Thomas Schatz

Theorizing Television’s Writer–Producer Re-viewing The Producer’s Medium

Alisa Perren and Thomas Schatz honor television studies scholar and former Peabody Director Horace Newcomb’s career. The authors illustrate how one of Newcomb’s less frequently cited books, The Producer’s Medium (coauthored with Robert Alley), expresses themes central to his larger body of work and serves as a groundbreaking study of American television, authorship, and industry in its own right. In addition, they illustrate key ways that the book might inspire contemporary investigations into convergent-era television.

Mulvey and Hitchcock

In 2004, I edited a four-volume collection on Hollywood for Routledge’s Critical Concepts series. Volume II, Formal-Aesthetic Dimensions, included ‘a case study of film authorship’ on Alfred Hitchcock, with classic pieces by Truffaut and Sarris (of course) as well as Tania Modleski, William Rothman, and others. I had hoped to include Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, even though only two pages of the essay are devoted to Hitchcock. Mulvey declined the invitation. The essay already had been anthologized numerous times, she explained, and I also sensed that she had grown rather weary of its continued prominence, some three decades after its initial publication, as a signal event in her wide-ranging and accomplished career as a scholar and filmmaker. But there’s no denying the impact and lasting influence of ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ on the field and particularly, at least for me, on the study of Hitchcock. Indeed, reflecting on Laura Mulvey leads me quickly and quite directly to Hitchcock. I’ve been teaching a course on Hitchcock for more than three decades at fairly regular three-year intervals, and Mulvey’s essay remains indispensable despite the ever-widening array of Hitchcock scholarship – much of it quite good, but almost none of it on a par with Mulvey’s groundbreaking work. Indeed, every time I revisit it I marvel at the sheer staying power of the pithy, provocative piece which, to borrow a prizefighting metaphor, is pagefor-page (all 13 of them in its original version), one of the toughest pieces of film scholarship ever written. ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ packed a powerful punch when it was first published in the fall issue of 1975 Screen, a journal that was devoting considerable attention to ‘psychoanalysis and the cinema’. (That same issue included Raymond Bellour’s ‘The Unattainable Text’, and the preceding summer issue featured Christian Metz’s magisterial 60-page treatise, ‘The Imaginary Signifier’.) It’s difficult to describe the strength of those intellectual currents for me and my colleagues at the University of Iowa – a cohort that included Phil Rosen, Mary Anne Doane, Michael Budd, Jane Feuer, Bobby Allen, and various