Global Hollywood 2

Substantially revised and updated, this book highlights how Hollywood has transformed itself to attain ever global clout and reach and the material factors underlining Hollywood's apparent artistic success. Takes into consideration recent events affecting Hollywood such as 9/11, US foreign policy and developments in consumer technology.

This extensively revised edition of an best-selling text provides a compelling exploration of Hollywood's global business practices

Substantially revised and updated, this book highlights how Hollywood has transformed itself to attain ever global clout and reach and the material factors underlining Hollywood's apparent artistic success. Takes into consideration recent events affecting Hollywood such as 9/11, US foreign policy and developments in consumer technology.

This work explores the global-local interplay through the case study of the People's Republic of China's encounter with global Hollywood from the mid-1990s to 2013. It analyzes the changing role of the Chinese state and its evolving cultural policy; investigates the intertwined relationships among the Chinese state, global capital, and local dynamics; and examines the impact of this encounter on the Chinese film sector's radical transformation from a Soviet-style planned economy and state ownership model to a market-oriented cultural industry.

The little-explored story of how politics, propaganda, and profits were combined to create the drama, imagery and fantasy that was American film during World War II. 32 black-and-white photographs.

In Hollywood, the goals of art and business are entangled. Directors, writers, actors, and idealistic producers aspire to make the best films possible. These aspirations often interact with the dominant firms that control Hollywood film distribution. This control of distribution is crucial as it enables the firms and other large businesses involved, such as banks that offer financing, to effectively stand between film production and the market. This book analyses the power structure of the Hollywood film business and its general modes of behaviour. More specifically, the work analyses how the largest Hollywood firms attempt to control social creativity such that they can mitigate the financial risks inherent in the art of filmmaking. Controlling the ways people make or watch films, the book argues, is a key element of Hollywood’s capitalist power. Capitalist power—the ability to control, modify, and, sometimes, limit social creation through the rights of ownership—is the foundation of capital accumulation. For the Hollywood film business, capitalist power is about the ability of business concerns to set the terms that will shape the future of cinema. For the major film distributors of Hollywood, these terms include the types of films that will be distributed, the number of films that will be distributed, and the cinematic alternatives that will be made available to the individual moviegoer. Combining theoretical analysis with detailed empirical research on the financial performance of the major Hollywood film companies, the book details how Hollywood’s capitalist goals have clashed with the aesthetic potentials of cinema and ultimately stymied creativity in the pursuit of limiting risk. This sharp critique of the Hollywood machine provides vital reading for students and scholars of political economy, political theory, film studies, and cinema.

Transcultural Images in Hollywood Cinema discusses how cinema, particularly Hollywood, impacts the cultural identities we construct for ourselves in order to make sense of who we are in the world. The politics of representation in cinema influence the boundaries of ethnic and racial characteristics and invent cultural and symbolic meanings that create a conventional image throughout the world. The transnational perspective, dissolves, fragments, and decentralizes this image, leaving the nationalist understanding of identity to a hybrid form. Cultures and identities that are expanded across borders form a mosaic by combining their local characteristics with those of the host cultures. This book examines the transnational and transcultural characteristics of Hollywood cinema. The narrative, cinematographic, and aesthetic structures of Hollywood cinema are turned upside down as chapters analyze gender, social, cultural, and economic-political contexts. Scholars of international communication, film, and social sciences will find this book particularly interesting.

The Hollywood family film is one of the most popular, commercially-successful and culturally significant forms of mass entertainment. This book is the first in-depth history of the Hollywood family film, tracing its development from its beginnings in the 1930s to its global box-office dominance today. Noel Brown shows how, far from being an innocuous amusement for children, the family film has always been intended for audiences of all ages and backgrounds. He tells the story of how Hollywood's ongoing preoccupation with breaking down the barriers that divide audiences has resulted in some of the most successful and enduring films in the history of popular cinema. Drawing on multiple sources and with close analysis of a broad range of films, from such classics as Little Women, Meet me in St Louis, King Kong and Mary Poppins to such modern family blockbusters as Star Wars, Indiana Jones and Toy Story, this timely book underlines the immense cultural and commercial importance of this neglected genre.