Writing samples

Steve Bowbrick: film writer, blogger, technologist.

These are mostly from my Substack newsletter GROSS, which is a chronological history of Hollywood told through the top-grossing films of every year since 1913 – plus regular contemporary intrusions. I’ve been going around calling it a materialist project because I want always to historicise the film I’m writing about, to put it up against the political and cultural moment of its creation.

steve@bowbrick.com
07768 257 570
GROSS, on Substack
My blog.

The Godfather is a melodrama and the Long Good Friday is an epic.

A spaceship is a workplace: 2001: A Space Odyssey and Mickey 17.

The Graduate: boomer cruelty and hermetic individualism.

A partial Goldfinger alphabet and a partial Die Hard alphabet.

West Side Story: camp makes tragedy impossible.

The Apprentice: midtown mendacity and downtown depravity.

Rear Window: Hitchcock and Jane Jacobs on the grid.

Cinderalla is film noir.

Samson and Delilah – biblical tribal screwball.

Ripley: how to be shallow.

Gone With The Wind: a Confederate monument.

King Kong is a business movie.

Kenneth Anger’s Hollywood Babylon – human vanity and corruption are not incidental to the Hollywood project.

A 1918 double-bill: Dziga Vertov and Mabel Normand.