Date of Award
2025
Degree Type
Open Access Dissertation
Degree Name
History, PhD
Program
School of Arts and Humanities
Advisor/Supervisor/Committee Chair
James Morrison
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Matthew Bowman
Dissertation or Thesis Committee Member
Elizabeth Affuso
Terms of Use & License Information
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Rights Information
© 2025 Myles Mikulic
Subject Categories
History
Abstract
This dissertation examines Americans’ relationship with information gathering in the 20th century through the lens of the Hollywood market research technique of movie test screenings. During the post-production phase of a narrative commercial film, a studio will typically hold a test (or preview) screening to gauge audience reaction. An unfinished version of the film is screened before an audience of nonprofessional “regular moviegoers,” after which viewers fill out questionnaires. These can range from the generalized, such as favorite characters or whether you would recommend the film to friends, to the granular, such as the depiction of violence in a war movie, or brand awareness of a popular franchise. How studios gather and synthesize information from these screenings reflects the shifting values of producers and filmmakers and their conceptions of what audiences they hope to attract. Studios have test screened movies since the 1920s, and over the years have enlisted market research firms and political pollsters in an effort to mitigate financial risk. How they interpret and act on this data can have dramatic consequences on the fate of their films: endings have been altered, musical numbers removed, pictures retitled, characters recontextualized, films intended for home-release upgraded to theatrical distribution, or those once bound for theaters shelved indefinitely. Yet this commonplace and occasionally controversial element of American moviemaking has received little comprehensive scholarship. The dissertation comprises five chapters, each focusing on a particular film: Red-Headed Woman (MGM, 1932), The Magnificent Ambersons (RKO, 1941), Magnificent Obsession (Universal, 1954), Shaft (MGM, 1971), and Apocalypse Now (United Artists, 1979). MGM used preview screenings to defuse censorship threats over Red-Headed Woman, a pre-Code sex comedy. Intended for a predominantly female audience, it exists at the intersection between optimism and anxieties over the concept of a mass public, the advertising industry, and Hollywood’s star system. RKO tested The Magnificent Ambersons, Orson Welles’s period drama follow-up to Citizen Kane, in industry-adjacent cities Pomona and Pasadena, using the negative comments from the Pomona screening as pretext to edit the film against Welles’s wishes. The studio had commissioned pollster George Gallup to conduct audience research, which I argue informed RKO’s interpretation of Pomona’s younger, working class audience as more representative of the general public than Pasadena, despite the nuanced ambivalence of the former and the clear enthusiasm of the latter. Douglas Sirk’s Technicolor melodrama Magnificent Obsession was popular with predominantly female audiences but dismissed by predominantly male critics. Scholars have since reevaluated Sirk’s Hollywood output as a critique of suburban conformity, but I question whether audiences were in on the joke. The barebones, homogenized comment cards Universal collected at studio-adjacent theaters throughout that period betrays a stubborn complacency and conformity juxtaposed against broader industry turmoil. In the wake of the civil rights movement and collapse of the studio system, MGM produced the inexpensive thriller Shaft with a predominantly Black male audience in mind, testing the film in Inglewood and hiring the Black-owned market research firm UniWorld to promote the movie. While broadening its scope beyond an imagined white audience, MGM also severely limited the range of possibility of what a Black-centric film could be. Director Francis Coppola cast an unusually wide net in soliciting feedback for his Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, including pollsters Patrick Caddell and Joseph Farrell. Caddell’s firm, Cambridge Survey Research, produced an exhaustively detailed report about potential audience interest in the film. Coppola evidently ignored all of it, while rewarding Farrell’s comparatively simple and actionable counsel by financing the National Research Group (NRG), which went on to monopolize Hollywood market research throughout the 1980s and 1990s, establishing the foundation of modern American entertainment industry audience research practices. Today, streaming platforms like Netflix and Amazon Prime Video, in addition to traditionally testing their movies in theaters, collect vast quantities of subscriber data to use as leverage during talent negotiations and dictate the stories and aesthetics of productions. My dissertation investigates how this aggressive data mining is part of a longer, less acknowledged continuum of the film industry’s increasing reliance on market research. Beyond the dissertation, I’m interested in one day writing a book exploring the history of the National Research Group and its unassuming yet profound influence on Hollywood, and how a broader utopian fixation on metrics and data undergirding its power has intensified in the digital era. This project has entailed extensive archival research across several repositories, including the Margaret Herrick Library, the University of Michigan Library, and the Library of Congress. Each chapter puts the subject film in context by exploring the sociopolitical ecosystem that studios and filmmakers were operating in at the time of its making, as well as the market research or polling trends informing studio decisions. I investigate their test screenings, including venue overview and, when possible, analyze audience comments and subsequent studio action. In the case of two chapters, Red-Headed Woman and Apocalypse Now, I was unable to locate the cards or summary reports, and instead relied on surrounding primary sources, including production correspondence, comment cards from comparable screenings, and newspaper clippings. This limited and fragmentary archival record speaks to the dearth of scholarship focused on test screenings. In addition to public opinion and market research historiographies, my research fits within an expanding literature examining the institutional, business history of American cinema. Test screenings as industry practice are seldom discussed in substantial detail or length; they are usually one component in writings about specific films or broader conversations about market research. However, in 2021 Screen Engine/ASI CEO and Joe Farrell protégé Kevin Goetz published a memoir about his career in market research: Audience-ology: How Moviegoers Shape the Films We Love. Goetz provides useful insight into the industry’s self-conception of test screening use, but features little historical analysis. Testing movies prior to the 1990s is relegated to one chapter and features almost no archival sources, nor does Goetz go into much detail about Joe Farrell despite having worked at the NRG for sixteen years. I intend this project to illuminate a long-overdue blindspot.
ISBN
9798244884364
Recommended Citation
Mikulic, Myles. (2025). Would You Recommend This Picture to Your Friends? A History of Hollywood Test Screenings. CGU Theses & Dissertations, 1115. https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/1115.
