Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry

Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry PDF Author: James Fenwick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000463206
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
This book makes the case for unproduction studies, the study of films left unmade, unseen, or unreleased, as a radical discipline with the potential to uncover a shadow history of the American film industry. Exploring the archival methods that can be utilised in this endeavour, James Fenwick argues that a revisionist history is needed to understand the logic of the film industry, finding that it has long-been predicated on a system of unmade creativity in which finances, resources, and labour is invested into projects that production companies know will never be produced or have no intention of ever producing. Using the Production Code Administration (PCA) records, housed at the Margaret Herrick Library, as a case study, the book explores the material existence of the unmade and considers how archives and archival methods can be used to construct a shadow history that recovers the forgotten, marginalised, and overlooked figures in film history, providing explanations for structural forces that contributed to the unmade. Given its unique use of the unmade as an analytic for film history, this book will be an essential read for scholars interested in film and media history, performance studies, film production, and creative practice, as well as to archivists and archival researchers.

Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry

Unproduction Studies and the American Film Industry PDF Author: James Fenwick
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000463206
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 124

Get Book

Book Description
This book makes the case for unproduction studies, the study of films left unmade, unseen, or unreleased, as a radical discipline with the potential to uncover a shadow history of the American film industry. Exploring the archival methods that can be utilised in this endeavour, James Fenwick argues that a revisionist history is needed to understand the logic of the film industry, finding that it has long-been predicated on a system of unmade creativity in which finances, resources, and labour is invested into projects that production companies know will never be produced or have no intention of ever producing. Using the Production Code Administration (PCA) records, housed at the Margaret Herrick Library, as a case study, the book explores the material existence of the unmade and considers how archives and archival methods can be used to construct a shadow history that recovers the forgotten, marginalised, and overlooked figures in film history, providing explanations for structural forces that contributed to the unmade. Given its unique use of the unmade as an analytic for film history, this book will be an essential read for scholars interested in film and media history, performance studies, film production, and creative practice, as well as to archivists and archival researchers.

The American Film Industry

The American Film Industry PDF Author: Tino Balio
Publisher: Univ of Wisconsin Press
ISBN: 0299098737
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 677

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Book Description
Upon its original publication in 1976, The American Film Industry was welcomed by film students, scholars, and fans as the first systematic and unified history of the American movie industry. Now this indispensible anthology has been expanded and revised to include a fresh introductory overview by editor Tino Balio and ten new chapters that explore such topics as the growth of exhibition as big business, the mode of production for feature films, the star as market strategy, and the changing economics and structure of contemporary entertainment companies. The result is a unique collection of essays, more comprehensive and current than ever, that reveals how the American movie industry really worked in a century of constant change-from kinetoscopes and the coming of sound to the star system, 1950s blacklisting, and today's corporate empires.

Looking Past the Screen

Looking Past the Screen PDF Author: Jon Lewis
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390132
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 425

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Book Description
Film scholarship has long been dominated by textual interpretations of specific films. Looking Past the Screen advances a more expansive American film studies in which cinema is understood to be a social, political, and cultural phenomenon extending far beyond the screen. Presenting a model of film studies in which films themselves are only one source of information among many, this volume brings together film histories that draw on primary sources including collections of personal papers, popular and trade journalism, fan magazines, studio publications, and industry records. Focusing on Hollywood cinema from the teens to the 1970s, these case studies show the value of this extraordinary range of historical materials in developing interdisciplinary approaches to film stardom, regulation, reception, and production. The contributors examine State Department negotiations over the content of American films shown abroad; analyze the star image of Clara Smith Hamon, who was notorious for having murdered her lover; and consider film journalists’ understanding of the arrival of auteurist cinema in Hollywood as it was happening during the early 1970s. One contributor chronicles the development of film studies as a scholarly discipline; another offers a sociopolitical interpretation of the origins of film noir. Still another brings to light Depression-era film reviews and Production Code memos so sophisticated in their readings of representations of sexuality that they undermine the perception that queer interpretations of film are a recent development. Looking Past the Screen suggests methods of historical research, and it encourages further thought about the modes of inquiry that structure the discipline of film studies. Contributors. Mark Lynn Anderson, Janet Bergstrom, Richard deCordova, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Sumiko Higashi, Jon Lewis, David M. Lugowski, Dana Polan, Eric Schaefer, Andrea Slane, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp

The American Movie Industry

The American Movie Industry PDF Author: Gorham Anders Kindem
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780809310371
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
These seventeen essays make up a history of the American film industry. Because film-making entails a special blend of economic and artistic endeavor, Kindem has chosen contributions from experts in a variety of fields—business, law, mass communications, and cinema studies. The organization of this anthology is both chronological and topical. The first three parts of the book basically follow the history of the film industry’s marketing strategies, structural changes, and product innovations: from exhibition in Kinetoscope arcades to film “acts” in vaudeville, Nickelodeons, and movie palaces; from states’ rights marketing schemes to block booking and chain-store exhibition strategies; from a production and distribution monopoly based on the pooling of major patents to an oligopoly of produc­tion, distribution, and exhibition firms; and from the rise of feature films, the star system, and the studio system to Hollywood’s con­versions to sound and color. The fourth through sixth parts examine film regulation and censorship, film’s inter­action with television, and America’s role in the international film industry. The diversity of methods and perspectives in this anthol­ogy are representative of the field, suggesting that the history of the American film indus­try is really a collection of histories, not a monolithic, single-strand chronology of events.

Runaway Hollywood

Runaway Hollywood PDF Author: Daniel Steinhart
Publisher: University of California Press
ISBN: 0520298640
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 298

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Book Description
After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon “runaway” production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry’s creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.

The Movie Business

The Movie Business PDF Author: A. William Bluem
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description


American Independent Cinema

American Independent Cinema PDF Author: Yannis Tzioumakis
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474416853
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A comparative analysis of key Islamic ity platforms and their debates

American Independent Cinema

American Independent Cinema PDF Author: Yannis Tzioumakis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Independent filmmakers
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
From the prestige films of Cagney Productions to recent, ultra-low budget cult hits, such as Clerks and The Blair Witch Project, American independent cinema has produced some of the most distinctive films ever made. This comprehensive introduction draws on key films, filmmakers, and film companies from the early twentieth century to the present to examine the factors that shaped this vital and evolving mode of filmmaking. Specifically, it explores the complex and dynamic relations between independent and mainstream Hollywood cinema, showing how institutional, industrial, and economic changes in the latter have shaped and informed the former. Ordered chronologically, the book begins with Independent Filmmaking in the Studio Era (examining both top-rank and low-end film production), moves to the 1950s and 1960s (discussing both the adoption of independent filmmaking as the main method of production as well as exploitation filmmaking), and finishes with contemporary American independent cinema (exploring areas such as the New Hollywood, the rise of mini-major and major independent companies and the institutionalization of independent cinema in the 1990s). Each chapter includes case studies which focus on specific films, filmmakers, and production and distribution companies.

Hollywood Outsiders

Hollywood Outsiders PDF Author: Anne Morey
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 9780816637324
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
An innovative approach to the relationship between filmmaking and society during Hollywood's golden age. The 1910s and 1920s witnessed the inception of a particular brand of negotiation between filmdom and its public in the United States. Hollywood, its proponents, and its critics sought to establish new connections between audience and industry, suggesting means by which Hollywood outsiders could become insiders. Hollywood Outsiders looks at how four disparate entities--the Palmer Photoplay correspondence school of screenwriting, juvenile series fiction about youngsters involved in the film industry, film appreciation and character education programs for high school students, and Catholic and Protestant efforts to use and influence filmmaking--conceived of these connections, and thus of the relationship of Hollywood to the individual and society. Anne Morey's exploration of the diverse discourses generated by these different conjunctions leads to a fresh and compelling interpretation of Hollywood's place in American cultural history. In its analysis of how four distinct groups, each addressing constituencies of various ages and degrees of social authority, defined their interest in the film industry, Hollywood Outsiders combines concrete discussions of cultural politics with a broader argument about how outsiders viewed the film industry as a vehicle of self-validation and of democratic ideals.

Hollywood on Location

Hollywood on Location PDF Author: Joshua Gleich
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813586275
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
Location shooting has always been a vital counterpart to soundstage production, and at times, the primary form of Hollywood filmmaking. But until now, the industrial and artistic development of this production practice has been scattered across the margins of larger American film histories. Hollywood on Location is the first comprehensive history of location shooting in the American film industry, showing how this mode of filmmaking changed Hollywood business practices, production strategies, and visual style from the silent era to the present. The contributors explore how location filmmaking supplemented and later, supplanted production on the studio lots. Drawing on archival research and in-depth case studies, the seven contributors show how location shooting expanded the geography of American film production, from city streets and rural landscapes to far-flung territories overseas, invoking a new set of creative, financial, technical, and logistical challenges. Whereas studio filmmaking sought to recreate nature, location shooting sought to master it, finding new production values and production economies that reshaped Hollywood’s modus operandi.