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Author: Peter Decherney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231133774
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
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Book Description
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.
Author: Peter Decherney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231133774
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 289
Get Book Here
Book Description
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.
Author: Peter Decherney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231159471
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 306
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Book Description
Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Though much of Hollywood's engagement with the law occurs offstage, in the larger theater of copyright, many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law and recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture.
Author: Andrew Breitbart
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
ISBN: 0471706248
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 422
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Book Description
Hollywood, Interrupted is a sometimes frightening, occasionally sad, and frequently hysterical odyssey into the darkest realms of showbiz pathology, the endless stream of meltdowns and flameouts, and the inexplicable behavior on the part of show business personalities. Charting celebrities from rehab to retox, to jails, cults, institutions, near-death experiences and the Democratic Party, Hollywood, Interrupted takes readers on a surreal field trip into the amoral belly of the entertainment industry. Each chapter — covering topics including warped Hollywood child-rearing, bad medicine, hypocritical political maneuvering and the complicit media — delivers a meticulously researched, interview-infused, attitude heavy dispatch which analyzes and deconstructs the myths created by the celebrities themselves. Celebrities somehow believe that it's their god-given right to inflict their pathology on the rest of us. Hollywood, Interrupted illustrates how these dysfunctional dilettantes are mad as hell... And we're not going to take it any more.
Author: Elizabeth Currid-Halkett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 1400884691
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 267
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Book Description
How the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite, and how their consumer habits affect us all In today’s world, the leisure class has been replaced by a new elite. Highly educated and defined by cultural capital rather than income bracket, these individuals earnestly buy organic, carry NPR tote bags, and breast-feed their babies. They care about discreet, inconspicuous consumption—like eating free-range chicken and heirloom tomatoes, wearing organic cotton shirts and TOMS shoes, and listening to the Serial podcast. They use their purchasing power to hire nannies and housekeepers, to cultivate their children’s growth, and to practice yoga and Pilates. In The Sum of Small Things, Elizabeth Currid-Halkett dubs this segment of society “the aspirational class” and discusses how, through deft decisions about education, health, parenting, and retirement, the aspirational class reproduces wealth and upward mobility, deepening the ever-wider class divide. Exploring the rise of the aspirational class, Currid-Halkett considers how much has changed since the 1899 publication of Thorstein Veblen’s Theory of the Leisure Class. In that inflammatory classic, which coined the phrase “conspicuous consumption,” Veblen described upper-class frivolities: men who used walking sticks for show, and women who bought silver flatware despite the effectiveness of cheaper aluminum utensils. Now, Currid-Halkett argues, the power of material goods as symbols of social position has diminished due to their accessibility. As a result, the aspirational class has altered its consumer habits away from overt materialism to more subtle expenditures that reveal status and knowledge. And these transformations influence how we all make choices. With a rich narrative and extensive interviews and research, The Sum of Small Things illustrates how cultural capital leads to lifestyle shifts and what this forecasts, not just for the aspirational class but for everyone.
Author: Stephen P Powers
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429973357
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 296
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Book Description
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.
Author: Mark Dice
Publisher: Mark Dice
ISBN: 1943591105
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 282
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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.
Author: Ross Melnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231554133
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 371
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Book Description
Winner - 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.
Author: Giuliana Muscio
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823279391
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 455
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Book Description
This cinema history illuminates the role of southern Italian performance traditions on American movies from the silent era to contemporary film. In Napoli/New York/Hollywood, Italian cinema historian Giuliana Muscio investigates the significant influence of Italian immigrant actors, musicians, and directors on Hollywood cinema. Using a provocative interdisciplinary approach, Muscio demonstrates how these artists and workers preserved their cultural and performance traditions, which led to innovations in the mode of production and in the use of media technologies. In doing so, she sheds light on the work of generations of artists, as well as the cultural evolution of “Italian-ness” in America over the past century. Muscio examines the careers of Italian performers steeped in an Italian theatrical culture that embraced high and low, tragedy and comedy, music, dance, acrobatics, naturalism, and improvisation. Their previously unexplored story—that of the Italian diaspora’s influence on American cinema—is here meticulously reconstructed through rich primary sources, deep archival research, extensive film analysis, and an enlightening series of interviews with heirs to these traditions, including Francis Coppola and his sister Talia Shire, John Turturro, Nancy Savoca, James Gandolfini, David Chase, Joe Dante, and Annabella Sciorra.
Author: Michael Z. Newman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231513526
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 421
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Book Description
America's independent films often seem to defy classification. Their strategies of storytelling and representation range from raw, no-budget projects to more polished releases of Hollywood's "specialty" divisions. Yet understanding American indies involves more than just considering films. Filmmakers, distributors, exhibitors, festivals, critics, and audiences all shape the art's identity, which is always understood in relation to the Hollywood mainstream. By locating the American indie film in the historical context of the "Sundance-Miramax" era (the mid-1980s to the end of the 2000s), Michael Z. Newman considers indie cinema as an alternative American film culture. His work isolates patterns of character and realism, formal play, and oppositionality and the functions of the festivals, art houses, and critical media promoting them. He also accounts for the power of audiences to identify indie films in distinction to mainstream Hollywood and to seek socially emblematic characters and playful form in their narratives. Analyzing films such as Welcome to the Dollhouse (1996), Lost in Translation (2003), Pulp Fiction (1994), and Juno (2007), along with the work of Nicole Holofcener, Jim Jarmusch, John Sayles, Steven Soderbergh, and the Coen brothers, Newman investigates the conventions that cast indies as culturally legitimate works of art. He binds these diverse works together within a cluster of distinct viewing strategies and invites a reevaluation of the difference of independent cinema and its relationship to class and taste culture.
Author: Peter Miles
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317917480
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 284
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Book Description
During the interwar period cinema and literature seemed to be at odds with each other, part of the continuing struggle between mass and elite culture which so worried writers such as Aldous Huxley, T.S. Eliot and the Leavises. And this cultural divide appeared to be sharp evidence of a deeper struggle for control of the nation’s consciousness, not only between dominant and oppositional elements within Britain, but between British and American vales as well. On the one hand, films like Sing As We Go, Proud Valley, and The Stars Look Down consolidated the assumptions about the existence of a national rather than separate class identities. On the other hand, working-class literature such as Love on the Dole articulated working-class experience in a manner intended to bridge the gap between the ‘Two Englands’. This book, originally published in 1987, examines how two of the most significant cultural forms in Britain contributed indirectly to the stability of Britain in the interwar crisis, helping to construct a new class alliance. A major element in the investigation is an analysis of the mechanics of the development of a national cultural identity, alongside separate working-class culture, the development of the lower-middle class and the implications of the intrusion of Hollywood culture. The treatment throughout is thematic rather than text-oriented – works of Graham Greene, George Orwell, Bert Coombes, Evelyn Waugh, the British Documentary Film Movement and Michael Balcon are included in the wide range of material covered.
