How The World Remade Hollywood

For decades, filmmakers worldwide have been remaking Hollywood movies in colorful ways. They've chronicled a singing and dancing Hannibal Lecter in India, star-crossed lovers aboard the doomed Nigerian ship Titanic, a Japanese expedition to the planet of the apes, and an uncivil war in Turkey between Captain America and a mobbed-up Spider-Man. Most of these films were low budget and many were unauthorized, but all of them were fantastic--and lately have begun to resurface thanks to cherry-picked YouTube clips. But why and how were they made in the first place? This book tells the little-known stories of the wily filmmakers who made an Italian 007 flick by casting Sean Connery's tradesman brother, produced a Turkish space opera by stealing a print of Star Wars for its effects footage, and transported a full-fledged Terminator to the present day--not from a post-apocalyptic future, but from the vibrant mythology of Indonesia. Their stories reveal more than mere imitations; they demonstrate the fascinating ways ideas evolve as they cross borders.

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.

This book describes how notions of Chinese identity, culture, and popular film genres have been reinvented and repackaged by major U.S. studios, spurring a surge in Chinese visibility in Hollywood.

What happens when a film is remade in another national context? How do notions of translation, adaptation and localisation help us understand the cultural dynamics of these shifts, and in what ways does a transnational perspective offer us a deeper understanding of film remaking? Bringing together a range of international scholars, Transnational Film Remakes is the first edited collection to specifically focus on the phenomenon of cross-cultural remakes. Using a variety of case studies, from Hong Kong remakes of Japanese cinema to Bollywood remakes of Australian television, this book provides an analysis of cinematic remaking that moves beyond Hollywood to address the truly global nature of this phenomenon. Looking at iconic contemporary titles such as The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Oldboy, as well as classics like La Bete Humaine and La Chienne, this book interrogates the fluid and dynamic ways in which texts are adapted and reworked across national borders to provide a distinctive new model for understanding these global cultural borrowings.

Originally published in 1994, Homelands, Harlem & Hollywood examines the anti-colonialist struggle against apartheid, and the ways in which American and South African culture have been fascinated with and influenced by one another. Rob Nixon’s wide-ranging analysis looks at Hollywood representations of the struggle for liberation, the impact of the Harlem Renaissance on the Sophiatown writers, the banning and censorship of television under apartheid, Mandela and messianic politics, the sports and cultural boycotts, ethnic nationalism, and the culture of violence. Nixon concludes with an investigation of how the collapse of communism and anti-communism and the rise of ethnic cleansing in Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union had powerful implications for the shape of post-apartheid South Africa.

"Peter Decherney tells the story of Hollywood, from its nineteenth-century origins to the emergence of internet media empires. Using well-known movies, stars, and directors, the book shows that the elements we take to be a natural part of the Hollywood experience--stars, genre-driven storytelling, blockbuster franchises, etc.--are the product of cultural, political, and commercial forces"--

The author analyzes historic film moments alongside historical facts. The result is a highly entertaining book on Hollywood's extravagant relationship with the past, a celebration of the cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind. By the author of the bestselling Flashman novels. 200 photos.

A chronicle of the massive transformation in Hollywood since the turn of the century and the huge changes yet to come, drawing on interviews with key players, as well as documents from the 2014 Sony hack

This title was originally published in 1998. Play It Again, Sam is a timely investigation of a topic that until now has received almost no critical attention in film and cultural studies: the cinematic remake. As cinema enters its second century, more remakes are appearing than ever before, and these writers consider the full range: Hollywood films that have been recycled by Hollywood, such as The Jazz Singer, Cape Fear, and Robin Hood; foreign films including Breathless; and Three Men and a Baby, which Hollywood has reworked for American audiences; and foreign films based on American works, among them Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, which is a "makeover" of Coppola's Godfather films. As these essays demonstrate, films are remade by other films (Alfred Hitchcock went so far as to remake his own The Man Who Knew Too Much) and by other media as well. The editors and contributors draw upon narrative, film, and cultural theories, and consider gender, genre, and psychological issues, presenting the "remake" as a special artistic form of repetition with a difference and as a commercial product aimed at profits in the marketplace. The remake flourishes at the crossroads of the old and the new, the known and the unknown. Play It Again, Sam takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of this hitherto unexplored territory. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

A bracing, indispensable account of America’s epoch-defining involvement in the Great War, rich with fresh insights into the key issues, events, and personalities of the period After years of bitter debate, the United States declared war on Imperial Germany on April 6, 1917, plunging the country into the savage European conflict that would redraw the map of the continent—and the globe. The World Remade is an engrossing chronicle of America’s pivotal, still controversial intervention into World War I, encompassing the tumultuous politics and towering historical figures that defined the era and forged the future. When it declared war, the United States was the youngest of the major powers and militarily the weakest by far. On November 11, 1918, when the fighting stopped, it was not only the richest country on earth but the mightiest. With the mercurial, autocratic President Woodrow Wilson as a primary focus, G. J. Meyer takes readers from the heated deliberations over U.S. involvement, through the provocations and manipulations that drew us into the fight, to the battlefield itself and the shattering aftermath of the struggle. America’s entry into the Great War helped make possible the defeat of Germany that had eluded Britain, France, Russia, and Italy in three and a half years of horrendous carnage. Victory, in turn, led to a peace treaty so ill-conceived, so vindictive, that the world was put on the road to an even bloodier confrontation a mere twenty years later. On the home front, Meyer recounts the break-up of traditional class structures, the rise of the progressive and labor movements, the wave of anti-German hysteria, and the explosive expansion of both the economy and federal power, including shocking suspensions of constitutional protections that planted the seeds of today’s national security state. Here also are revealing portraits of Theodore Roosevelt, Henry Cabot Lodge, Robert La Follette, Eugene Debs, and John J. “Black Jack” Pershing, among others, as well as European leaders such as “Welsh Wizard” David Lloyd George of Britain, “Tiger” Georges Clemenceau of France, and Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany. Meyer interweaves the many strands of his story into a gripping narrative that casts new light on one of the darkest, most forgotten corners of U.S. history. In the grand tradition of his earlier work A World Undone—which centered on the European perspective—The World Remade adds a new, uniquely American dimension to our understanding of the seminal conflict of the twentieth century. Praise for The World Remade “[G. J.] Meyer offers wonderful insights into many of the key players in this arresting saga . . . one that should be read to understand our emergence as a global power.”—Booklist (starred review) “Meyer gives a good sense of America’s future at that negotiating table and Wilson’s celebrated role at Versailles as the leader of the free world. . . . A refreshing look at this still-much-debated world debacle.”—Kirkus Reviews “Characters come alive and the past seems near. . . . Meyer succeeds brilliantly with his basic narrative approach, and any reader who wants to learn about American participation in the war will benefit from this book.”—Publishers Weekly “This book is well written, sharp, and has bearing on our present and future involvement in wars. A+”—Seattle Book Review “This lengthy revisionist history will fit well with American history and governmental studies departments in both public and academic libraries.”—Library Journal