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"Decherney, Peter"
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Hollywood : a very short introduction
\"Peter Decherney tells the story of Hollywood, from its nineteenth-century origins to the emergence of internet media empires. Using well-known movies, stars, and directors, the book shows that the elements we take to be a natural part of the Hollywood experience--stars, genre-driven storytelling, blockbuster franchises, etc.--are the product of cultural, political, and commercial forces\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Communicating Fair Use: Norms, Myth, and the Avant-Garde
Increasingly, copyright scholars are looking beyond statutes and case law to fair use norms and the behavior of gatekeepers. Much of this scholarship adopts methodologies from the field of economics. This essay suggests a different approach. It chronicles the community of American avant-garde and experimental filmmakers from the 1960s to the 1990s, examining the development, circulation, and influence of fair use myths. It takes seriously the place of storytelling in shaping behaviors based on fair use. Filmmakers seized on fair use stories at pivotal moments in the development of their community. They then altered the stories to reflect social and artistic needs. In some cases, those stories even trumped advice from lawyers when filmmakers made creative decisions. This essay traces the emergence and function of several fair use myths in this field and concludes by suggesting questions and methodologies for future research on fair use myths more generally.
Journal Article
Hollywood and the Culture Elite
As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture.
Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions.
As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement.
Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.
eBook
Copyright Dupes: Piracy and New Media in Edison v. Lubin (1903)
The author examines the attempts of studios such as Edison to copyright films as photographs in the period prior to the inclusion of motion pictures in copyright law in 1912. The essay reviews the history of copyright law as it applies to photography, instances of piracy in this period, and Edison's lawsuit against rival producer (and fellow pirate) Siegmund Lubin.
Journal Article
IRIS BARRY, HOLLYWOOD IMPERIALISM, AND THE GENDER OF THE NATION
In 1933 the director of the Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Architecture and Design, Philip Johnson, met the British film critic Iris Barry (born Crump) at a party in New York, most likely held at the apartment/salon of their mutual friends Kirk and Constance Askew. Johnson promptly offered Barry a job starting a library at the Museum of Modern Art. Barry had some experience as a librarian; she had worked for a short period in the library of the School of Oriental Studies in London. But the post was, more accurately, a form of patronage for a writer who
Book Chapter
THE POLITICS OF PATRONAGE
With the help of the Museum of Modern Art, Hollywood film became an American national art form. This chapter turns to what is in some ways the coda to that history: the fate of American avant-garde film after Hollywood film became museum art. MoMA and other major institutions of American culture, we will see, rejected avant-garde film from the 1940s though the late 1960s. In turn, a movement of avant-garde filmmakers created an alternate system of institutions in an attempt to usurp Hollywood’s role as American national film. This history reveals much about the political and aesthetic decisions that brought
Book Chapter
CONCLUSION
Collaborations between Hollywood and cultural institutions belong to the golden era of the studio system. Like the other constituent elements of that period, such collaborations were transformed during the transition from the studio system to what has been called the New Hollywood, in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. The Supreme Court’s decision that studios should divest themselves of movie theater chains, as well as the popularity of television and the increasing importance of international ticket sales, among many other factors, forced the American film industry to undergo significant restructuring. The studios continued to exist but the system changed. The New
Book Chapter
THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART AND THE ROOTS OF THE CULTURAL COLD WAR
Film museums, libraries, and collections were first theorized and tested in the name of nationalism, as interventions either for or against the spread and preservation of American culture after World War I. They were realized (we will see in this chapter and the next) when the definition and dissemination of American culture became an important element in the war to defend democracy against the threats of communism and fascism. As a result, film museums, libraries, and collections found their enduring, nationalistic function during World War II, and they became full-blown weapons in the cultural cold war.
Much of the debate
Book Chapter