Selling Science Fiction Cinema

This is another great book by J. P. Telotte. Selling Science Fiction Cinema makes significant contributions to the understanding of both SF film and SF magazines. Thoroughly researched and clearly written, it engages with current concerns in film scholarship around industry practices and how they affect the meaning and reception of the films themselves.

— Patrick B. Sharp, author of Darwinian Feminism and Early Science Fiction: Angels, Amazons and Women

J. P. Telotte has thoroughly synthesized the various arguments of prior critics, but he has his own tale to tell about techniques for drawing people into the cinemas in a time of dwindling audiences; there were wildly differing intuitive approaches, a variety of tactics and strategies that showcase the ambiguous and protean boundaries of SF. This highly informative work is a delight to read.

— Carol McGuirk, coeditor of The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction

J. P. Telotte offers a thoughtful, well-researched overview of how these films were marketed to audiences at their height in Selling Science Fiction Cinema...Telotte also offers a thought-provoking look at contemporary sci-fi marketing approaches during such a fascinating time in which so much content is available to users via streaming platforms rather than the past 'traditional' approach of attending the cinema.

— Hometowns to Hollywood

Focusing on various promotional campaigns, publicity strategies, and cultural products, this fascinating study offers a material-based history of the selling of mid-20th-century science fiction cinema...Deploying precise critical insight and drawing on an array of archival findings, Telotte considers the marketing of such films as The Thing from Another World (1951), Forbidden Planet (1956), and Godzilla, King of the Monsters (1954), and he adroitly generates new insights and readings of these films and their significance to history and culture. Considering the discourse circulating around science fiction film’s place in literary fan culture, the genre’s position in society, and the shifting attitudes toward speculative cinema of studios in both Hollywood and Japan, Telotte’s work emerges as an engaging addition to film studies.

— CHOICE

By focusing on how [science fiction] became legible as a film genre, and in particular as a set of aesthetic andnarrative expectations sold to an audience before they even see a film, Telotte offers a fresh perspective on one of [science fiction] film’s most derided eras.

— Science Fiction Studies

For anyone interested in the origins of American sf cinema and the film industry’s attempts to grapple with marketing a new and unfamiliar genre in the postwar period, Telotte’s thoroughly researched and well-cited monograph will prove an invaluable resource.

— H-Net