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About Last Night

Terry Teachout on the arts in New York City

What makes a summer movie?

June 26, 2020 by Terry Teachout

I’ve written an essay for Saturday’s Wall Street Journal about the history of summer movies in America. Here’s an excerpt.

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Summer is here—but there are no movies to mark its coming. With Hollywood in deep-seated disarray and America’s movie theaters still trying to figure out whether they can reopen safely, it’ll likely be at least another year before the next summer movie comes along. But how will we know it when we see it? Exactly what is a summer movie? Can it be something other than a romcom? Must it take place on or near a beach? These questions are harder to answer than you might suppose.

The composer and critic Virgil Thomson once wrote something that came to mind when I first started thinking about summer movies: “The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is to be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.” That’s a great definition, one that emphasizes the proliferating eclecticism of American classical music. Is it possible, then, to take a similar tack in defining summer movies? Not unless you believe that “Die Hard,” “Ghostbusters” and “Speed” qualify simply because they all came out in June. No matter when it’s released, a film must be unequivocally summer-themed to qualify as a summer movie—and even that alone isn’t enough. Does Alfred Hitchcock’s “Rear Window” make the cut solely because it takes place during a big-city heat wave? Not really.

It’s more obviously tempting to say that summer movies are always comedies of one kind or another. This comes closer to the truth, though there is no shortage of exceptions….

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Read the whole thing here.

The original theatrical trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Jaws:

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Terry Teachout

Terry Teachout, who writes this blog, is the drama critic of The Wall Street Journal and the critic-at-large of Commentary. In addition to his Wall Street Journal drama column and his monthly essays … [Read More...]

About

About “About Last Night”

This is a blog about the arts in New York City and the rest of America, written by Terry Teachout. Terry is a critic, biographer, playwright, director, librettist, recovering musician, and inveterate blogger. In addition to theater, he writes here and elsewhere about all of the other arts--books, … [Read More...]

About My Plays and Opera Libretti

Billy and Me, my second play, received its world premiere on December 8, 2017, at Palm Beach Dramaworks in West Palm Beach, Fla. Satchmo at the Waldorf, my first play, closed off Broadway at the Westside Theatre on June 29, 2014, after 18 previews and 136 performances. That production was directed … [Read More...]

About My Podcast

Peter Marks, Elisabeth Vincentelli, and I are the panelists on “Three on the Aisle,” a bimonthly podcast from New York about theater in America. … [Read More...]

About My Books

My latest book is Duke: A Life of Duke Ellington, published in 2013 by Gotham Books in the U.S. and the Robson Press in England and now available in paperback. I have also written biographies of Louis Armstrong, George Balanchine, and H.L. Mencken, as well as a volume of my collected essays called A … [Read More...]

The Long Goodbye

To read all three installments of "The Long Goodbye," a multi-part posting about the experience of watching a parent die, go here. … [Read More...]

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