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"Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) History 20th century."
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Girl about town
\"When fate brings Lulu and Freddie together in 1930s Hollywood, sparks fly--and gunshots follow\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Popular culture in the age of white flight
Los Angeles pulsed with economic vitality and demographic growth in the decades following World War II. This vividly detailed cultural history of L.A. from 1940 to 1970 traces the rise of a new suburban consciousness adopted by a generation of migrants who abandoned older American cities for Southern California's booming urban region. Eric Avila explores expressions of this new \"white identity\" in popular culture with provocative discussions of Hollywood and film noir, Dodger Stadium, Disneyland, and L.A.'s renowned freeways. These institutions not only mirrored this new culture of suburban whiteness and helped shape it, but also, as Avila argues, reveal the profound relationship between the increasingly fragmented urban landscape of Los Angeles and the rise of a new political outlook that rejected the tenets of New Deal liberalism and anticipated the emergence of the New Right. Avila examines disparate manifestations of popular culture in architecture, art, music, and more to illustrate the unfolding urban dynamics of postwar Los Angeles. He also synthesizes important currents of new research in urban history, cultural studies, and critical race theory, weaving a textured narrative about the interplay of space, cultural representation, and identity amid the westward shift of capital and culture in postwar America.
eBook
Nobody's girl Friday : the women who ran Hollywood
\"Disillusioned with what the American film industry had become by the 1970s, Bette Davis remembered a time when \"women owned Hollywood.\" This book is their story. Historian J.E. Smyth challenges the belief, reinforced in too many histories and public comments, that feminism died between 1930 and 1950, that women were not important within the Hollywood studio system, that male directors called all the shots, and that the most important Hollywood writer you should know about is Dalton Trumbo\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Hollywood cinema and the real Los Angeles
i For many people the epithet 'City of Angels' evokes sunshine and golden beaches, glamorous movie stars and the promise of fame - the reality is of course very different. And, paradoxically, the city's reality is as much the record of Los Angeles on film as it is the Los Angeles of highways and suburban neighbourhoods, of people and shops, police and parking lots. This is because Los Angeles is first and foremost a city of cinema - it is where so many major movies are made, and where its locations and studio re-creations are recorded and re-presented on film.This book explores Los Angeles from the invention of motion pictures in the 1890s to the decline of the studio system in the 1950s, describing the ever-changing cinematic image of the city, and the ways in which its representations reflected and manipulated its physical geography. It shows how the construction of big studios helped to change the shape of Los Angeles, and how Hollywood not only contributed to, but also complicated, the city's economic, political, social and cultural life. The incredibly popular films that were produced during this time, from the early slapstick comedies to film noir, and the histories of Los Angeles and its film industry cannot be understood in isolation from each other. Shiel provides a close analysis of narrative, mise en scene, cinematography, editing and other elements of film-making and style, concentrating on the ways in which directors and others engaged with the architecture of the city both within the studios and on location in California.Written by an expert in the history and theory of cinema and the city, this book is a must-read for anyone interested in Hollywood movies, or the history and architecture of Los Angeles. As well as being illustrated with many previously unpublished photographs, the book offers an in-depth view of a city that has never really been seen before.
eBook
Go west, young women
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.
eBook
Death of the Moguls
Death of the Mogulsis a detailed assessment of the last days of the \"rulers of film.\" Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios' collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn't reign supreme.
Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command.Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills,Death of the Mogulsis a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.
eBook
The genius of the system : Hollywood filmmaking in the studio era
A history of the Hollywood studio system, the rise of its moguls and movie stars, and its eventual demise with the advent of television.
Book
The Hollywood Sign
Hollywood's famous sign, constructed of massive white block letters set into a steep hillside, is an emblem of the movie capital it looms over and an international symbol of glamour and star power. To so many who see its image, the sign represents the earthly home of that otherwise ethereal world of fame, stardom, and celebrity--the goal of American and worldwide aspiration to be in the limelight, to be, like the Hollywood sign itself, instantly recognizable.
How an advertisement erected in 1923, touting the real estate development Hollywoodland, took on a life of its own is a story worthy of the entertainment world that is its focus. Leo Braudy traces the remarkable history of this distinctly American landmark, which has been saved over the years by a disparate group of fans and supporters, among them Alice Cooper and Hugh Hefner, who spearheaded its reconstruction in the 1970s. He also uses the sign's history to offer an intriguing look at the rise of the movie business from its earliest, silent days through the development of the studio system that helped define modern Hollywood. Mixing social history, urban studies, literature, and film, along with forays into such topics as the lure of Hollywood for utopian communities and the development of domestic architecture in Los Angeles,The Hollywood Signis a fascinating account of how a temporary structure has become a permanent icon of American culture.
eBook