, not only as arguably the most iconic late night host in television history behind Johnny Carson, but more importantly, as a man with job security. Unlike NBC, which forced Jay Leno to retire (again) to make room for Jimmy Fallon, CBS is allegedly content to allow Letterman to choose his own retirement date. Leno’s impending departure offers Letterman the chance to top the ratings for the first time since Conan O’Brien took over The Tonight Show in 2009; Letterman could benefit from “the Jimmy wars,” snatching up Leno’s older viewership while the two younger hosts cannibalize each other’s ratings.

Letterman’s more confrontational political approach runs the risk of alienating conservative viewers, but it also offers a point of departure from the Jimmys, whose interactions with politicians are more obsequious and inoffensive (e.g., Fallon’s “Mom Dancing” skit with the First Lady). Fallon’s “nice guy” demeanor, similar to Leno’s, may ultimately prove a better fit for the wide general audience sought by the networks – “Mom Dancing” has over 15 million hits on YouTube – but Letterman, even the checked-out Letterman of recent years, will continue to produce television that is frequently sharper and more thoughtful than his network competitors. Letterman’s prickly personality and disdain for the celebrities he interviews has been his trademark from the beginning; applying this cantankerous attitude to politics adds an additional layer to the generally innocuous late night talk format, aligning it more closely with the popular Daily Show and Colbert Report.

Critic Ken Tucker argues that Letterman alone offers “a core of seriousness that has enabled [him] to surge ahead of his genre colleagues in moments of national drama, whether it’s presidential politics or the entertainment industry’s vexed reassertion into post-9/11 American culture.” Bill Carter quotes an anonymous executive who wonders “how the younger hosts will handle being in the heat of a presidential election where they have to be accountable and ask tough questions.” With his contract up in 2014, it’s unclear if David Letterman will be around for another presidential election. But as one of Letterman’s key comic strategies is excessive repetition (both of comedy bits and key phrases, extracted from their context) it seems likely that “Stooge of the Night,” at least, will appear in all its awkward glory for at least another month.

If his classic novel, The Great Gatsby, is any indication, F. Scott Fitzgerald loved the sound of a woman’s voice. The book, upon which Baz Luhrmann’s upcoming film adaptation is based, is like a textual serenade to a thrilling and unique feminine voice that rings out like “a wild tonic in the rain.” Luhrmann’s The Great Gatsby will hit theaters this Friday, with Tobey Maguire voicing Fitzgerald’s masculine narrator and Leonardo DiCaprio portraying the mysterious Jay Gatsby. Fitzgerald’s intriguing feminine voice – which belongs to Daisy Buchanan – will be embodied by Carey Mulligan. Gatsby’s promotional materials indicate that Mulligan’s performance will offer the nuanced physical performance demanded by the role – but if Gatsby’s trailers are any indication, Daisy’s voice will have some impressive help from the film’s soundtrack. Her voice carried little influence or power in Fitzgerald’s day – in an age in which “the best thing a girl can be in this world [is] a beautiful little fool” – but Gatsby’s soundtrack artfully blends Fitzgerald’s 1920s female voices with a cast of contemporary female musical powerhouses, who insistently reclaim Daisy’s silenced perspective.

In an effort that delayed the film’s release substantially, Luhrmann recruited Jay-Z to compile an impressive array of top artists. The most impressive among them are women, performers who intimately express the timeless emotional appeal of Fitzgerald’s Daisy. Beyoncé’s collaboration with André 3000, an eerie rendition of Amy Winehouse’s “Back to Black,” is an unsettling confession of compulsive loyalty to an unfaithful partner. The vulnerable honesty of Lana Del Rey’s “Young and Beautiful” begs for reassurance that love can outlast youth. And Florence + the Machine’s intensely powerful “Over the Love” nods to Daisy’s gendered social restrictions, channeling the frustration of a woman “borne back ceaselessly into the past.”

On the surface, these songs may not strike a feminist chord. In many ways, they speak to the powerlessness of Fitzgerald’s jazz age women. But while Lana Del Rey, Florence Welch, and Beyoncé, like Daisy, have incredibly memorable voices, their performances are also overflowing with generations of hard-won power. Welch’s voice has been called “hauntingly powerful” and “too loud for the room,” pointing to the brick wall of sound she pushes from her adept Lungs. She describes her music as “something overwhelming and all-encompassing that fills you up,” putting her right at home alongside female mogul Queen Beyoncé’s authoritative style. And while Lana Del Rey’s tender contribution to the musical compilation is more subdued, her industry prowess earned her featured billing. Setting her apart from other contributors, Warner Brothers’ “Soundtrack Sampler” features a still image of Del Rey’s name in the bold, graphic lettering of the film’s title screen.

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

Regardless of whether these musicians should be considered feminist or not, these songstresses’ massive voices bubble up under the story’s surface, threatening to overturn the masculine narrator’s perspective in favor of Daisy’s lilting voice. Some of the film’s trailers even seem to take on Daisy’s point of view, layering Carey Mulligan’s beautifully nuanced facial reactions to the violence she both witnesses and perpetrates over contemporary female performers’ driving vocals. Daisy’s voice may not have had much power in the jazz age, but with singers like Beyoncé, Welch, and Del Rey to offer their vocal prowess to the character, Daisy’s perspective takes on a whole new meaning for feminism. United with these musicians’ vocal power, Daisy becomes an illustration of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going.

Fitzgerald describes Daisy’s as “the kind of voice that the ear follows up and down, as if each speech is an arrangement of notes that will never be played again.” I like to imagine the woman whose lilting speech compelled him to craft such a lovely phrase, but like so many women – both historical and contemporary – her voice has been silenced. In performances that truly speak to the power of a musical message, Florence Welch, Beyoncé, and Lana Del Rey have taken up her cause. Together, they remind us of the hope in a powerfully insistent voice. They remind us that some voices are forever silent. And, most importantly, they remind us that our voices – and media soundtracks – can be important feminist tools as we “beat on, boats against the current.”

Click here to view the video on YouTube.

The distinction is one that would permeate Durbin’s screen image: always the ‘ideal daughter’, never any rawness of nerve, unresolved hurt, or riskiness. It certainly worked. By the early 1940s Durbin was one of the industry’s most popular and best-paid actresses, second only to Bette Davis. She made 21 feature films between 1936 and 1948. The public loved her operetta films, musical romances full of sweetness and smiles, such as the highly successful Three Smart Girls (directed by her mentor, Henry Koster, 1936) and Mad About Music (Norman Taurog, 1938). Rarely did she step outside that mold (she did once with the noirish Lady on a Train, directed by her future third husband, Charles David, once a production manager for Jean Renoir). Durbin’s success made her a worldwide celebrity. She was the favourite actress of Anne Frank (who had a picture of Deanna on her wall), and Winston Churchill’s, and Benito Mussolini’s. Then, at the age of 27, and much to everyone’s astonishment, Durbin quit the business, and retired into reclusive anonymity. Why? She said she never enjoyed movies and fame, and just wanted to be “nobody”.

Aside from the nostalgia it triggers for a kind of film industry that is long gone, that maybe never was as imagined, and that most people alive today only know from the most unreliable of sources – the movies and their publicity machines – the figure of Durbin is fascinating today because of how it embodies a sensibility within stardom: that of the cult of the child star. A few years ago, I discovered a book in my department’s office kitchen, abandoned in a delicately placed cardboard box, tucked away amidst ditched textbooks (like a baby orphan on a church’s steps). The book was called Hollywood’s Children: An Inside Account of the Child Star Era. It is a bitter confessional, yet also surprisingly socio-historical, memoir written by Diane Serra Cary, a child star in the 1920s, known as Baby Peggy, one of several children catapulted into stardom in the golden period of classical Hollywood cinema. Hollywood’s Children offers a rare insight into the industry of child stars, and Baby Peggy’s intimate knowledge of the trade gave her a front-row seat to the lives of Mickey Rooney, Jackie Coogan, Shirley Temple, Judy Garland, and Deanna Durbin.

At the time when I found Hollywood’s Children I was researching Hollywood star fandom for a book on cult cinema. I was struck by the intensity and ambivalence of child star cults. Child and teen actors have always been a point of fascination for film audiences. They are universally adored, yet at the same time there is a sense they are out of place, their physical and mental wellbeing endangered by the machinery of Hollywood. Conflicts between perceptions of child labor (exploitative, slave-labor, exhausting) and perceptions associated with children (pure, naïve, innocent, playful, cute, asexual, impulsive) put child acting outside of normality and open debates that pitch a poor defenseless youth against an evil, faceless corporation. Such debates have saturated the reputations of Garland, Natalie Wood, Margaret O’Brien, and many other child actors – including Deanna Durbin – and they have fuelled cult reputations in which admiration for acting is precariously negotiated against concerns about labor conditions. Put in that context, Durbin’s yearning to be “nobody” acquires added meaning: she already felt she was “no-body” in Hollywood, so in a sense she abandoned being nobody.

Cult followings of (former) child and teen actors are often deeply involved in identity-affirmation. Such involvements are combined with anxieties over the cultural appropriation of visual representations of child actors. In her study of the gay cult of Garland, Janet Staiger details the similarities between public perceptions of Garland’s adult “nervous exhaustion”, “intensity,” “insecurity,” and “elf-like androgyny,” and contemporaneous views of gays in American culture. She proposes that this similarity might be one of the reasons for the prominent queer cult appeal of Garland, articulated through organizations for gay liberation such as the Radical Faeries. Only few followings are as outspoken as Garland’s, and Durbin’s fans have been, overall, located too much in the middle of the mainstream to qualify as a ‘pure cult.’ That said, within the mass cult existed a hardcore cult. Around Durbin arose an incredibly well-organized and collectible-heavy cult following, administrated by the Deanna Durbin Society. Some of the fandom for Durbin distinguished itself through its appetite for dolls (we’d call them figurines today) of cute, doll-like Deanna – a twist not out of place in a satiric comedy.

More even than the fandom for Shirley Temple, which remained ‘modest,’ or for Judy Garland, which developed, a little later, into something ‘unwieldy,’ Durbin’s fans were the model of the perfectly disciplined film cult: immersive, cohesive, self-sustained, introspective, and above all loyal (it is instructive to see parallels with television fandom today, as it is described by Katherine Larsen and Lynn Zubernis in Fandom at the Crossroads. After Deanna herself dropped out, the fandom remained, it even fortified (as cults tend to do in the absence of new materials). To this day it is active as ever – it is in my eyes no coincidence that news of Durbin’s passing arrived through fandom channels first. (For a glimpse into Durbin’s fan following, see Deanna Durbin Devotees - make sure to scroll down to Benito Mussolini’s open letter to the star!)

We can only speculate on what identity-affirming role Durbin’s image on the wall in Het Achterhuis played for Anne Frank. Yet I feel encouraged to see it as slightly more than merely a signal of popular mainstream culture’s pin-ups penetrating the most secretive of girl’s rooms but instead – perhaps –something with somewhat of a personal significance, something that establishes an intimate and unlikely contact between the most public and the most private realms of understanding reality that form the core of a cult following, something predicated on a simmering of meaning encapsulated in the triangulation between Deanna’s, and our, ‘reclusiveness,’ ‘doll-ness,’ ‘farewell,’ and ‘nobody.’

However, by the time baby boomers reached middle-age, economics had taken on an outsized role in shaping the cultural relevance of collecting. The cards of the 1950s and ’60s, based largely on their original use as disposable playthings, became scarce, fetishized objects and grew in value at fantastic rates. Squares of cardboards bought for pennies in 1952 became multi-thousand dollar status symbols by the mid-1980s. As Bloom notes, this increase in value played a crucial part in making the return to youthful, pre-pubescent hobbies socially acceptable for a generation moving towards the peak of its social, cultural and economic power. The impressive price tag of a Mickey Mantle rookie served as economic cover for adults wishing to reengage with a child’s activity.

Unfortunately for those of us born a generation later with aspiration of living the good life off the profits from our collections of ’80s and ’90s cards, things have not worked out the same way. Exactly because everyone thought they would become valuable (and thus no one threw them away), virtually every baseball card produced from the late-70s to mid-90s is worthless. The few that aren’t maintain relatively modest values and, as such obvious exceptions, only serve to emphasize the fact that our painstakingly curated boxes and binders of cards are more useful as kindling for fire than in economic exchange. But, yet, for many Gen Xers and Yers, this has done little to diminish the yearning to return to the pleasures of a past free from work deadlines or romantic desires.

The Internet is now home to thousands of blogs dedicated to collecting but, in a significant turn, relatively few focus on baseball cards in economic terms. Some of the most powerful and culturally relevant sites, in fact, offer entirely new conceptions of ownership or eschew cards as commodities altogether. The first such site, and still one of the most popular, is Ben Henry’s The Baseball Card Blog. Started in 2006 when a Google search for “baseball cards” brought little beyond eBay results, The Baseball Card Blog began with a scanner and closet or two full of cards hardly worth their weight in cardboard. Whereas so many hobby magazines and books are dedicated to objects people dream about owning, The Baseball Card Blog revels in items that most collectors consider burdensome chaff. Nonetheless, the site quickly found an audience both among card enthusiasts and the mainstream press, making appearances in Entertainment Weekly and Bill Simmons’ ESPN column.

Most posts on the site consist of an image of a card that is owned by hundreds of thousands of people and available for pennies, alongside a few paragraphs of ironic, occasionally nostalgic comedy. In employing this approach, The Baseball Card Blog exchanges conventional forms of ownership for one that emphasizes the importance of creativity in cultural practice.

The site not only recasts objects of the past through the reframing capacities of new technologies; it also quite literally recreates the past, taking denigrated bits and pieces of 1980s culture and refashioning them into items even rarer than a 1952 Willie Mays. The Baseball Card Blog produces cards of which zero (actual) copies exist.

Site creator Ben Henry and artist Travis “PunkRockPaint” Peterson have collaborated on a variety of projects in which they take iconic card templates from the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s and adapt them. Some are simply baseball cards that don’t exist, but would be fun to have if they did. Others embrace what scholar Henry Jenkins describes as the nomadic nature of fans, taking the forms of old baseball cards and infusing them with other elements of childhood play ranging from Super Mario Bros. to The Muppets to Star Wars.

The impulses behind these projects, I argue, are rather similar to those described by Bloom in his discussion of the baseball card boom of the 1980s. Now blessed with economic resources (in time and technology, if not necessarily cash) and burdened with the realities of adult life, there is a strong desire among many children of the 1980s not only to reengage in childhood play, but also to assert control and ownership of it. This is not, of course, an act of true resistance to a corporate-run industry. But it is, nonetheless, an excellent example of how creativity can serve as a satisfying replacement for traditional economic incentives if we only allow it to.

However, in prominent popular discourse surrounding the series’ return, journalists have privileged the value of the programs to producers rather than their value to audiences. While talk of profit margins is all well and good, the two soaps’ move online involves asking audiences to accept new definitions of a soap opera’s value—once “free” over broadcast—within the television marketplace. Although the product itself—its characters, its narratives, its evolution—will determine its ultimate value to fans, Prospect Park’s release strategy intersects in complicated ways with discourses of televisual value within an evolving space of digital distribution, which is being adapted in order to fit the specificity of an atypical televisual form.

When broadcast networks started selling their shows through the iTunes Store, it was a pivotal moment for the digitization of media content and the growing impact of convergence on industry business models. However, it also rearticulated our conception of televisual value by placing a distinct price on an episode of television as a discrete twenty- or forty-minute entity.

This articulation was part of the larger digital distribution revolution: while iTunes and its competitors Amazon Instant Video and YouTube continue to sell individual episodes, streaming services like Hulu, Netflix, and Amazon Prime have reframed televisual value through access to expanded libraries of content, largely leaving the iTunes model as an industrial afterthought (albeit one which is still useful for cord-cutters).

Prospect Park’s distribution strategy for All My Children and One Life To Live is an unorthodox merger of these two business models. Their primary partnership with Hulu—under their “Hulu Exclusives” acquisition strategy—is itself a combination of two different streaming logics: the online Hulu service features recent episodes of the series for free, ad-supported web browser streaming, while the multi-platform Hulu Plus service—$7.99 a month—will have the entire library of each series along with HD ad-supported streaming to tablets, game consoles, Roku players, etc. In order to articulate these options, particularly to viewers—imagined as older viewers in popular discourse—unfamiliar with online streaming, Hulu drafted One Life to Live stars for a video explanation:

In the process, Prospect Park and Hulu have dissected the experience of watching soap operas on television into two discrete values. The first is being able to “revive their daily drama habit”—to use Hulu’s marketing rhetoric—for free, with the caveat that their viewing must remain daily (as only the most recent episodes will be available). However, the second is the ability to “relax on your sofa and watch on your TV,” which Hulu has commodified by limiting device-based streaming to its subscription service. The distinction allows viewers to determine which parts of their soap viewing experience were most valuable to them, and specifically asks if watching on a television—or on a tablet—is worth $7.99 a month.

And yet Prospect Park’s arrangement with iTunes is even more interesting, given that no currently running soap operas are distributed through the service (whereas Days of our Lives and General Hospital also stream on Hulu). They are offering what they call a “Multi-Pass,” which is comparable to a “Season Pass” for primetime series with one caveat: instead of an entire season, it instead gives viewers twenty episodes—or four weeks—of a series for $9.99; viewers can also choose to purchase individual episodes for $0.99.

Whereas the Hulu arrangement asks viewers to place a value on their soap viewing habits, the iTunes arrangement explicitly asks viewers how much they are willing to pay for an episode of a soap opera. Prospect Park’s choice of $0.99 is half of what iTunes charges for primetime television episodes in standard definition (Hulu Plus remains the exclusive home of high-definition episodes), a decision that reflects the large volume of content viewers are expected to pay for—hence the Multi-Pass discount of $0.50 an episode—but also reinforces existing hierarchies of value between daytime and primetime programming.

However, the two soaps also fit somewhat awkwardly into the logics of streaming, given that one of the key values of streaming services—an extended library of previous episodes—is thus far unavailable to the two programs. Although one could expect that many fans of the two shows would invest in the ability to access decades of soap opera content through a streaming service like Hulu, the ability to revisit previous episodes has less perceptible value when there are thus far no previous episodes to revisit (as ABC’s stake in the new ventures—as license holders—is not strong enough for them to actively support Prospect Park with such library content beyond 8-10 minute recaps for potential new viewers).

Although it’s unclear what kind of data Prospect Park will be releasing—it will, as always, depend on whether releasing the data has value to them—any determinations about the “value” of the two relaunching soap operas have to be withheld until we understand how audiences respond to these initial articulations. While online distribution is often framed as offering audiences new ways to experience television, the habit-based nature of soap viewing has led Prospect Park and Hulu to devise and promote specific distribution strategies which emulate more traditional viewing patterns, at a price.

As a result, the stakes of this project are neither as simple as Prospect Park’s financial investment in All My Children and One Life To Live nor as broad as the very future of digital distribution. Rather, the specificity of this experiment will determine what value soap audiences have within future conceptions of digital distribution, their acceptance or rejection of industrial definitions of value shaping how and where they will be programmed to in the future.

1) Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium will become the first Sony film mixed both for Dolby Atmos and for Barco’s rival Auro 11.1 format. Meanwhile, the British theater chain Vue said it is currently “testing” Atmos in its select Xtreme auditoriums, while Barco signed a 15-picture deal with DreamWorks Animation. The two companies are hoping that their products will coexist in theaters so as to avoid an all-out format war.

2) DreamWorks also announced a potentially controversial coproduction with its Shanghai based Oriental DreamWorks and the state-owned China Film Group to adapt the popular Tibet Code adventure novels for the big screen. Jeffrey Katzenberg, however, denies any political motivation behind the project. The Indiana Jones-esque films will begin production after King Fu Panda 3.

3) Quentin Tarrantino’s Django Unchained will get another chance at the Chinese box office after officials pulled the film from theaters within minutes of its initial release on April 11th. The film will re-open on May 12 with several sexual and violent images likely removed.

4) In streaming news, Amazon.com announced it will soon release a set-top box to compete with Roku and AppleTV. Netflix is adding the option for a single account to stream up to four videos at once.  The current limit is two simultaneous streams. Netflix also unveiled nine new posters for their upcoming season of Arrested Development.

5) NBC renews five of its dramas for next season, including Revolution and Grimm. Meanwhile once-popular shows like The Office and Fox’s American Idol hit all-time ratings lows this past week.

6) In cable news, CNN is in talks to add Stephanie Cutter and Newt Gingrich to its reboot of the network’s once-popular Crossfire debate show. CNN also topped Fox and MSNBC in the 25-54 demo during the Watertown manhunt on Friday.  However, Fox bested all of cable programming in total viewership during the week of the Boston bombing, edging out USA 2.87M to 2.62M.  CNN placed third with 1.99M and MSNBC placed 19th with only 923k.

7) Reddit general Manager Erik Martin admitted he deeply regrets how some of the Boston marathon discussions on his site “fueled online witch hunts and dangerous speculation which spiraled into very negative consequences for innocent parties.” Some media outlets have been critical of the way the website was handling the ongoing investigation, though others were more defensive of Reddit’s involvement.

8) In twitter news, the AP’s twitter feed was hacked with claims of two explosions at the White House, causing the Dow to see momentary drop of about 130 points. The Onion‘s twitter feed responded in form, and has had more than 1,000 re-tweets since its posting. None of this seemed to deter Former President Clinton from officially joining the social media site, nor from making the announcement on The Colbert Report.

9) Disney’s slated film adaptation of Stephen Sonheim’s Into the Woods is inching toward including Meryl Streep and Johnny Depp as leads. The company’s theme parks in Florida and California will also stay open for 24 hours on Friday, May 24th in order to offer visitors an all-nighter to celebrate the beginning of summer.

10) iTunes celebrates its 10-year anniversary, and though some journalists called the online music store an “instant revolution,” analysts suggest it is now losing significant market share to streaming services like Spotify.

Over two-and-a-half days, five problematics will be addressed that have been central to the development of “television studies” as an identifiable academic endeavor and that continue to drive television scholarship: Television’s Past, Present, and Future; Television and the Nation in an Era of Globalization; Television and Politics; Television, Text, and Identity; and finally, Digital Television.

Each problematic will be discussed by a panel featuring an invited keynote speaker followed by two invited respondents and a third we aim to identify through this open call. We are particularly interested in having recent PhDs and advanced graduate students serve as respondents.

Conference Website: TV and Television Studies in the 21st Century [URL]

To Apply to the Open Call

Please review the topic statements from the keynote presenters and select the ONE that best fits your expertise. To review the preliminary statements, please click on the title of each topic here. By May 10, 2013, please submit via email (TV21Cconf@gmail.com) the following in a single document:

• A 250-word statement outlining the ideas of your 10-minute response. Please be specific; offer concrete examples and cases.
• A 3-item bibliography that suggests works key to your thinking in this area.
• A 100-word biographical statement.

The subject of your email should include the words “Open Call” and the topic to which you are responding.

We anticipate making notifications by May 30, 2013. If selected, you can expect to hear from us during the summer with further information.

Conference Organizers: Amanda Lotz and Aswin Punathambekar