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Aggressive product placement and retail tie-ins are as much a part of moviemaking today as high-concept scripts and computer-generated special effects, but this phenomenon is hardly recent. Since the silent era, Hollywood studios have proved remarkably adept at advertising both their own products and a bewildering variety of consumer commodities, successfully promoting the idea of consumption itself. Hollywood Goes Shopping brings together leading film studies scholars to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between American cinema and consumer culture, providing an innovative reading of both film history and the evolution of consumerism in the twentieth century.
Aggressive product placement and retail tie-ins are as much a part of moviemaking today as high-concept scripts and computer-generated special effects, but this phenomenon is hardly recent. Since the silent era, Hollywood studios have proved remarkably adept at advertising both their own products and a bewildering variety of consumer commodities, successfully promoting the idea of consumption itself. Hollywood Goes Shopping brings together leading film studies scholars to explore the complex and sometimes contradictory relationship between American cinema and consumer culture, providing an innovative reading of both film history and the evolution of consumerism in the twentieth century.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2009 When Broadway Was the Runway explores the central and largely unacknowledged role of commercial Broadway theater in the birth of modern American fashion and consumer culture. Long before Hollywood's red carpet spectacles, Broadway theater introduced American women to the latest styles. At the beginning of the twentieth century, theater impresarios captured the imagination of their largely female patrons by transforming the stage into a glorious site of consumer spectacle. Theater historian Marlis Schweitzer examines how these impresarios presented the dresses actresses wore onstage, as well as the jewelry and hairstyles they chose, as commodities that were available for purchase in nearby department stores and salons. The Merry Widow Hat, designed for the hit operetta of the same name, sparked an international craze, and the dancer Irene Castle became a fashion celebrity when she anticipated the flapper look of the 1920s by nearly a decade. Not only were the latest styles onstage, but advertisements appeared throughout theaters, in programs, and on the curtains, while magazines such as Vogue vied for the rights to publish theatrical costume sketches and Harper's Bazar enticed readers with photo spreads of actresses in couture. This combination of spectatorship and consumption was a crucial step in the formation of a mass market for consumer goods and the rise of the cult of celebrity. Through historical analysis and dozens of early photographs and illustrations, Schweitzer aims a spotlight at the cultural and economic convergence of the theater and fashion industries in the United States.
Adopting and developing a ‘cultural politics’ approach, this comprehensive study explores how Hollywood movies generate and reflect political myths about social and personal life that profoundly influence how we understand power relations. Instead of looking at genre, it employs three broad categories of film. ‘Security’ films present ideas concerning public order and disorder, citizen–state relations and the politics of fear. ‘Relationalities’ films highlight personal and intimate politics, bringing norms about identities, gender and sexuality into focus. In ‘socially critical’ films, particular issues and ideas are endowed with more overtly political significance. The book considers these categories as global political technologies implicated in hegemonic and ‘soft power’ relations whose reach is both deep and broad.
This collection of original essays interrogates disciplinary boundaries in fashion, gathering fashion studies research across disciplines and from around the globe. Fashion and clothing are part of material and visual culture, cultural memory, and heritage; they contribute to shaping the way people see themselves, interact, and consume. For each of the volume’s eight parts, scholars from across the world and a variety of disciplines offer analytical tools for further research. Never neglecting the interconnectedness of disciplines and domains, these original contributions survey specific topics and critically discuss the leading views in their areas. They include discursive and reflective pieces, as well as discussions of original empirical work, and contributors include established leaders in the field, rising stars, and new voices, including practioner and industry voices. This is a comprehensive overview of the field, ideal not only for undergraduate and postgraduate fashion studies students, but also for researchers and students in communication studies, the humanities, gender and critical race studies, social sciences, and fashion design and business.
In the twentieth century, glamour has often been associated with the cinema and its stars, though fashion, 'high society', popular music, shopping, glossy magazines and advertising have all sought to harness its allure. The authors explore the origins and uses of the aura of glamour and trace its history and power as a language of visual seduction.
The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, is a staple of Hollywood film production harking back to the silent era and extending to the present day. What gives backstudios their coherence as a distinctive genre, Steven Cohan argues in Hollywood by Hollywood, is their fascination with the mystique of Hollywood as a geographic place, a self-contained industry, and a fantasy of fame, leisure, sexual freedom, and modernity. Yet by the same token, if backstudio pictures have rarely achieved blockbuster box-office success, what accounts for the film industry's interest in continuing to produce them? The backstudio picture has been an enduring genre because, aside from offering a director or writer a chance to settle old scores, in branding filmmaking with the Hollywood mystique, the genre solicits consumers' strong investment in the movies. Whether inspiring the "movie crazy" fan girls of the early teens and twenties or the wannabe filmmakers of this century heading to the West Coast after their college graduations, backstudios have given emotional weight and cultural heft to filmmaking as the quintessential American success story. But more than that, a backstudio picture is concerned with shaping perceptions of how the film industry works, with masking how its product depends upon an industrial labor force, including stardom, and with determining how that work's value accrues from the Hollywood brand stamped onto the product. Cohan supports his well theorized and well researched claims with nuanced discussions of over fifty backstudios, some canonical and well-known, and others obscure and rarely seen. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, Hollywood by Hollywood offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.
From its beginnings, Disneyland was destined to be something entirely different from the standard mid-century amusement park. To sell his dream park to investors and the public, Walt Disney recruited Hollywood art directors and sketch artists to design the grounds around the mythic settings and high-minded ideals commonly expressed on the silver screen. This book focuses on the initial planning of Disneyland and its first year of operation, a time when Walt personally oversaw every detail of the park's development. Divided into chapters by park zone, it reveals how the five sectors were constructed using illusionistic tricks of stage design. Reaching beyond structure and design, chapters also explore how the sectors--Main Street, U.S.A., Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland and Fantasyland--represented themes found in Disney stories, familiar movie genres and American culture at large.
As the film industry was establishing itself at the start of the twentieth century, trade associations played a pivotal role in the emergence of the studio system. These producer-distributor trade associations were forums for internal and external conflicts, as well as the true sources of influence and power in early Hollywood. In The Hollywood Trust: Trade Associations and the Rise of the Studio System, Kia Afra provides a detailed account of three successive trade organizations from 1915 to 1928. By examining the Motion Picture Board of Trade, the National Association of the Motion Picture Industry (NAMPI), and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), Afra outlines the relationships of power in Hollywood’s early years, asking questions such as: How and why did the studio system come about, and what were the industrial and institutional forces that impacted Hollywood’s development? In order to answer these crucial questions, The Hollywood Trust explores the role played by film industry trade associations in navigating important issues facing the burgeoning studio system, including censorship, public relations, trade practices, government regulation, film distribution, labor conflicts, taxes and tariffs, and exhibitor opposition. A vital look at an under-reported aspect of the studio system, this volume fills a gap in the history of the American film industry. As such The Hollywood Trust will be of particular interest to scholars of film history, as well as those concerned with cultural history and the political economics of entertainment.
In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.