Hooray For Hollywood A Cultural Encyclopedia Of Americas Dream Factory 2 Vols

How has Hollywood - as a place, an industry, a concept, and a myth - affected American culture as a whole? This book addresses this complex question. It presents hundreds of A?Z entries that discuss Hollywood as a place, industry, concept, and myth in American popular culture, within a historical context as well as from the modern perspective of our Internet-enabled, social media-driven society, supplies primary documents that present first-hand accounts of topics related to Hollywood and includes a timeline that highlights key events in Hollywood history.

More than just a place where movies were made, Hollywood in its "golden years" was a highly charged symbolic site in America. It was a focal point for mass desires and expectations and a symbol of cultural decay and crumbling social values. The popular fiction of those decades -- including novels, short stories, essays, autobiographies, fan magazines, and trade journals -- portrayed the town as a place where hope and failure in American life tragically and inevitably collided. By elevating such themes as sin and redemption, success and failure, betrayal and loss, art and commerce, and illusion and reality to the level of cultural argument, this group of fictional works offered a popular literary forum to question fundamental American assumptions and beliefs. John Parris Springer's incisive readings of these "Hollywood fictions" trace the contradictory ways in which Hollywood was represented and analyze the conflicting images it evoked.

2013 Reprint of 1950 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. Powdermaker's study of the Hollywood film industry was an early example of anthropological research on contemporary American society. Her observations of the tensions between business and art in the film world led her to suggest that the social relations of the filmmaking process significantly affect the content and meaning of movies. Chapters include: Chapter 1 - Habitat and People, Mythical and Real Chapter 2 - Mass Production of Dream Chapter 3 - Taboos Chapter 4 - Front Office Chapter 5 -Men Who Play God Chapter 6 - Lesser Gods, but Colossal Chapter 7 -The Scribes Chapter 8 - Assembling the Script Chapter 9 - The Answers Chapter 10 - Directors Chapter 11 - Acting, in Hollywood Chapter 12 - Stars Chapter 13 - Actors are People Chapter 14 - Emerging from Magic Chapter 15 - Hollywood and the U.S.A.

The experience of modernization -- the dizzying social changes that swept millions of people into the capitalist world -- and modernism in art, literature and architecture are brilliantly integrated in this account.

In the years between the world wars, Manhattan's Fourteenth Street-Union Square district became a center for commercial, cultural, and political activities, and hence a sensitive barometer of the dramatic social changes of the period. It was here that four urban realist painters--Kenneth Hayes Miller, Reginald Marsh, Raphael Soyer, and Isabel Bishop--placed their images of modern "new women." Bargain stores, cheap movie theaters, pinball arcades, and radical political organizations were the backdrop for the women shoppers, office and store workers, and consumers of mass culture portrayed by these artists. Ellen Wiley Todd deftly interprets the painters' complex images as they were refracted through the gender ideology of the period. This is a work of skillful interdisciplinary scholarship, combining recent insights from feminist art history, gender studies, and social and cultural theory. Drawing on a range of visual and verbal representations as well as biographical and critical texts, Todd balances the historical context surrounding the painters with nuanced analyses of how each artist's image of womanhood contributed to the continual redefining of the "new woman's" relationships to men, family, work, feminism, and sexuality.

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