Catalogue Search | MBRL
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
{{itemTitle}}
209
result(s) for
"hollywood studios"
Sort by:
RKO Radio Pictures
In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.
eBook
Hollywood studio filmmaking in the age of Netflix
Online streaming services are challenging long-standing decision-making processes in the traditional motion picture industry, thus placing Hollywood major studios at a crossroads. We use the institutional logics perspective to examine how both traditional studios and online streaming services make strategic decisions on which films to produce and how these films are to be distributed. We then apply scenario analysis to explore how their interaction will likely evolve. We argue that the key criteria that studio executives use to make production and distribution decisions are shaped by what we define as a commitment institutional logic: decision-making heuristics that focus their attention on theatrical release and box-office intakes. In contrast, online streaming services follow a convenience institutional logic, the product of advanced data analytics to increase subscriptions. In the convenience institutional logic, the need to drive online traffic by providing users with an extensive catalogue of movies guides film production and distribution decisions. Whereas the commitment logic aims for mass-market hits in cinemas, the convenience logic seeks to reach a wide range of subscribers at home with micro-segmented offerings. We compare the two logics, develop four scenarios of how the interaction between them may shape the film industry, and offer recommendations.
Journal Article
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 photoplay or the pickaxe: extras, gender, and labour in early Hollywood
During the 1910s, the extra girl emerged as a type of ““star”” whose persona was defined by the always ambivalent narrative associated with extra work: that the discovery of unknown talent or screen charisma could equal fame and fortune. This essay examines the emergence of the extra girl as the representative of the film industry's anonymous underclass, whose rise as a figure of fascination and concern deflected attention from the heterogeneous appeal of extra work. Despite scandal and controversy, the extra girl represented a much more manageable image of Hollywood's underclass than the chaotically diverse and potentially radical masses that were also glimpsed at the studio gates. In describing the cultural politics of extra labor, the essay focuses on the de-professionalization of extra work, narrative tropes that helped define extra labor as a feminine occupation, and attempts to manage labor problems with extras in Los Angeles's burgeoning film studios.
Journal Article
Hollywood Be Thy Name
From the earliest years of sound film in America, Hollywood studios and independent producers of \"race films\" for black audiences created stories featuring African American religious practices. In the first book to examine how the movies constructed images of African American religion, Judith Weisenfeld explores these cinematic representations and how they reflected and contributed to complicated discourses about race, the social and moral requirements of American citizenship, and the very nature of American identity. Drawing on such textual sources as studio production files, censorship records, and discussions and debates about religion and film in the black press, as well as providing close readings of films, this richly illustrated and meticulously researched book brings religious studies and film history together in innovative ways.
eBook
“The Hollywood Powder Puff War”: Technicolor Cosmetics in the 1930s
This essay examines the rivalry between cosmetics firms Max Factor and Elizabeth Arden in 1930s Hollywood as they competed for dominance in the field of Technicolor cosmetics. This rivalry, dubbed “the Hollywood Powder Puff War” by the press, was far from a trivial skirmish but is discussed here as the site where labor practices, racial constructions, and female identity were contested. Against a backdrop of industrial action in studio makeup departments, I argue that Factor's Technicolor cosmetics line ultimately triumphed over Arden's by reinforcing whiteness as a beauty ideal during the transition from black-and-white to color film.
Journal Article
Fantastic Functionality: Studio Architecture and the Visual Rhetoric of Early Hollywood
This article examines film studio architecture in the Los Angeles region in the 1910s. Building on the work of architectural historian Reyner Banham, it argues that studio architects developed “fantastic functionality” to meet their dual task of creating functional sites for efficient production while also giving film companies a public face that might mediate local anxieties about the new industry. By focusing on studio spaces rather than studio films, the article stresses the value of expanding our view of film production to include its architectural forms, and of pushing visual analysis beyond the film text to include the spaces of filmmaking. As an addendum, this essay also reprints and examines the demolition permit for Lois Weber's film studio.
Journal Article
“Fan Magazine Trouble”: The AMPP, Studio Publicity Directors, and the Hollywood Press, 1945–1952
Files from the Studio Publicity Directors Committee of the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP), housed in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library (MHL), reveal that studio publicity directors in the postwar era considered many articles in fan magazines to be “unfriendly and destructive” to the industry. This essay examines the perspectives of both studio publicity directors and members of the Hollywood press on what constituted “fan magazine trouble” in postwar Hollywood, the relation of that trouble to studio controls in place over these publications since 1934, and how fan-magazine editors and newspaper reporters and columnists conceptualized their coverage of Hollywood stars, studios, and productions within ongoing developments in reporting practices and their relation to the professionalization of journalism.
Journal Article