In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing ...town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a "New Woman." Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford's rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood's first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.
On Hollywood Scott, Allen John
2018., 20180605, 2018, 2004, 2018-06-05, 20050101
eBook
Why is the U.S. motion picture industry concentrated in Hollywood and why does it remain there in the age of globalization? Allen Scott uses the tools of economic geography to explore these questions ...and to provide a number of highly original answers. The conceptual roots of his analysis go back to Alfred Marshall's theory of industrial districts and pick up on modern ideas about business clusters as sites of efficient and innovative production. On Hollywood builds on this work by adding major new empirical elements. By examining the history of motion-picture production from the early twentieth century to the present through this analytic lens, Scott is able to show why the industry (which was initially focused on New York) had shifted the majority of its production to Southern California by 1919. He also addresses in detail the bases of Hollywood's long-standing creative energies and competitive advantages. At the same time, the book explores the steady globalization of Hollywood's market reach as well as the cultural and political dilemmas posed by this phenomenon. On Hollywood will appeal not only to general readers with an interest in the motion-picture industry, but also to economic geographers, business professionals, regional development practitioners, and cultural theorists as well.
The Golden Age of Hollywood, dating to the hazy depths of the early 20th Century, was an era of movie stars worshipped by the masses and despotic studio moguls issuing decrees from poolside divans… ...but despite the world-wide reach of the movie industry, little more than memories of that era linger amidst the freeways and apartment complexes of today’s Los Angeles. Noted archaeologist Paul G. Bahn digs into the material traces of that Tinseltown in an effort to document and save the treasures that remain. Bahn leads readers on a tour of this singular culture, from the industrial zones of film studios to the landmarks where the glamorous lived, partied, and played, from where they died and were buried to how they’ve been memorialized for posterity. The result is part history, part archaeology—enlivened with pop culture, reminiscence, and whimsy—and throughout, it feeds and deepens our fascination with an iconic place and time, not to mention the personalities who brought it to life.
Hollywood is facing unprecedented challenges - and is changing rapidly and radically as a result. In this major new study of the contemporary film industry, leading film historian Tino Balio explores ...the impact of the Internet, declining DVD sales and changing consumer spending habits on the way Hollywood conducts its business. Today, the major studios play an insignificant role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents and have fled to safety, relying on big-budget tentpoles, franchises and family films to reach their target audiences. Comprehensive, compelling and filled with engaging case studies (TimeWarner, DreamWorks SKG, Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, IMAX, Netflix, Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate and Sundance), Hollywood in the New Millennium is a must-read for all students of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, communication studies, and radio and television.
When the actor Phillip Baker Hall was approached by a twenty-two-year-old Paul Thomas Anderson with the script for his first short film, Cigarettes & Coffee (1993), he claims to have wondered to ...himself, “Who was the first actor in the seventeenth century to see a Shakespeare script, and did he know what he was reading? I certainly knew what I had in my hand” (qtd. in Warren 3). As Anderson is known for having a deep self-certainty about exactly what he was capable of, and moreover, a keen self-awareness too of how he is placed as an auteur figure within the arena of post-New Hollywood cinema, it can be very hard to divorce his work from his personality. This popular imagination of Anderson and his oeuvre, which I in no way wish to suggest is inherently misleading or facetious, is extensively considered by film critic Ethan Warren through a critical reading of not just his films, but also the discourse surrounding Anderson as well. Through a theory of an American apocrypha in Anderson’s work, Warren finds a fascinating way to not just think through Anderson’s own dynamicity as a filmmaker, but also to provide us with an intellectual manoeuvre that makes the reader ask what an auteur even means within commercial Hollywood today, a question we must approach within the terms of commerce.
Hollywood 1938 Jurca, Catherine
2012., 20120227, 2012, 2012-03-28
eBook
In Hollywood 1938, Catherine Jurca brings to light a tumultuous year of crisis that has been neglected in histories of the studio era. With attendance in decline, negative publicity about stars that ...were "poison at the box office," and a spate of bad films, industry executives decided that the public was fed up with the movies. Jurca describes their desperate attempt to win back audiences by launching Motion Pictures' Greatest Year, a massive, and unsuccessful, public relations campaign conducted in theaters and newspapers across North America. Drawing on the records of studio personnel, independent exhibitors, moviegoers, and the motion pictures themselves, she analyzes what was wrong—and right—with Hollywood at the end of a heralded decade, and how the industry's troubles changed the making and marketing of films in 1938 and beyond.
Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, “Women owned Hollywood for twenty years.” She had a point. During the 1930s and 1940s, the press claimed Hollywood was a ...generation or two ahead of the rest of the United States in terms of gender equality and employment, with women constituting 40% of film industry employees. Mary C. McCall Jr. was elected president of the Screen Writers Guild three times, and a quarter of all screenwriters were women. Barbara McLean was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” She and her colleague Margaret Booth supervised their studios’ feature outputs and could order retakes on any director’s work. One woman ran MGM behind the scenes. Over a dozen women worked as producers of major feature films. Edith Head told American women what to wear for decades. Executive Anita Colby, “ ‘the Face with a brain to match,” told them how to do everything else. But historians, critics, and the public have largely forgotten this period and persist in seeing studio-era Hollywood as a place where the only careers open to women were passive, pretty directors’ dummies on-screen or underpaid, anonymous secretaries off-screen. This book tells another story of a “golden age” for women’s employment in the film industry and of Hollywood’s ranks of powerful organization women.
Der von Hannes Brühwiler herausgegebene Sammelband The Sound of Fury beleuchtet schlaglichtartig die Schwarze Liste Hollywoods und punktet vor allem mit einer gendersensiblen Perspektive.
