Why Do American Film Historians Slight the Bond Movies When Recounting the Blockbuster's Rise?

I remember that when reading RJ Rinzler's The Making of Star Wars I was impressed with it as a hugely impressive work offering pretty much everything that a reader could want to know about the making of the films.

Still, there were lacks here and there--not least the slighting of the influence of the Bond films on George Lucas, to which there was not a single reference (in spite of the fact that Lucas himself mentioned them many a time, not least when he was attempting to sell the film studios on his idea). And this has struck me as characteristic of American film historians generally, who tend to give the Bond films less than their due when discussing the development of the contemporary blockbuster.

Why is that? Perhaps the most important reason, I think, is the provincialism of those who write about American film in the U.S., tending to slight "foreign" film--to think of others as not doing much worth talking about. Moreover, when they are ready to acknowledge foreign filmmakers they are more willing to do so when their work is for arthouse highbrows, rather than for a mass audience--to think of blockbuster filmmaking as America's turf, and take a rather snide attitude toward anyone else setting foot on it (witness the critics' treatment of, for example, a Luc Besson). Thus an Akira Kurosawa was never in the running for the "ordinary" Oscars (e.g. Best Director), but there is a willingness to acclaim him as an influence on Lucas when he set about making Star Wars (the more in as some Star Wars fans like the thought of associating the franchise with highbrow cinema). There is less readiness to give similar credit to the Bond films as an influence (even apart from the lack of highbrow cachet). And this goes as much for those who see Star Wars as having been a disaster for American cinema (for instance, a New Hollywood-singing Peter Biskind) as for those who glorify it and its director as having saved American cinema.

However, if that would seem the most important reason it is by no means the only reason, and I can think of at least two others.

One is that there is a tendency when thinking about film history this past half century or so to think in terms of movies as director's productions--and in the case of the Bond films, at least until the reboot, one did not have prominent "auteur"-types strongly associated with the productions, or indeed, much grounds for thinking of them in auteur theory terms at all . Instead the films harkened back to the days of the Irving G. Thalberg-style "creative producer," who dominated the production while directors were hired and fired, perhaps not wholly without leaving some mark on the production, but all the same, not conveniently fitting into the framework.

The other is that it is easier, even for highly experienced and knowledgeable critics, to talk about content rather than form in art, especially when they are writing an articles and books rather than offering an audiovisual demonstration in which they can more easily and precisely match analysis to material conveniently being presented to the audience. And the Bond movies' contribution was on the level not of content, but of form--how one puts together a "high concept" action film--with the disinclination compounded by the fact that "serious" critics generally take little interest in this dimension of such movies.

And so recountings of how the blockbuster as we know it emerged in the 1970s tend to be all-American stories, with Barry Diller and Don Simpson upending the conventional wisdom at Paramount, and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas toiling on movies that became far bigger commercial and cultural events than they had dared to dream.