Download or read book The Hollywood Studio System written by Douglas Gomery and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 655 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite being one of the biggest industries in the United States, indeed the World, the internal workings of the 'dream factory' that is Hollywood is little understood outside the business. The Hollywood Studio System: A History is the first book to describe and analyse the complete development, classic operation, and reinvention of the global corporate entitles which produce and distribute most of the films we watch. Starting in 1920, Adolph Zukor, Head of Paramount Pictures, over the decade of the 1920s helped to fashion Hollywood into a vertically integrated system, a set of economic innovations which was firmly in place by 1930. For the next three decades, the movie industry in the United States and the rest of the world operated by according to these principles. Cultural, social and economic changes ensured the dernise of this system after the Second World War. A new way to run Hollywood was required. Beginning in 1962, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios emerged as the key innovator in creating a second studio system. He realized that creating a global media conglomerate was more important than simply being vertically integrated. Gomery's history tells the story of a 'tale of two systems 'using primary materials from a score of archives across the United States as well as a close reading of both the business and trade press of the time. Together with a range of photographs never before published the book also features over 150 box features illuminating aspect of the business.
Download or read book The Genius of the System written by Thomas Schatz and published by Henry Holt and Company. This book was released on 2015-06-02 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At a time when the studio is making a stunning comeback, film historian Thomas Schatz provides an indispensable account of Hollywood's tradional blend of business and art. This book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and reveals instead the genius of a system of collaboration and conflict. Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making-and unmaking-of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel. Richly illustrated and highly readable, The Genius of the System gives the definitive view of the workings of the Old Hollywood and the foundations of the New.
Download or read book Studios Before the System written by Brian R. Jacobson and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2015-09-01 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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 System expands 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 System describes 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.
Download or read book Working in Hollywood written by Ronny Regev and published by UNC Press Books. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers--people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos--were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.
Download or read book Hollywood TV written by Christopher Anderson and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2013-10-11 with total page 356 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1950s was one of the most turbulent periods in the history of motion pictures and television. During the decade, as Hollywood's most powerful studios and independent producers shifted into TV production, TV replaced film as America's principal postwar culture industry. This pioneering study offers the first thorough exploration of the movie industry's shaping role in the development of television and its narrative forms. Drawing on the archives of Warner Bros. and David O. Selznick Productions and on interviews with participants in both industries, Christopher Anderson demonstrates how the episodic telefilm series, a clear descendant of the feature film, became and has remained the dominant narrative form in prime-time TV. This research suggests that the postwar motion picture industry was less an empire on the verge of ruin—as common wisdom has it—than one struggling under unsettling conditions to redefine its frontiers. Beyond the obvious contribution to film and television studies, these findings add an important chapter to the study of American popular culture of the postwar period.
Download or read book Hollywood Genres Formulas Filmmaking and The Studio System written by Thomas Schatz and published by McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages. This book was released on 1981-02 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.
Download or read book Independent Stardom written by Emily Carman and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2015-12-15 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Bringing to light an often-ignored aspect of Hollywood studio system history, this book focuses on female stars who broke the mold of a male-dominated, often manipulative industry to dictate the path of their own careers through freelancing. Runner-up, Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association, 2016 During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood’s patriarchal structure. Through extensive, original archival research, Independent Stardom uncovers this hidden history of women’s labor and celebrity in studio-era Hollywood. Carman weaves a compelling narrative that reveals the risks these women took in deciding to work autonomously. Additionally, she looks at actresses of color, such as Anna May Wong and Lupe Vélez, whose careers suffered from the enforced independence that resulted from being denied long-term studio contracts. Tracing the freelance phenomenon among American motion picture talent in the 1930s, Independent Stardom rethinks standard histories of Hollywood to recognize female stars as creative artists, sophisticated businesswomen, and active players in the then (as now) male-dominated film industry.
Download or read book The Studio System written by Janet Staiger and published by Burns & Oates. This book was released on 1995 with total page 333 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is is like to work in Hollywood, within the complexities of film-making, is studied in depth in the essays gathered in this book. Among the topics examined are: key workers and the system; women in the early film industry; labour relations; teenagers, teenpics and exploitation film-making; the conventions of the Tarzan films; and the effect of production needs and budgets upon the films themselves.
Download or read book The Last Word written by Justin Gautreau and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-11-02 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Word tells the story of a handful of insiders who used fiction as a way to expose the harsh realities behind the silver screen. Unauthorized and unfiltered, these works uncover a new history of Hollywood during the studio era.
Download or read book Rebels on the Backlot written by Sharon Waxman and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Admirably reported . . . Waxman unearths juicy anecdotes that’ll keep film fans cackling and turning the pages.” — Salon.com “Riveting tales of Hollywood hubris . . . a fun read.” — Entertainment Weekly “Vivid . . . fascinating . . . delightful . . . [Waxman’s] background as a hard news reporter serves her well.” — New York Times Book Review “A behind-the-cameras fireball of wicked insider revelations . . . Love it!” — Liz Smith, syndicated columnist “[Waxman’s] thorough reporting results in a compulsively readable chronicle of the decade’s auteurs and their work.” — Premiere “Enjoyably dishy.” — Variety “Addictively readable . . . fascinating” — Miami Herald “A lively book with gossipy and readable stories about some obsessive guys who are as much rascals as rebels.” — Los Angeles Times Book Review “Terrific . . . wildly informative and readable about the plight of the biggest young talents in modern movies” — Buffalo News “[Rebels on the Backlot] makes a case for creating a new film canon of this late ‘90s renaissance.” — Pittsburgh Tribune “Waxman perceptively depicts the vocabulary of the new Hollywood . . . well-written . . . recommended.” — Library Journal “Hums along on detail and gossip, adding up to a template for making it in contemporary Hollywood.” — men.style.com “Up-close, often gossipy” — The Hollywood Reporter “Fascinatingly candid” — Minneapolis Star Tribune
Download or read book Despite the System written by Clinton Heylin and published by Chicago Review Press. This book was released on 2006-06 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Revealing the facts rather than the myths behind Orson Welles's Hollywood career, this groundbreaking history fills in the gaps behind the drama of one of the most well-known American filmmakers.
Download or read book Playing the Percentages written by Derek Long and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2024-04-16 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "In the early 1910s through the 1930s, as developing studios embodied the cinema landscape, distribution played a significant role in defining the structure of the American film industry. Playing the Percentages addresses the material history of distribution from the early days of short films to the sound features that dominated the silver screen. While many histories of this time period account for the ascent of the studio system and the Golden Age of film, there is a tendency to encourage a teleological view of an oligopolistic studio system as inevitable. Studying the material history of distribution in the growth of Hollywood, Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the unforeseen result of multiple battling distribution practices. He argues that distribution, with roots in other methods of media production, was a complex and diverse system of ever-shifting wrangling between distributors and exhibitors that allowed for, but did not determine, the domination of the studio system"--
Download or read book The Hollywood Studio System written by Douglas Gomery and published by . This book was released on 1986 with total page 213 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Hollywood and the Culture Elite written by Peter Decherney and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
Download or read book The Hollywood Studios written by Ethan Mordden and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-01-02 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood in the years between 1929 and 1948 was a town of moviemaking empires. The great studios were estates of talent: sprawling, dense, diverse. It was the Golden Age of the Movies, and each studio made its distinctive contribution. But how did the studios, "growing up" in the same time and place, develop so differently? What combinations of talents and temperaments gave them their signature styles? These are the questions Ethan Mordden answers, with breezy erudition and irrepressible enthusiasm, in this fascinating and wonderfully readable book. Mordden illuminates how the style of each studio was primarily dictated by the personality, philosophy, and attitudes of its presiding mogul—and how all these factors affected the work and careers of individual actors, directors, writers, and technicians, and the success of the studio in general.
Download or read book Hollywood East written by Diana Altman and published by . This book was released on 2010-08 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How did the business of movies grow? Who were the people who made it grow? What innovative twists did mobsters Al Capone and Willie Bioff add? Hollywood East tells the story of how the movies evolved as a business-a business controlled from the Eastern seaboard. As Diana Altman notes, "Hollywood was a pretty face but New York was the heart and lungs." Most film historians concentrate on the Hollywood studios and treat the New York side as an unimportant annoyance to the creative geniuses of Hollywood. In fact, New York ran the whole show, and the geniuses were merely employees as far as New York was concerned. Many of the elements of film art and technology were developed in the East. The screen test was an eastern innovation. James Stewart, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, and many other unknown actors who became stars got their start in the Fifty-fourth Street Manhattan studio where MGM screen tests were shot. Hollywood East is the story of Louis B. Mayer from his days as a theater owner in New England through his tenure as studio head at MGM, through his dismissal from the company bearing his name. It is the story of William Fox, the avaricious founder of Fox News (1919), the mightiest newsreel company, and Fox Film which eventually merged with Twentieth Century. At one time Fox sought to control the entire film industry and had a net worth of $100 million. Sent to prison for bribery, he sank into such obscurity that the New York Times referred to him as "the late William Fox" while he was still alive. It is the story of Marcus Loew, the benevolent ruler of the country's largest theater chain. It is the story of Adolph Zukor, Samuel Goldwyn, Cecil B. DeMille, and other pioneers. It's all here: how the stars emerged, how the public relations mills did their jobs, how the moguls put aside their rivalries when they were threatened by adverse publicity. Many of the photographs in the book are from the one-of-a-kind collection of the author's father.
Download or read book Hollywood Genres written by Thomas Schatz and published by Philadelphia : Temple University Press. This book was released on 1981 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Schatz analyzes the studio system and tells what film genres mean in a general and theoretical way. Describing some important movie genres in Hollywood's "Golden Era", -- the Western, the gangster film, detective movies, screwball comedies, the musical and the family melodrama -- he surveys selected films and the work of directors associated with them.
