Peter Decherney explores how the concerns of intellectuals and the needs of Hollywood studio heads led to the development of a mutually beneficial relationship during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960). During this period, museums, universities, and government agencies used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions, transforming movies into an art form and making moviegoing a vital civic institution. Decherney's history features an intriguing cast of characters, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak Will Hays, and philanthropist Nelson Rockefeller. He shows how Columbia and Harvard started film studies programs in the 1910s and 1920s to remake American education and American culture. And he shows how the Museum of Modern Art, the U.S. Office of War Information, and the National Endowment for the Arts worked with Hollywood to fight fascism and communism and to promote American values abroad. Hollywood and the Culture Elite offers a unique glimpse into the collaboration between Hollywood and the stewards of high culture to ensure their own survival and profitability.

Classical Hollywood, American Modernism charts the entwined trajectories of the Hollywood studio system and literary modernism in the United States. By examining the various ways Hollywood's industry practices inflected the imaginations of authors, filmmakers, and studios, Jordan Brower offers a new understanding of twentieth-century American and ultimately world media culture. Synthesizing archival research with innovative theoretical approaches, this book tells the story of the studio system's genesis, international dominance, decline, and continued symbolic relevance during the American postwar era through the literature it influenced. It examines the American film industry's business practices and social conditions, demonstrating how concepts like anticipated adaptation, corporate authorship, systemic development, and global distribution inflected the form of some of the greatest works of prose fiction and nonfiction by modernist writers, such as Anita Loos, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Patsy Ruth Miller, Nathanael West, Parker Tyler, Malcolm Lowry, and James Baldwin.

Hollywood's Overseas Campaign: The North Atlantic Movie Trade, 1920-1950 examines how Hollywood movies became one of the most successful U.S. exports, a phenomenon that began during World War I. Focusing on Canada, the market closest to the United States, on Great Britain, the biggest market, and on the U.S. movie industry itself, Ian Jarvie documents how fear of this mass medium's impact and covetousness toward its profits motivated many nations to resist the cultural invasion and economic drain that Hollywood movies represented.

Since the early days of film, critics and theorists have contested the value of formula, cliché, conventional imagery, and recurring narrative patterns of reduced complexity in cinema. Whether it's the high-noon showdown or the last-minute rescue, a lonely woman standing in the window or two lovers saying goodbye in the rain, many films rely on scenes of stereotype, and audiences have come to expect them. Outlining a comprehensive theory of film stereotype, a device as functionally important as it is problematic to a film's narrative, Jörg Schweinitz constructs a fascinating though overlooked critical history from the 1920s to today. Drawing on theories of stereotype in linguistics, literary analysis, art history, and psychology, Schweinitz identifies the major facets of film stereotype and articulates the positions of theorists in response to the challenges posed by stereotype. He reviews the writing of Susan Sontag, Roland Barthes, Theodor W. Adorno, Rudolf Arnheim, Robert Musil, Béla Balázs, Hugo Münsterberg, and Edgar Morin, and he revives the work of less-prominent writers, such as René Fülöp-Miller and Gilbert Cohen-Séat, tracing the evolution of the discourse into a postmodern celebration of the device. Through detailed readings of specific films, Schweinitz also maps the development of models for adapting and reflecting stereotype, from early irony (Alexander Granowski) and conscious rejection (Robert Rossellini) to critical deconstruction (Robert Altman in the 1970s) and celebratory transfiguration (Sergio Leone and the Coen brothers). Altogether a provocative spectacle, Schweinitz's history reveals the role of film stereotype in shaping processes of communication and recognition, as well as its function in growing media competence in audiences beyond cinema.

American motion pictures still dominate the world market with an impact that is difficult to measure. Their role in American culture has been a powerful one since the 1930s and is a hallmark of our culture today. Though much has been written about the film industry, there has been very little systematic attention paid to the ideology of its creative elite. How does the outlook of that elite impact on the portrayals of America that appear on the screen? How do their views interact with the demands of the market and the structure of the industry to determine the product that is seen by mass audiences? Hollywood's America is a marvellously rich and careful discussion of these questions. It combines a meticulous systematic content analysis of fifty years of top-grossing films with a history of the changing structure of the industry. To that mixture it adds an in-depth survey of Hollywood's creative elite, comparing them to other leadership groups. The result is a balanced discussion of unique breadth and depth on a subject of national importance.Placing the film industry in the context of American society as a whole, the authors point out that Hollywood's creative leadership impacts the larger society even as it is influenced by that society. The creators of films cannot remove themselves too far from the values of the audiences that they serve. However, the fact that films are made by a relatively small number of people, who, as the authors demonstrate, tend to share a common outlook, means that, over time, motion pictures have had an undeniable impact on the beliefs, lifestyles, and action of Americans.This study contributes to the debate over the role and influence of those who create and distribute the products of mass culture in the United States.The book also contains a devastating critique of the poststructuralist theories that currently dominate academic film criticism, demonstrating how they fail in their attempt to explain the political significance of motion pictures.

This landmark collection of essays considers the global legacy of John Grierson, the father of British documentary. Featuring the work of leading scholars from around the world, The Grierson Effect explores the impact of Grierson's ideas about documentary and educational film in a wide range of cultural and national contexts – from Russia and Scandinavia, to Latin America, South Africa and New Zealand. In reconsidering Grierson's international infl uence, this major new study emphasises the material conditions of the production and circulation of documentary cinema, foregrounds core issues in documentary studies, and opens up expanded perspectives on transnational cinema cultures and histories.

Shakespeare's plays were immensely popular in their own day -- so why do we refuse to think of them as mass entertainment? In Pleasing Everyone, author Jeffrey Knapp opens our eyes to the uncanny resemblance between Renaissance drama and the incontrovertibly mass medium of Golden-Age Hollywood cinema. Through fascinating explorations of such famous plays as Hamlet, The Roaring Girl, and The Alchemist, and such celebrated films as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, and City Lights, Knapp challenges some of our most basic assumptions about the relationship between art and mass audiences. Above all, Knapp encourages us to resist the prejudice that mass entertainment necessarily simplifies and cheapens whatever it touches. As Knapp shows, it was instead the ceaseless pressure to please everyone that helped generate the astonishing richness and complexity of Renaissance drama as well as of Hollywood film.

Hollywood Abroad is the first book to examine the reception of Hollywood movies by non-American audiences. Although numerous books on film history have analyzed the ways in which American films came to dominate world markets, there has so far been very little published work on how audiences outside the United States have responded to Hollywood-produced films. Hollywood Abroad explores the reception of U.S. films in Britain, France, Belgium, Turkey, Australia, India, Japan, and Central Africa. The book covers topics from the first major penetration of American films into France, Britain, and Australia to the impact of such films as The Best Years of Our Lives to the response of Belgian young people in the age of the multiplex. It demonstrates that the story of the reception of American films overseas is less one of domination than of a complex adoption of Hollywood into various cultures.

Hollywood is placeless, timeless, and iconic, a key fabricator and forger of American cultural myths and stories. How, then, will the history of Hollywood be written?

Screenwriters often joke that “no one ever paid a dollar at a movie theater to watch a screenplay.” Yet the screenplay is where a movie begins, determining whether a production gets the “green light” from its financial backers and wins approval from its audience. This innovative volume gives readers a comprehensive portrait of the art and business of screenwriting, while showing how the role of the screenwriter has evolved over the years. Reaching back to the early days of Hollywood, when moonlighting novelists, playwrights, and journalists were first hired to write scenarios and photoplays, Screenwriting illuminates the profound ways that screenwriters have contributed to the films we love. This book explores the social, political, and economic implications of the changing craft of American screenwriting from the silent screen through the classical Hollywood years, the rise of independent cinema, and on to the contemporary global multi-media marketplace. From The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to Chinatown (1974), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), each project began as writers with pen and ink, typewriters, or computers captured the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the periods in which they were writing. As the contributors take us behind the silver screen to chronicle the history of screenwriting, they spotlight a range of key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond. With original essays from both distinguished film scholars and accomplished screenwriters, Screenwriting is sure to fascinate anyone with an interest in Hollywood, from movie buffs to industry professionals.