The document discusses Irving Thalberg's executive technique at MGM studios, which involved pivoting between being a backstage producer and a backstage audience member by observing the production from the perspective of the camera during filming and the projector during screenings. It also outlines the various components that constituted the MGM brand and marketing strategy, including its stars, lavish productions, commitment to quality entertainment, and focus on show business historicism through self-reflexive films. Finally, it analyzes the conditions that enabled the production and success of specific MGM musicals like Singin' in the Rain, including postwar changes in audiences and the rise

1. MARKETING FICTION
= SHOW BUSINESS
= Stage
= Fortune’s account of MGM as synechdoche for Hollywood, of Thalberg
as synechdoche for Hollywood, and of Hollywood as synechdoche for
industry based on marketing intangibles.
----------------------------
MARKETING FICTION
= BUSINESS AS SHOW
= Backstage
= Thalberg’s executive techniquewhich is his capacity to pivot from
backstage producer to backstage audience by making himself camera
during the day and projector at night. Self-reflexiveness that incorporates
exhibition in production. Sees things as audience sees them.
Packaging.

2. Corporate Marketing: MGM Brand
What Counts
• Logo and trademark.
• Leading Hollywood studio
• Commitment to entertainment
• Commitment to quality: “common denominator of goodness”
• Commitment to musicals as epitome of quality entertainment
• Commitment to show business historicism; self-reflexivity as a progressive
method.
• Stars: making them, publicizing them
• Lavish productions: packaged like perfume
• Studio lot
• Uncredited backstage talent
• Fans
• Somewhat dignified, middle class audience

3. Corporate Marketing: MGM Brand
What Doesn’t Count
• Loew’s Inc.
• Stars: disciplining them, breaking them
• Labor
• Working class audience
• Fans

4. Conditions of Existence for Singin’ in the Rain
• End of wartime bonanza
• Decline of audiences
• Suburbanization
• Alternate forms of entertainment
• Television
• Paramount decision
• Loosening of contractual commitments of stars
• Unit production and, especially, Freed unit

5. Conditions for existence of
Duelling Cavalier
• CLIP

6. Conditions of Existence for Duelling Cavalier
• Premiere
• Search lights
• Loudspeakers
• Microphones
• Radio
• Gossip columnist
• Appearance of stars -- Physical connection with audience
• Fans
• Fan magazines
• Police
• Recognizable genre--historical romance
• [Backstage--Executives--History]

7. Conditions of Existence for Dancing Cavalier
• Competition with other studios for the movie
audience Microphones
• Quiet on the set
• Sound booths
• Arc Lighting
• Sound synchronization
• Sound post-synchronization
• Good singing voices
• Movement, dancing

8. “What emerged from this rerouting of camp into the mainstream . . . was not camp itself but
the ‘camp trace,’ its recuperation as an unthreatening ‘queer aura’ giving special value to
straight tastes within the domain of heterosexuality” (7)
“Camp sought to reclaim language and representationality as well as public spaces from a
heteronormative mainstream culture that rendered homosexuality invisible except as a
structuring absence for defining ‘manliness’ in opposition to ‘womanliness,’ whether in
gendered or sexual terms” (9).
“Camp is situational, ‘inhering not in the person or thing itself but in the tension between that
person or thing itself but in the tension between that person or thing and the context or
association. . . . Camp cohered around certain ‘strong themes,’ which ‘are intimately related
to homosexual situation and strategy.’ These are incongruity, ‘the subject matter of camp’;
theatricality, ‘its style’; and humor, ‘its strategy’” (10)
“The cultural conundrum of seeing/not seeing queerness was the stuff of camp—and also the
source of its fun” (12)
representation” (22-23)

9. signaling to each other shared interest as well. The coded texture of camp discourse made it hard to discern by outsiders except
ation to both the heteronormative world and the unseen queer culture present within it.”
ly providing one with a comic appreciation of it contradictions’” (17)

10. What’s Wrong with Lina?

11. • Delusion of grandeur
• Delusion of romance with Don
• Voice
• Popularity
• Refusal to give credit
• Lack of sexuality
• Ambition
• Delusion that “I ain’t people.”

12. What’s Right about Don?

13. What’s Right about Don?
• Produces camp--incongruity of narrative
• Creativity / Adaptability
• Responsiveness to audience
• Talent
• Stardom
• Friendship with Cosmo
• Heterosexuality
• Giving Credit to Kathy

14. What’s Right About Kathy?

15. What’s Right about Kathy?
• Face in the crowd
• Voice
• Versatility
• Pliability -- apparent lack of ambition
• Under five year contract
• Love for Don
• Gets camp
• “Heterosexuality”
• Approval by Cosmo

16. What’s Right about Cosmo?

17. What’s Right about Cosmo?
• Talent
• Versatility
• Love for Don
• Hatred of Lina
• Gets camp
• Lack of sexuality
• Approval by Kathy
• Ambition

18. Revolution
or
Counter-
Revolution?