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This paper seeks to explore a host of straight‐to‐DVD and direct‐download motion picture marketing, production, and distribution strategies deployed by Florida‐based Maverick Entertainment. The focus is Maverick's most prominent and successful sub‐genre “urban teen gangsta” films.

The somewhat wide‐ranging and eclectic approach taken in this paper draws from two emergent academic subdisciplines: consumer culture theory (CCT), largely on the business‐school side, and media industry studies (MIS), largely on the communications‐school side. The project thus attempts to bridge the interpretive poetics and eclecticism of CCT with the interpretive aesthetics and eclecticism of MIS and relies on a blend of filmic, marketing, PR, journalistic, trade publication, and academic evidence.

It is argued that “marketing mimicry” – where Maverick imitates specific successful urban‐teen themed cross‐over film marketing strategies of major and mini‐major Hollywood studio titles – was crucial to the start‐up's success.

Marketers outside the USA will find it somewhat difficult to glean generalizable lessons based on the strategies and principles evaluated here. Future research should be conducted in the area of direct‐download of urban teen filmed content, particularly vis‐à‐vis Maverick's new direct‐download partners such as Hulu, YouTube, Amazon VOD, Facebook Store, and Gigaplex. Future research should also look into the extent to which the somewhat pervasive notion of a “global teen audience” is valid for this sub‐genre of films.

Marketers are advised to thin‐slice the appeals of their teen‐themed product‐lines to maximize the appeal to given sub‐segments. Marketers may beneifit by developing ethical non‐harmful iterations of marketing‐mimicry in their market space.

Scholars who analyze teen‐themed marketing strategies often tend to construct some version of the “global teenager”. The current paper focuses largely on African American and Latino American teens.

This is the first paper to analyse how a small firm successfully markets to the urban American teen film audience. It is also the first academic paper to explore the concept of marketing‐mimicry.

While there is no question that women on movie screens are frequently eroticised, with countless shots of heaving bosoms or curvaceous rear ends, action stars do occasionally get a reprieve. Pam Grier, the first female action star, was not so lucky. While Grier's Amazonian status should be celebrated, the dark side of her career should also be noted as a cautionary tale of just how much misogyny and racism lurks behind Hollywood doors and intertwined into American cinema history. This chapter examines how Grier's career forces us to rethink both femininity and racism, as well as action films themselves.

The 1980s saw both a return and rise to box office prominence of the once-popular Sword and Sorcery genre. Following on from Arnold Schwarzenegger's performance as Conan the Barbarian (1982), a raft of imitators followed. On the one hand, there were films like Krull (1983) and He-Man and the Masters of the Universe (1983) with their big budgets and excellent casts. On the other were their ‘spaghetti’ variations, such as Conquest (1983), Hercules (1983) and the Ator (1982–1990) series, where poor production values, doleful acting, and even more atrocious dubbing remained more frightening than any monsters the hero encountered.

For the most part, the sword and sorcery genre predominantly focused on the male in the canon. However, using Yvonne Tasker's (1993) work on spectacular and hard bodies in action cinema, this chapter will provide an analysis of how female characters in the sword and sorcery genre are portrayed, using Barbarian Queen (1985) as a case study.

“Since films attract an audience of millions, the need and appetite for information about them is enormous.” So said Harold Leonard in his introduction to The Film Index published in 1941. The 1970's has produced more than enough — too much — food to satisfy that appetite. In the past five years the number of reference books, in this context defined as encyclopedias, handbooks, directories, dictionaries, indexes and bibliographies, and the astounding number of volumes on individual directors, complete histories, genre history and analysis, published screenplays, critics' anthologies, biographies of actors and actresses, film theory, film technique and production and nostalgia, that have been published is overwhelming. The problem in film scholarship is not too little material but the senseless duplication of materials that already exist and the embarrassing output of items that are poorly or haphazardly researched, or perhaps should not have been written at all.

Strategy and leadership guru, Sydney Finkelstein believes that “regenerating the talent pool is the single most important thing that any leader can do” to help his or her organization to “survive and prosper.” His new book, Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent (Harvard Business Review Press, 2016), studies “those few individuals” in any given industry who “grow human capital better than anyone else.”

Strategy & Leadership contributing editor Brian Leavy asks Prof. Finkelstein what can managers learn from these exceptional talent developers that might be more widely emulated?

According to Prof. Finkelstein, “The superboss playbook is not about being nice or empathic. It’s about giving proteges the motivation, guidance, wisdom, creative licence, and other elements they need to learn and grow”

Prof. Finkelstein notes, “While many businesses today focus on getting closer to the customer, superbosses are very much focused on getting closer to their employees or team members.”

Prof. Finkelstein asserts, “Superbosses have cracked the code on how to make organizations work better by designing a playbook that helps people accomplish more than they ever thought possible in their careers, or their lives. By studying the superbosses and what they do, we now know how genuinely unusual talent comes to populate an organization.?