The Business of Film (Film S-208)
Charles Lyons
Business Reports
Business reports, such as corporate Annual Reports to stockholders, SEC filings, and market data, provide valuable information on particular movie production companies and film distributors, and on the film industry as a whole. Yale University Library has two particularly user-friendly online sources for business information: Lexis-Nexis Academic, and Factiva (formerly known as Dow Jones Interactive). There is plenty of overlap between the two, but each of them also has resources that aren't on the other, so it's important to search both.
Warning: There are no subject headings in these sources. If you search for "film," you may get articles on camera film, semiconductor "thin film" technologies, etc. Use as many search terms as possible in order to specify what you want!
In addition to these two general resources, there are many specialized business and industry financial databases, including Thomson Research and Hoover's. See the Social Science Library's Business, Finance and Management page.
Lexis-Nexis Academic
Lexis-Nexis is a simple (if somewhat basic) source for business information. Access business information in Lexis-Nexis through its "Business" page (look at the list of search forms on the left side of the Lexis-Nexis interface). This offers several database resources, the most important being:
- Business News (the same as discussed on Film S-208's Business News page)
- Industry and Market (select "Arts & Entertainment" from the dropdown list of industries; note that there's also a Guided Search option)
- Company Financial
- SEC Filings and Reports
Searching for Particular Companies
It isn't always obvious what company name you should search for when you want business information, because the company may be owned by a larger corporation. For example, if you tried to search for SEC filings or annual reports to stockholders from New Line Cinema, you would find nothing. That's because New Line Cinema is owned by AOL Time Warner, so it doesn't have its own reports to stockholders -- it's included in AOL Time Warner's. In order to find out whether one company is owned by another, seach in "Company Financial" for the name of the company (in this case, New Line Cinema). This will lead you to an entry in Standard & Poor's Register of Corporations, and under "Corporate Structure," you learn that New Line is a subsidiary.
"Company Financial" won't give you find much information about Miramax either, but for a different reason: Miramax isn't a publicly traded company. When you search, check the "Source" dropdown list, and select "US Private Companies." In this case you'll get a list that includes information from Hoover's, which will help explain the situation. It is usually very difficult to find financial information about privately held companies, since they have no stockholders and no SEC reports to file.
The Business News and the Industry & Market News sections don't have this problem, but they cover diffferent resources.
Factiva
Factiva (a joint venture of Dow Jones and Reuters) encompasses an enormous array of print and some online resources, but it can be a bit tricky to use. When you enter the database, the default search screen is for news. Near the top of the page (just above the grey bar) there are links to other sections of Factiva. Click on Companies/Markets in order to access the business information. This brings you to four options:
- Company Quick Search. Here you can find basic information such as corporate headquarters, Web site, competitors, stock price history, recent news and press releases, a "financial snapshot" showing revenue and other financial data (including information of corporate divisions, when applicable), and comparisons between the stock performance of the company and the industry as a whole. You can search either by the stock ticker symbol, or the company name -- helpfully, if you search for a division (such as Warner Bros.), Factiva will offer information on both the division and the parent company.
- Quotes. More detailed stock data.
- Charting. Detailed stock data, with charts
- Company screening. This option allows you to retrieve a list of the companies in a particular industry, with access to the various reports Factiva can generate for each.
If a company is privately held, like Miramax, Factiva will have recent news reports and press releases, but little else.
