George Lucas's Blockbusting

George Lucas's Blockbusting: A Decade-by-Decade Survey of Timeless Movies Including Untold Secrets of Their Financial and Cultural Success is something completely out of left field, yet totally appropriate for a film geek like Mr. Lucas.

Starwars.com has more Inside George Lucas's Blockbusting.

"By setting successful films against each decade's major motion picture industry developments, George Lucas wanted to show that what has transformed the movie business is not the result of any individual film, but rather the result of technological advances and changes in production, distribution, marketing, and exhibition as well as changes in the social, political, and economic climate."

"Sound designer extraordinaire Randy Thom contributed an item when I needed some last minute text on technology for the 1960s chapter. Were it not for the CIA, who used the miniature recorders made by the Swiss company Nagra in their foreign spying operations, the larger portable Nagra recording system, used by filmmakers to more easily record sound on location, might never have been affordable to manufacture. Without these portable sound recording devices and smaller cameras, movies like Easy Rider might never have been made."

"Discovering, for example, that Walt Disney was the first to use Technicolor in commercial films and bet everything on his vision that a full-length, full-color animated movie based on the Grimm Brothers fairy tale Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs would work in the 1930s, made me realize anew the difference one person can make to an entire industry."

The book also got a great blog.