Ms. Magazine and the twenty-five per cent
Alice's warmest feminist review ran in a magazine part-owned by the studio that made it — reception and commerce in one fact.
- atomic
- reception
- commerce
Reviewing Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974) in 1975, Karyn Kay and Gerald Peary
noted that the film's positive reception in Ms. Magazine deserved an asterisk: Warner
Brothers, the studio that made the film, held a 25 per cent ownership stake in the magazine
(*A Companion to Martin Scorsese*, smc 121).
They stop short of alleging anything, and so should we. What the fact does is expose the seam where two context forces meet. A review is a Values document — evidence of what an audience, in this case an explicitly feminist one, made of a film. But the venue carrying that review is a Commerce object, with owners. Reception does not happen in a clean room.
It is the best single teaching example on this wiki for the reception lens, because it needs no theory to land: ask a class whether the review is worth less, and the argument runs itself. The honest answer is that ownership is a reason to check, not a verdict — the same discipline this wiki applies to a release essay or to a gossip-driven history.
Pairs with Selling Psycho: the no-late-admission policy: there, commerce shaped the conditions of viewing; here, it shadows the conditions of reviewing.