Organisers

The conference is co-organised by Professor Ian Hunter (De Montfort University) and Dr James Fenwick (Sheffield Hallam University).

Ian Hunter is an expert in cult film, adaptations, British cinema, the New Hollywood, and trash cinema. He is the author, most recently, of Cult Film as a Guide to Life: Fandom, Adaptation, and Identity (2016, Bloomsbury). The book investigates ‘cult film as lived experience. With reference mostly to American cinema, Hunter explores how cultists, with their powerful emotional investment in films, care for them over time and across numerous intertexts in relationships of memory, nostalgia and anticipation.’ Ian has also published and presented papers on the topic of unmade cinema and creative failure, including the forthcoming ‘Jaws: The Revenge and the Production of Failure’, and the co-written chapter with Kieran Foster, ‘Nessie Has Risen From the Grave’ (2018).

James Fenwick has published widely on Stanley Kubrick’s role as a film producer, as well as the role of the producer more widely in film and television. He is the editor of Understanding Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (Intellect, 2018) as well as the co-editor, along with Kieran Foster and David Eldridge, of the forthcoming Shadow Cinema: Industrial and Production Contexts (Bloomsbury). James’s research focuses on unmade cinema from industrial contexts and the process of ‘overdevelopment’. This includes research on the lost works of Stanley Kubrick in the forthcoming Stanley Kubrick Produces (Rutgers University Press), and in his continuing research on Kirk Douglas, including the chapter ‘A production strategy of overdevelopment: Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions and the unproduced Viva Gringo!’ (forthcoming).