Selling Science Fiction Cinema: Making and Marketing a Genre by J.P. Telotte (review)

Reviewed by: Selling Science Fiction Cinema: Making and Marketing a Genreby J.P. Telotte Sean Guynes Taking Ballyhoo Seriously. J.P. Telotte. Selling Science Fiction Cinema: Making and Marketing a Genre. U of Texas P, 2023. vii+ 206 pp. $45 hc. A good deal of sf scholarship has looked at American sf films of the 1950s mainly as symptomatic texts expressing Cold War anxieties, and so they have often been left out of consideration in the generic question of "what is sf?" Or, if not left out, then they have been presented as something of a problem for sf scholars who want to take sf films "seriously" in a way that will not have colleagues in literature and film studies departments rolling their eyes. Films such as The Thing(1951), Forbidden Planet(1956), and The Blob(1958) are rarely featured in lists of canonical sf texts and certainly are not recommended in film studies courses as exemplars of either sf film or 1950s cinema, even if they have become cult texts among aficionados of bad films ( The Day the Earth Stood Still[1951] might be one of the few exceptions for this period). But the terrain of sf studies has shifted away from the pedigree-anxious theorizing of the 1970s and toward a more historical understanding of genre shaped by changes in genre theory that emerged in the 1990s. This is perhaps best exemplified today by John Rieder's approach in "On Defining SF, or Not: Genre Theory, SF, and History" ( SFS[July 2010]) and later in his Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System(2017). These most stereotypical and derided "sci-fi" films need be reconsidered for their role in the history of sf genre-making. Selling Science Fiction Cinemaoffers this much needed reconsideration by focusing on how the meaning-making strategies of 1950s film marketing worked to create a popular, broadly shared understanding of "science fiction" as a genre distinct from similar and often overlapping filmic categories—such as adventure, horror, and thriller—and in the process created an audience for this newly recognizable film genre by the end of the decade. Telotte is by now a familiar name to scholars of sf film and television, having published regularly in the field since the early 1980s. He is the author of monographs such as Replications: A Robotic History of the Science Fiction Film(1995), A Distant Technology: Science Fiction Film and the Machine Age(1999), Animating the Science Fiction Imagination(2017), and Movies, Modernism, and the Science Fiction Pulps(2019), as well as of several single-authored introductions to and edited collections on sf film and television for Cambridge, Routledge, Oxford, Wayne State, and other presses. Telotte's work has never been solely about sf media, but is also about the larger cultural and industrial contexts of sf film and television. Telotte's new book situates marketing practices as key to sf film's constitution as an emergent genre system mediated by the film [End Page 330]industry—including directors, writers, producers, distributors, trade publications—and its audiences. Central to this is the story of how over the course of a decade, sf film marketing campaigns created audiences who could understand what to expect from sf film and to seek it out. Telotte tells this story through chapters that focus on the marketing campaigns—what used to be called "ballyhoo" or "exploitation"—of several key films of this period produced not as B films but by major Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Brothers, MGM, and Columbia. Telotte's introduction establishes the need in genre studies to understand marketing as a constructive if not constitutive genre-making practice; he also demonstrates its relevance for film studies, where marketing has often been overlooked in favor of a focus on the films themselves, as if narrative alone were all that drove audience and market conceptions of genre. Telotte provides a brief history of sf film up to the 1950s and demonstrates how, for audiences and studios alike, what we now consider films in the sf genre were not understood as sf, but were either confusingly described as their own brand of fantasy adventure or otherwise labeled horror...