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Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra—as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her \"just folks,\" small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 film Citizen Kane and her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, The First Lady of Hollywood is both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.

From Al Jolson in blackface to Song of the South, there is a long history of racism in Hollywood film. Yet as early as the 1930s, movie studios carefully vetted their releases, removing racially offensive language like the \"N-word.\" This censorship did not stem from purely humanitarian concerns, but rather from worries about boycotts from civil rights groups and loss of revenue from African American filmgoers. Cinema Civil Rightspresents the untold history of how Black audiences, activists, and lobbyists influenced the representation of race in Hollywood in the decades before the 1960s civil rights era. Employing a nuanced analysis of power, Ellen C. Scott reveals how these representations were shaped by a complex set of negotiations between various individuals and organizations. Rather than simply recounting the perspective of film studios, she calls our attention to a variety of other influential institutions, from protest groups to state censorship boards. Scott demonstrates not only how civil rights debates helped shaped the movies, but also how the movies themselves provided a vital public forum for addressing taboo subjects like interracial sexuality, segregation, and lynching. Emotionally gripping, theoretically sophisticated, and meticulously researched,Cinema Civil Rightspresents us with an in-depth look at the film industry's role in both articulating and censoring the national conversation on race.

Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra-as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her \"just folks,\" small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 filmCitizen Kaneand her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched,The First Lady of Hollywoodis both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.

Hollywood's relationship with Washington refl ected the broad political trends of the Great Depression decade. Once scorned as vulgar Jewish hucksters, the studio moguls looked to achieve social recognition through political identification with the largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Republican party establishment. For some, most notably MGM's Louis B. Mayer, conservative convictions reinforced status concerns, as was evident in their opposition to the New Deal, the rise of labour unions, and radical causes like Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) gubernatorial election crusade in 1934. This form of ‘mogul politics’ refl ected the instincts of its promoters: hardness, shrewdness, autocracy and coercion. In contrast, the crisis of the Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal engendered in other segments of the film community, including directors, writers and a galaxy of stars, a significant degree of liberal political activism – and radicalism in the case of some. This chapter analyses the mogul political response to the Great Depression, assesses the signifi- cance of the EPIC campaign for film community politics, and examines the politicisation of the Hollywood workforce in response to the New Deal and the rise of fascism abroad.MOGUL POLITICSExcept for Darryl Zanuck and Walt Disney, all the movie moguls (Carl Laemmle, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Joseph and Nicholas Schenck, the Warner brothers and Adolph Zukor) shared a common Jewish immigrant heritage. These men embodied the American Dream through their rise from the teeming immigrant ghettos of urban America to make fortunes in the new medium of the cinema. Having experienced the extremes of poverty, they jealously guarded their newly acquired fortunes, downplayed their Jewishness, and assimilated into mainstream society.While taking pride in their accumulation of riches, the Jewish moguls never forgot the pogroms that had driven their families to emigrate from Eastern Europe and were uncomfortably aware of ingrained WASP prejudice in their new homeland. Hollywood's Jewishness came regularly under attack from anti-Semites like Henry Ford, the moguls found themselves barred from the exclusive country clubs and oldest business groups of their adopted Los Angeles, and their children could not gain entry into the city's best schools. In spite of battling each other for ascendancy in the film business, the film bosses saw their real enemies as the ‘goyim of Wall Street who were constantly plotting to take over their studios’.

Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forcesFilms and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, TheDark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana,WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst othersExplores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwiseInvestigates Hollywood's treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000sShows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama.

Adopting and developing a ‘cultural politics’ approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly influence how we understand power relations. Instead of looking at genre, it employs three broad categories of film. ‘Security’ films present ideas concerning public order and disorder, citizen–state relations and the politics of fear. ‘Relationalities’ films highlight personal and intimate politics, bringing norms about identities, gender and sexuality into focus. In ‘socially critical’ films, particular issues and ideas are endowed with more overtly political significance. The book considers these categories as global political technologies implicated in hegemonic and ‘soft power’ relations whose reach is both deep and broad.

Will Rogers, hazily remembered today as a kindly, folksy comedian, is recalled as the half-Cherokee populist he was, dispensing sharp- edged political comment and calling for the redistribution of wealth. Starting with the rich, double-edged title of his book, resonating as it does with idealism and noir sensibility, May argues that the Depression was actually a liberating influence on the American mind, freeing it from blind subservience to the establishment, which obviously didn't have all the answers, encouraging artists to junk European models and invent new ones, allowing hitherto marginalized voices to be heard in the new - and to some, shocking - gangster movies, working-girl comedies, and snappy musicals. New archetypes appeared, from two-fisted working-class protagonists (Cagney, Gable, Stanwyck, Davis) to sophisticated iconoclasts such as William Powell and Myrna Loy in \"The Thin Man.\" Not that the postwar ideal of consumerism and domesticity offered an entirely satisfying alternative. The anxiety resulting from the stifling postwar imperative to conform gave rise to film noir, May argues, with its outsider sensibility lurking in the shadows. (He might have added the films of Douglas Sirk, that master portrayer of postwar American domestic and social entrapment.) May genuflects to Billy Wilder (\"Double Indemnity\") and John Huston (\"The Asphalt Jungle\") for their subversive criticism of repressive postwar roles, and he notes the criminalization of desire that set the stage for the counterculture - a revolt that was prefigured in the rebellious archetypes of Marlon Brando, James Dean, and Marilyn Monroe.

May looks anew at the changing film audiences of the Depression era and persuasively argues that patrons \"rejected studio products and demanded 'new subjects.' \" He cites the \"Thin Man\" and \"[Andy] Hardy Family\" series as examples of this new Hollywood, but neither series was produced outside of the studio system; both came from (and helped keep afloat) MGM, the biggest studio of the day. May describes the \"fresh narrative\" of \"The Thin Man\" as consisting of heroes who \"undergo a conversion experience\" and whose efforts \"yield a just society and a more inclusive and better tomorrow.\" Wow. Director Woody van Dyke, whose quick and consistently under-budget work earned him the moniker \"One Cut Woody,\" frustrating actors and writers but making him the darling of studio bosses, would surely be amused to have the movie he filmed in less than three weeks awarded such heft. It took writers Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett even less time to adapt the screen story, and the concern about the film voiced at the time by MGM story boss Sam Marx was that the main characters, Nick and Nora Charles, were married throughout the film, in stark contrast to the formula of finding true love in the last act. \"Marriage,\" Marx suggested, \"wasn't supposed to be fun.\"

Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930s.In the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nation's history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelt's New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression – the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM 'kids' musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidor's Our Daily BreadCary Grant's success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University

Fighting ability, although recognized as fundamental to intrasexual competition in many nonhuman species, has received little attention as an explanatory variable in the social sciences. Multiple lines of evidence from archaeology, criminology, anthropology, physiology, and psychology suggest that fighting ability was a crucial aspect of intrasexual competition for ancestral human males, and this has contributed to the evolution of numerous physical and psychological sex differences. Because fighting ability was relevant to many domains of interaction, male psychology should have evolved such that a man’s attitudes and behavioral responses are calibrated according to his formidability. Data are reviewed showing that better fighters feel entitled to better outcomes, set lower thresholds for anger/aggression, have self-favoring political attitudes, and believe more in the utility of warfare. New data are presented showing that among Hollywood actors, those selected for their physical strength (i.e., action stars) are more likely to believe in the utility of warfare.