Flamboyant risk taking: Why some filmmakers embrace avoidable and excessive risks

While many scholarly books and articles devoted to film make passing reference to risk, no attempt has been made systematically to explore filmmaking as a process involving the actual taking of risks as well as the depiction of risk taking. As a mostly cost-intensive, collaborative activity that spans the worlds of commerce and art and aims to engage large numbers of people-often in a range of different places-filmmaking is necessarily caught up with, at the very least, economic risks. That the phenomenon of risk should be rather neglected in the scholarly literature on film is in many ways surprising, given how central it is to any number of other disciplines, many of them relevant to the study of film. Risk, after all, is a concept that economists, sociologists, and anthropologists consider crucial, as their already voluminous and still growing literature on the topic clearly indicates. © 2012 by Wayne State University Press.