Stephen Prince is Professor of Communication Studies at Virginia Tech. His books include The Warrior's Camera: The Cinema of Akira Kurosawa (1999); Savage Cinema: Sam Peckinpah and the Rise of Ultraviolent Movies (1998); and Visions of Empire: Political Imagery in Contemporary American Films (1992).

"Prince's book pushes us to reconceptualize the interactions of economics and ideology.... It evokes and invokes the richness of filmmaking practices-both mainstream and alternative-even as it gives a harsh and perhaps tragic image of a cultural form, the cinema, losing its specificity and even identity in the vast synergistic networks of control at the end of the twentieth century."-Dana Polan, Film Quarterly; "Stephen Prince's A New Pot of Gold is good at sustaining a coherent historical narrative and critical commentary on the 1980s-a period when video and film grew closer together, and when Hollywood came under the control of global capitalism."-James O. Naremore, author of Acting in the Cinema

• AcknowledgmentsIntroductionContents1 The Industry at the Dawn of the Decade2 Merger Mania3 The Brave New Ancillary World4 Independents, Packaging, and Inflationary:Pressure in 1980s HollywoodJustin Wyatt5 The Talent Oligopoly6 The Filmmakers7 Genres and Production Cycles8 Movies and Morality9 American Documentary in the 1980sCarl Plantinga10 Experimental Cinema in the 1980sScott MacDonaldAppendices:APPENDIX 1 LIST OF TABLES AND CHARTS APPENDIX 2 TOP BOX-OFFICE FILMS OF THE 1980s APPENDIX :3 MAJOR ACADEMY AWARDS, 1980-1988 APPENDIX 4 THE NATIONAL FILM REGISTRY 45:3NotesBibliographyPicture SourcesGeneral IndexIndex of Films