Everybody knows the expression "show business." And making movies certainly is a business, generating titanic amounts of revenue and involving all the market research, product development, merchandising and promotional activity, of any other commercial enterprise.

The art of business is tricky, and so is the business of filmmaking — and filmmaking itself is indeed a business.

As a professor at Moscow University Touro this year, I’ve been teaching a course entitled Introduction to Film for Business Majors. The growth of the mass media and the widespread popularity of film make it at once a marketing dream and a nightmare. Here’s how my course came about.

Moscow University Touro’s School of Business and Management has been offering undergraduate and graduate diplomas for more than ten years. Here’s where I enter the picture. In July 1999, I went to Moscow for the 21st Moscow International Film Festival, where my film "Poor Liza," based on the classic 18th century story by Nikolai Karamzin, was a contestant.

I don’t have an MBA, nor am I particularly fit for banking and finance. I happen to swing in the artistic, literary direction. However, it is important to note that in order to swim in the waters of moviemaking, especially with your very own movie, you must be able to somehow make even the most artistic film a commercial blockbuster. Without any knowledge of business and market demand, a filmmaker will ultimately fail.

In September, I was introduced to MUT by one of its leading professors, James Roberts. That’s when I started teaching my course on film and business. Among other things, my course examined what makes a film successful. It is about as easy to predict the success of a film as Moscow’s weather, and MUT’s students particularly liked to dissect the reasons behind spectacular financial failures, such as Michael Cimino’s "Heaven’s Gate," which brought in only 1.5 million dollars against its production cost of 44 million. We also discussed the nosedive of Kevin Costner’s “Water World,” which was the most expensive film project up to that time, at 170-million-dollars in 1994.

It is interesting to see how Russian business students view the world of art, and motion pictures in particular. In the Soviet Union, after all, films were not made for commercial sale, and the idea that they should be is new here. While films are promoted as an art form in Eastern European countries, Americans have, from the beginning, made movies in order to maximize profits. Americans also strove endlessly, even during the hard times in the film industry during the 1960s and 1970s, to adapt their films to changing market conditions and develop new markets.

It was difficult to convey to some of my students that only a few worldwide conglomerates from the United States, Japan, Germany and Australia control the international media market today. These companies primarily invest their money into films churned out by Hollywood’s dream factory.

The box-office hits of the 1970s made Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Stephen Spielberg directing superstars. MUT students regard these filmmakers as just very good businessmen.

These directors’ first successes represent everything that New Hollywood embodies. The Godfather, Jaws, and Star Wars were genre productions, created according to the successful patterns of traditional Hollywood cinema. But, at the same time, they set new standards with the introduction of new kinds of special effects and, sometimes, the quality of their scripts.

All three films were blockbusters geared for commercial success; all three covered their production costs within a week. Another very important lesson in the filmmaking business — learn to at least cover your production costs.

We closely dissected Star Wars, which catapulted the film industry into new economic dimensions. Its marketing was not limited to box office revenues; the science fiction film provided the young video-game industry with its first bestseller and aimed to achieve equally high returns from merchandising. No wonder the film industry attempted to exploit such gold mines with sequels.

To conclude, my course taught the necessary business side of film — and why ordinary folks pay to see a movie. Who knows what’s possible for an individual who masters the business aspect of film and television? Vladimir Gusinsky, who is now on the run, studied film and was once a director. Now he is an oligarch with his own mega station, NTV, here in Russia. He must have played some of his business cards right.