In Mediamaking: Mass Media in a Popular Culture , Grossberg states: “A genre is a class of texts that have something in common. Genres are invented by people in the industry, by critics, and by audiences. For the industry as well as for the writers, they are a way of defining, measuring, and sustaining taste.” (Grossberg 1998: 159). Thus, westerns that stray from the formulaic conventions of that genre are disrupting the “taste” that audiences expect when sitting down to watch a film. By doing so, films like “Wild, Wild West” and “The Quick and the Dead” are slightly changing an audience's familiarity with the western genre in a disorderly fashion.

However, one film that did extremely well in the 1990's was Clint Eastwood's “Unforgiven” (1992). The film won best picture at the Oscars and grossed $101,157,447 in the U.S. The Harvard web site Clint Eastwood: An American Master states: “ Eastwood's most accomplished western, Unforgiven marked his return to the genre that had made him a star. Based on a David Webb Peoples screenplay that reworks elements of the classic revenge western, the film was shot on location in a remote setting in Western Canada that proved a flawless match for the American frontier of the 1880s.” The film follows what Grossberg calls a shared set of conventions; narrative (revenge), characters (Eastwood a retired ex-gunfighter), location (frontier), and style (traditional western attire and “talk”). Thus, the genre evolved in that some elements were “reworked”, but the film maintained its appeal because it stayed rooted in the shared conventions of the genre (Modern “Classic” Western).

Two approaches that define genre according to Grossberg

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