Titled Hollywood Film Masters and produced by Robert E. Kapsis, who is professor of Sociology and Film Studies at Queens College and in the Film Studies Certificate Program at the CUNY Graduate Center, this ground-breaking work is being designed as an interactive electronic learning tool that will document the accomplishment of seven American film directors: Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Robert Altman, Woody Allen and Spike Lee.

Like many of the ambitious interdisciplinary projects being undertaken by CUNY faculty in the still-young area of instructional technology, Hollywood Film Masters draws on the talents of numerous collaborators and encompasses a wealth of up-to-date scholarly material. Because of its scope and complexity (and because its creators are all working full time at other jobs), it is still very much a work in progress, with modules scheduled to be released as they are finished.

The module currently closest to completion is Multimedia Hitchcock: An Interdisciplinary Approach, which should be completed by the end of the year. A homepage with hotlinks to excerpts from the project is already in place (http://www.soc.qc.edu/MultiMedia/filmmasters.html).

Produced by Kapsis, author of Hitchcock: The Making of a Reputation (Chicago University Press, 1992), with editor Kathie Coblentz and programmer and designer Nikolay Uglov, Multimedia Hitchcock is an in-depth examination of Hitchcock's career. It incorporates film footage, stills, and soundtrack excerpts, as well as a wealth of archival material, including critical responses to Hitchcock's oeuvre of fifty feature films plus his television series, and significant portions of the 52 hours of interviews which Hitchcock taped with the French film director Francois Truffaut in 1962.

Of major importance for the scholarly value of Multimedia Hitchcock is the fact that the Hitchcock estate and Universal Pictures have recently granted Kapsis permission to use the director's papers -- original production notes, shooting scripts, correspondence and plans for publicity campaigns -- as well as footage from many of his films as part of the project. (Kapsis reports that rather than approach the Hitchcock estate with a conventional proposal on paper, he waited to offer them samples (color screen shots) of a polished early draft of the multimedia document itself, thus making a convincing technological and scholarly case for his project. The strategy worked.)

When completed, Multimedia Hitchcock will not only be an engaging and challenging teaching tool, but will also serve as a comprehensive research database, both documenting the director's entire career and investigating the social history of the time and places in which his films were made. Through the use of hotlinks, it will also provide cross-references to all the thematically-defined sections of the module.

The biographical profile, for example, now substantially complete as an interactive document, is illustrated with Hitchcock family photographs, publicity shots of the director at work and film stills. Each reference to a Hitchcock film title is hyperlinked to a "filmography" menu which offers a detailed synopsis, a list of credits and critical responses, as well as frame captures, stills and actual footage (including Hitchcock's ritual cameo appearance in the film in question). There will also be hyperlinks to a general glossary of technical terms, as well as to textual material by film historians.

Multimedia Hitchcock has several thematic sections, all similarly hyperlinked. One, "Marketing Hitchcock," examines the director's promotional campaigns, which were shrewdly orchestrated to ensure both the critical and popular success of his films. (This section includes, among other things, material from the pressbook for Psycho.) Another, "The Hitchcock Aesthetic," considers various formal and thematic aspects of the films, using contributions by Hitchcock scholars Sidney Gottlieb and William Rothman. Among them is a musicological analysis by Royal Brown, chair of the film studies program at Queens College, of several Hitchcock-Bernard Hermann film scores, with "playable" musical examples and comparative soundclips and filmclips from The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), Vertigo (1958) and Psycho (1960).

"Critics' Voices," linked to an exhaustive archive of press clips from America, England and France, deals with responses to his films both on their initial appearance and on their re-release. The reviews document the critical reception of his work over almost half a century. This massing of contemporary material is particularly valuable today, when "response theory" has become a common approach to the study of history. With multimedia technology the viewer can simultaneously read a review and see parts of the film to which it refers, moving back and forth freely from texts to still images, moving images and sound.

The section titled "Genre and Society" suggests ways in which Hitchcock's films comment on aspects of the era in which they were produced, reflecting popular attitudes toward, for example, the Cold War, the fad for psychoanalysis. (Hitchcock's own enthrallment with Freudian psychology, as it happened, changed over time), and the shifting status of the family.

Finally, the section titled "The Legacy" examines Hitchcock's influence on younger film makers of today, particularly Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg, whose works, like Hitchcock's, successfully straddle both popular and elite status. Both directors are among the subjects of the six future modules of the project (Multimedia Eastwood is already well underway).

Hollywood Film Masters is funded in part by grants from Queens College and has received funding from the CUNY Office of Instructional Technology's Multimedia Courseware Initiative program. Like many of the successful multimedia projects either completed or under development by CUNY faculty, its uses are many-layered and complex, geared both to the classroom and to the graduate-level and faculty research project. Most important, with its melding of text-based scholarship and visual and sound data, Hollywood Film Masters suggests the innovative and virtuosic possibilities of multimedia technology in the world of higher education.