"Selling Science Fiction Cinema" by J. P. Telotte

J.P. Telotte has been writing about film since 1985. As the man who introduced film studies to Georgia Tech University, Telotte, now professor emeritus at the Georgia school, has produced Selling Science Fiction Cinema, a study of the effort to market sci-fi films in the 1950s and 1960s.His book focuses on a period when science fiction first exploded on the screen.  In this postwar period both the film industry and its traditional audience were undergoing sea changes.Telotte notes the presence of television was at first a concern of Hollywood then later used as a marketing tool to help promote films like Godzilla (1954) and The Blob (1958).While television could help spread the word about a film, it could also be restrictive in some ways, said Telotte. Advertising for a film like The War of the Worlds (1953) was refused by several television stations because, it was claimed, the film’s images of an atomic bomb explosion and a Martian heat ray incinerating people might alarm children in the TV audience. The problem boiled down to figuring out how best to define science fiction, Telotte told Steve Tarter. Hollywood producers, in efforts to draw people into the theater, were wary of sending out the wrong signals to the general public. The Thing from Another World (1951), for example, the film that featured an alien that ran amuck on a North Pole military base, was not advertised specifically as a science fiction film. Its initial marketing  avoided the term “science fiction” with early reports describing it as a “mystery,” an “exploitation” film, or even a “pseudo-scientific melodrama.”