George Miller’s “old-fashioned Hollywood studio”: corporate authorship at Kennedy Miller, 1981–1991

Abstract

ABSTRACT Australia’s George Miller, director of the Mad Max films and others, has an international reputation as a singular creative force. But this reputation overlooks key facts about Miller’s career and working methods, including his co-founding and stewardship of the production company Kennedy Miller (now Kennedy Miller Mitchell), which organized production along collaborative and collective lines. In this article, I undertake an organizational analysis of Kennedy Miller from 1981 to 1991, the period that led Australian film scholars to describe the firm as akin to a classical Hollywood studio operation. I argue that just as we recognize classical Hollywood studios as possessing a collective ‘genius’ that delimits individual claims to authorship, so should we understand Kennedy Miller in this period as possessing a corporate authorship over its film and television production. I locate this strong ‘house’ identity in the firm’s organizational structure, its distinctive culture of ‘comprehensivism’, its collaborative creative procedures, and in the discourses of publicity and critical reception that surrounded its output. I conclude by contending that this understanding of Kennedy Miller’s corporate authorship requires that we reframe our understanding of Miller’s practice to account for his role in this collaborative structure.