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.
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.
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.
At the end of World War II, Hollywood basked in unprecedented prosperity. Since then, numerous challenges and crises have changed the American film industry in ways beyond imagination in 1945. ...Nonetheless, at the start of a new century Hollywood's worldwide dominance is intact - indeed, in today's global economy the products of the American entertainment industry (of which movies are now only one part) are more ubiquitous than ever.How does today's 'Hollywood' - absorbed into transnational media conglomerates like NewsCorp., Sony, and Viacom - differ from the legendary studios of Hollywood's Golden Age? What are the dominant frameworks and conventions, the historical contexts and the governing attitudes through which films are made, marketed and consumed today? How have these changed across the last seven decades? And how have these evolving contexts helped shape the form, the style and the content of Hollywood movies, from Singin' in the Rain to Pirates of the Caribbean?Barry Langford explains and interrogates the concept of 'post-classical' Hollywood cinema - its coherence, its historical justification and how it can help or hinder our understanding of Hollywood from the forties to the present. Integrating film history, discussion of movies' social and political dimensions, and analysis of Hollywood's distinctive methods of storytelling, Post-Classical Hollywood charts key critical debates alongside the histories they interpret, while offering its own account of the 'post-classical'. Wide-ranging yet concise, challenging and insightful, Post-Classical Hollywood offers a new perspective on the most enduringly fascinating artform of our age.
This article proposes to study The Boys (Prime Video, 2019-in production) from a genealogical approach that will shed light on the series' cinematic legacy, with a particular emphasis on its science ...fictional matrix. The starting point of this reflection lies in the paradigmatic shift embodied by The Boys, following the cinema of Zack Snyder (Watchmen, 2009 and Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice, 2016), which consists in proposing a realistic rereading of the mythologies of the superhero, whose traditional model is thus strongly criticized, even deconstructed. Similarly, the authors will show how the use of the science- fictional imaginary, notably through the use of the film-matrix Scanners (David Cronenberg, 1981), composes a clear genealogical source while, at the same time, The Boys renews its relationship to cinephilic memory and to media and political criticism in a formal synthesis of New Hollywood.
Research summary: Research on the resource-based view has begun to place more emphasis on the ability of managers to extract better performance from the resources that are available to them. In this ...paper, we show that prior experience can both help and hinder their ability to generate performance from various categories of resources. Further, we argue that the fungibility of each resource influences the opportunities managers have to use their experiences in order to find the best method to deploy them. We test our hypotheses by examining the ability of Hollywood film producers to generate results from financial, brand, and human resources. Our findings show that experienced producers can generate better performance from more fungible resources, but they actually achieve weaker results with less fungible resources. Managerial summary: Do more experienced top managers get better results from their resources? We examine this question for Hollywood film producers. Our results show that experience can really help when producers work with resources such as cash (budgets) and brand resources (such as film sequels). However, such experiences actually reduce performance when they work with some human resources, such as highly talented directors. We argue that experience can be most helpful when managers work with more fungible resources, which can be used in a variety of different ways but can actually hurt when they work with resources that are more constrained in how they can be deployed. Under ideal circumstances, we find that experienced producers can generate nearly 40percent more revenue with the right mix of resources.
Globalization is a process that has lasted for centuries. People naturally tend to cross state borders. Some from cultural motives of getting to know the world, others from economic ones, and others ...from political ones. Over time, the idea of globalism emerged. It implied a directed activity of global importation of the world with the aim of strengthening large corporations and their countries. These are primarily corporations and political elites of the United States. Those ideas of globalism are promoted and imported into the modern world through the creation of greater economic interdependence and de-sovereignization of states, through military and political domination, through new technologies, but also through culture and the media. In that context, Hollywood series also play an important role. By analyzing the content of the most watched Hollywood sitcoms, such as The House of Cards, The Americans, The Big Bang Theory and Two and a Half Men, this research determines which ideas of globalism these series promote and in what way. This raises the question of the importance of Western media and culture in the process of globalization of the world.
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