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"Motion picture studios United States History 20th century."
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Studios before the system
By 1915, Hollywood had become the epicenter of American filmmaking, with studio \"dream factories\" structuring its vast production. Filmmakers designed Hollywood studios with a distinct artistic and industrial mission in mind, which in turn influenced the form, content, and business of the films that were made and the impressions of the people who viewed them. The first book to retell the history of film studio architecture,Studios Before the Systemexpands the social and cultural footprint of cinema's virtual worlds and their contribution to wider developments in global technology and urban modernism.
Focusing on six significant early film corporations in the United States and France--the Edison Manufacturing Company, American Mutoscope and Biograph, American Vitagraph, Georges Méliès's Star Films, Gaumont, and Pathé Frères--as well as smaller producers and film companies,Studios Before the Systemdescribes how filmmakers first envisioned the space they needed and then sourced modern materials to create novel film worlds. Artificially reproducing the natural environment, film studios helped usher in the world's Second Industrial Revolution and what Lewis Mumford would later call the \"specific art of the machine.\" From housing workshops for set, prop, and costume design to dressing rooms and writing departments, studio architecture was always present though rarely visible to the average spectator in the twentieth century, providing the scaffolding under which culture, film aesthetics, and our relation to lived space took shape.
eBook
Beyond the looking glass
As living subjects rather than static icons, studio-era Hollywood actresses actively negotiated a balance between their public personas, film roles, and corporeal presence. The contemporary audience's engagement with the experience of these actresses unsettles the traditional model of narcissistic identification, which divides the off-screen spectator from his/her on-screen ideal. Exploring the fan's desire for a material connection to the performer - as well as the star's own dialogue between embodied experience and idealized image -Beyond the Looking Glasstraces on- and off-screen representations of narcissistic femininity in classical Hollywood through studies of stars like Greta Garbo, Ava Gardner, and Marilyn Monroe. Merging historical and theoretical concerns, with particular attention to the resonance of golden-age Hollywood in new media, this book explores the movie screen as a medium of shared experience between spectator and star.
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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
Cinema Civil Rights
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.
eBook
Broadcasting Hollywood
Broadcasting Hollywood: The Struggle Over Feature Films on Early Television uses extensive archival research into the files of studios, networks, advertising agencies, unions and guilds, theatre associations, the FCC, and key legal cases to analyze the tensions and synergies between the film and television industries in the early years of television. This analysis of the case study of the struggle over Hollywood’s feature films appearing on television in the 1940s and 1950s illustrates that the notion of an industry misunderstands the complex array of stakeholders who work in and profit from a media sector, and models a variegated examination of the history of media industries. Ultimately, it draws a parallel to the contemporary period and the introduction of digital media to highlight the fact that history repeats itself and can therefore play a key role in helping media industry scholars and practitioners to understand and navigate contemporary industrial phenomena.
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Post-Classical Hollywood
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.
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Best Years
Americans flocked to the movies in 1945 and 1946ùthe center point of the three-decade heyday of the studio system's sound era.Why?
Best Yearsis a panoramic study, shining light on this critical juncture in American historyand the history of American cinemaùthe end of World War II (1945) and a year of unprecedented success in Hollywood's \"Golden Age\" (1946). This unique time, the last year of war and the first full year of peace, provides a rich blend of cinema genres and typesùfrom the battlefront to the home front, the peace film to the woman's film, psychological drama, and the period's provocative new style, film noir.
Best Yearsfocuses on films that were famous, infamous, forgotten, and unforgettable. Big budget A-films, road shows, and familiar series share the spotlight. From Bergman and Grant inNotoriousto Abbott and Costello inLost in a Harem,Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron examine why the bond between screen and viewer was perhaps never tighter. Paying special attention to the movie-going public in key cities--Atlanta, New York, Boston, Honolulu, and Chicago--this ambitious work takes us on a cinematic journey to recapture a magical time.
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Indie, Inc
During the 1990s, films such assex, lies, and videotape,The Crying Game,Pulp Fiction,Good Will Hunting, andShakespeare in Loveearned substantial sums at the box office along with extensive critical acclaim. A disproportionate number of these hits came from one company: Miramax.Indie, Inc.surveys Miramax's evolution from independent producer-distributor to studio subsidiary, chronicling how one company transformed not just the independent film world but the film and media industries more broadly. As Alisa Perren illustrates, Miramax's activities had an impact on everything from film festival practices to marketing strategies, talent development to awards campaigning.
Case studies of key films, includingThe Piano,Kids,Scream,The English Patient, andLife Is Beautiful, reveal how Miramax went beyond influencing Hollywood business practices and motion picture aesthetics to shaping popular and critical discourses about cinema during the 1990s.Indie, Inc.does what other books about contemporary low-budget cinema have not-it transcends discussions of \"American indies\" to look at the range of Miramax-released genre films, foreign-language films, and English-language imports released over the course of the decade. The book illustrates that what both the press and scholars have typically represented as the \"rise of the American independent\" was in fact part of a larger reconfiguration of the media industries toward niche-oriented products.
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