Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture

Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture PDF Author: Mark Dice
Publisher: Mark Dice
ISBN: 1943591105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
Films and television shows aren’t just entertainment. They are powerful vehicles that influence social and political trends, ultimately shaping the very fabric of our culture. Because of this potential, there are various agencies which work behind the scenes in Hollywood to harness these forces for their own aims or those of their clients. Few people outside the industry are aware that such agencies exist and are hired by advocacy groups to lobby studios, writers, and producers in order to get their ideas inserted into plots of popular works. These Hollywood lobbyists have been instrumental in successfully paving the path for same-sex marriage to become legal, destigmatizing abortion, encouraging mass immigration, and sounding the alarm about climate change; all under the cloak of mere “entertainment.” More recently we’ve seen these same powers levied against President Trump, his supporters, and used to demonize “white privilege” as an invisible enemy that’s supposedly around every corner. Even sports and late-night comedy shows are employed for political causes, violating the once unwritten cardinal rules of their industries. In this groundbreaking work, media analyst Mark Dice details the true power of entertainment and proves how it is being used to wage a psychological war against the world.

Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture

Hollywood Propaganda: How TV, Movies, and Music Shape Our Culture PDF Author: Mark Dice
Publisher: Mark Dice
ISBN: 1943591105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 280

Get Book

Book Description
Films and television shows aren’t just entertainment. They are powerful vehicles that influence social and political trends, ultimately shaping the very fabric of our culture. Because of this potential, there are various agencies which work behind the scenes in Hollywood to harness these forces for their own aims or those of their clients. Few people outside the industry are aware that such agencies exist and are hired by advocacy groups to lobby studios, writers, and producers in order to get their ideas inserted into plots of popular works. These Hollywood lobbyists have been instrumental in successfully paving the path for same-sex marriage to become legal, destigmatizing abortion, encouraging mass immigration, and sounding the alarm about climate change; all under the cloak of mere “entertainment.” More recently we’ve seen these same powers levied against President Trump, his supporters, and used to demonize “white privilege” as an invisible enemy that’s supposedly around every corner. Even sports and late-night comedy shows are employed for political causes, violating the once unwritten cardinal rules of their industries. In this groundbreaking work, media analyst Mark Dice details the true power of entertainment and proves how it is being used to wage a psychological war against the world.

The Hidden Art of Hollywood

The Hidden Art of Hollywood PDF Author: John Fawell
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313356939
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 240

Get Book

Book Description
Although we tend to accord our highest praise to films with strong messages, Hollywood is resolutely unserious in its goals, and closer perhaps to music than to literature in this regard. Thus, in order to appreciate Hollywood's classic movies, we have to understand them as the result of a style of filmmaking that justifies itself through the grace and beauty of its form. This beauty, when seen, challenges our notion of film as the poorer cousin of the high arts, or as worthwhile only when it serves a social purpose. The Hidden Art of Hollywood draws from a huge fund of recorded interviews with the directors, writers, cinematographers, set designers, producers, and actors who were a part of the studio process, in order to give the filmmakers themselves the chance to explain a very elusive phenomenon: the glancing beauty of the Hollywood film. While the greatness of the classic Hollywood film is, for many of us, settled business, there are also a great number who have difficulty understanding why these films—which can often seem dated and unrealistic compared to modern fare—are taken as seriously as they are. Although we tend to accord our highest praise to films with strong and often didactic messages, Hollywood is resolutely unserious in its goals, and closer perhaps to music than to literature in this regard. Thus, in order to appreciate classic American movies, we have to understand them as the result of a style of filmmaking that justifies itself not through ideas or social relevance, but through the grace and beauty of its form. The beauty of the Hollywood film challenges our notion of film as the poorer cousin of the high arts, or as worthwhile only when it serves a social purpose. In his effort to answer the many questions that classic American cinema suggests, author John Fawell considers previous criticism of Hollywood, but also draws from a huge fund of recorded interviews with the directors, writers, cinematographers, set designers, producers, and actors who were a part of the studio process, in order to give the filmmakers themselves the chance to explain a very elusive phenomenon: the glancing beauty of the Hollywood film. The films of certain great auteurs, including Charlie Chaplin, Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges, Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, John Ford, and Orson Welles, receive particular attention here, but this book is organized by ideas rather than films or artists, and it draws from a wide array of Hollywood films, both successes and failures, to make its points.

Hollywood and the Culture Elite

Hollywood and the Culture Elite PDF Author: Peter Decherney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231508514
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 289

Get Book

Book Description
As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture. Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions. As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement. Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.

TV on Strike

TV on Strike PDF Author: Cynthia Littleton
Publisher: Syracuse University Press
ISBN: 0815652003
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 326

Get Book

Book Description
TV on Strike examines the upheaval in the entertainment industry by telling the inside story of the hundred-day writers’ strike that crippled Hollywood in late 2007 and early 2008. The television industry’s uneasy transition to the digital age was the driving force behind the most significant labor dispute of the twenty-first century. The strike put a spotlight on how the advent of new-media distribution platforms is reshaping the traditional business models that have governed the television industry for decades. The uncertainty that sent writers out into the streets of Los Angeles and New York with picket signs laid bare the depth of the divide between the media barons who rule the entertainment industry and the writers who are integral as the creators of movies and television shows. With both sides afraid of losing millions in future profits, a critical communication breakdown spurred a fierce battle with repercussions that continue today. The saga of the Writers Guild of America strike is told through the eyes of the key players on both sides of the negotiating table and of the foot soldiers who surprised even themselves with the strength of their resolve to fight for their rights in the face of an ambiguous future. In the years since the strike ended, the rise of digital distribution platforms has changed the business landscape in ways that few could have predicted when Hollywood guilds were feverishly trying to hammer out a contract template for a new era.

Film and Television After 9/11

Film and Television After 9/11 PDF Author: Wheeler W. Dixon
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809325566
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Get Book

Book Description
Twelve distinguished scholars and critics discuss the production, reception, and distribution of Hollywood and foreign films after the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, and examine how movies have changed to reflect the new world climate.

Contemporary Hollywood Cinema

Contemporary Hollywood Cinema PDF Author: STEVE NEALE
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135108765
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

Get Book

Book Description
A comprehensive overview of the film industry in Hollywood today, Contemporary Hollywood Cinema brings together leading international cinema scholars to explore the technology, institutions, film makers and movies of contemporary American film making.

Hollywood Goes to War

Hollywood Goes to War PDF Author: Clayton R. Koppes
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 9780520071612
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book

Book Description
The little-explored story of how politics, propaganda, and profits were combined to create the drama, imagery and fantasy that was American film during World War II. 32 black-and-white photographs.

Popular Appeal

Popular Appeal PDF Author: Lesley Hawkes
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 144385431X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 220

Get Book

Book Description
Now is an opportune moment to consider the shifts in youth and popular culture that are signalled by texts that are being read and viewed by young people. In a world seemingly compromised by climate change, political and religious upheavals and economic irresponsibility, and at a time of fundamental social change, young people are devouring fictional texts that focus on the edges of identity, the points of transition and rupture, and the assumption of new and hybrid identities. This book draws on a range of international texts to address these issues, and to examine the ways in which key popular genres in the contemporary market for young people are being re-defined and re-positioned in the light of urgent questions about the environment, identity, one’s place in the world, and the fragile nature of the world itself. The key questions are: • What are the shifts and changes in youth culture that are identified by the market and by what young people read and view? • How do these texts negotiate the addressing of significant questions relating to the world today? • Why are these texts so popular with young people? • What are the most popular genres in contemporary best-sellers and films? • Do these texts have a global appeal, and, if so, why? These over-arching themes and ideas are presented as a collection of inter-related essays exploring a rich variety of forms and styles from graphic novels to urban realism, from fantasy to dystopian writing, from epic narratives to television musicals. The subjects and themes discussed here reveal the quite remarkable diversity of issues that arise in youth fiction and the variety of fictional forms in which they are explored. Once seen as not as important as adult fiction, this book clearly demonstrates that youth fiction (and the popular appeal of this fiction) is complex, durable and far-reaching in its scope.

Crash Cinema

Crash Cinema PDF Author: Will Godfrey
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443815187
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 152

Get Book

Book Description
Crash Cinema: Representation in Film is a collection of essays that emerged from Crash Cinema an annual symposium that is an integral part of the Bradford Film Festival at the National Media Museum (UK). The symposium was created by academics and curators who share the common aim of promoting the importance of film both as an academic study and for critical public appreciation. Films can be enjoyed as entertainment, they can educate and inform and they can excite and disturb. Films are powerful pieces of culture. The films that we now ‘consume’ do more than simply amuse or horrify. Cinema not only thrills us but also communicates to us about ourselves and in the twentieth and twenty-first century moving images have become the dominant form of this communication. Bombarded by images, we inhabit a media intensive world in which every aspect of life is pervaded by visual signs. In these circumstances it becomes increasingly significant to engage with the politics of representation. Through this vital process we can acknowledge that all cultural forms, whether in high art or the mass media, are in the broadest sense political. We can also appreciate that it is a complex agenda of interests that shapes specific ideological meanings. Fulsomely equipped, we can apply this essential tool to the exciting task of decoding the political, social and cultural meanings articulated through the making, promotion and consumption of film. This book aims to offer an arena for the analysis of these representations. Representations cannot depict the ‘truth’ and the essays in this book do not claim to search for the ‘truth’. We ask whose ‘truth’ is being represented, how is it represented and why is it represented like that? We also ask how do representations tell us something about the culture within which they are created. Yet the essays in this volume are not ‘stuck’ in the representational concerns of the past and try instead to uncover the power of cinema to shock and surprise whether that be through visceral impact, subversive content, experiments with identity or the exploration of the taboo. Representation, as defined by the eleven essays in this book, is a fluid and dynamic approach to the study of film. The study of film, to which this book contributes some unique case studies, is as popular as ever and has withstood growing challenge from the new media such as CG Animations, the internet and computer, console and online gaming. This is because the pleasure of film is still the most humanistic and because the sophistication of the representations offered by cinematic expression remain ever more complex and pleasurable to decipher. This book can therefore be read by any student, academic, writer or filmmaker hooked on these delights.

Primetime Propaganda

Primetime Propaganda PDF Author: Ben Shapiro
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062092103
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 418

Get Book

Book Description
“Vitally important, devastatingly thorough, and shockingly revealing…. After reading Primetime Propaganda, you’ll never watch TV the same way again.” —Mark Levin Movie critic Michael Medved calls Ben Shapiro, “One of our most refreshing and insightful voices on the popular culture, as well as a conscience for his much-maligned generation.” With Primetime Propaganda, the syndicated columnist and bestselling author of Brainwashed, Porn Generation, and Project President tells the shocking true story of how the most powerful medium of mass communication in human history became a vehicle for spreading the radical agenda of the left side of the political spectrum. Similar to what Bernard Goldberg’s Bias and A Slobbering Love Affair did for the liberal news machine, Shapiro’s Primetime Propaganda is an essential exposé of corrupting media bias, pulling back the curtain on widespread and unrepentant abuses of the Hollywood entertainment industry.