The Hollywood Brand

The Hollywood Brand traces the development of the moving picture from its humble roots as an object of mass amusement to its transformation into an art form worthy of exhibition in museums and academic study in leading universities. This book provides historical context to the ideas that coalesce to create the iconic Hollywood brand that comes to define American identity.

From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in particular, Warner Bros., Brand Hollywood provides the first sustained examination of the will-to-brand in the contemporary movie business. Outlining changes in the marketing and media environment during the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Grainge explores how the logic of branding has propelled specific kinds of approach to the status and selling of film. Analyzing the practice of branding, the poetics of corporate logos, and the industrial politics surrounding the development of branded texts, properties and spaces - including franchises ranging from Looney Tunes to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to The Matrix - Grainge considers the relation of branding to the emergent principle of ‘total entertainment’. Employing an interdisciplinary method drawn from film studies, cultural studies and advertising and media studies, Brand Hollywood demonstrates the complexities of selling entertainment in the global media moment, providing a fresh and engaging perspective on branding’s significance for commercial film and the industrial culture from which it is produced.

Introduction: Modernity under the Hollywood sign -- What's in a name? exhibition and expectation -- Movies with a mission: populism and patriotism -- A home among the moderns: film becomes an art -- Hurray for Hollywood: entertainment as art -- A new art for the American century: Hollywood enters the museum -- Conclusion: The future for the Hollywood brand

From the growth in merchandising and product placement to the rise of the movie franchise, branding has become central to the modern blockbuster economy. In a wide-ranging analysis focusing on companies such as Disney, Dolby, Paramount, New Line and, in particular, Warner Bros., Brand Hollywood provides the first sustained examination of the will-to-brand in the contemporary movie business. Outlining changes in the marketing and media environment during the 1990s and 2000s, Paul Grainge explores how the logic of branding has propelled specific kinds of approach to the status and selling of film. Analyzing the practice of branding, the poetics of corporate logos, and the industrial politics surrounding the development of branded texts, properties and spaces - including franchises ranging from Looney Tunes to Lord of the Rings and Harry Potter to The Matrix - Grainge considers the relation of branding to the emergent principle of ‘total entertainment’. Employing an interdisciplinary method drawn from film studies, cultural studies and advertising and media studies, Brand Hollywood demonstrates the complexities of selling entertainment in the global media moment, providing a fresh and engaging perspective on branding’s significance for commercial film and the industrial culture from which it is produced.

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.

This book is an investigation of the cultural phenomenon of branding and its transformational effects on the contemporary spatial – and urban – reality. It develops a novel understanding of the rationale behind the construction of large-scale architectural complexes that relate to corporate brands, and of its tremendous cultural effects. The author suggests that what we see today is the creation of "global mass ornaments", of a thorough ornamentalization of the entire globe. The origins of this are discussed with regard to examples of corporate brand-building from Europe and China (Autostadt Wolfsburg, BMW Welt Munich and Anting New Town). Additional cases are several simulated spaces in Berlin and the space-branding activities of companies like Apple or Prada. Theoretically, the author develops an innovative poststructuralist framework, combining ideas from Gilles Deleuze with the space philosophy of Peter Sloterdijk. He analyzes how the corporate redefinition of space makes the city enter into a mode of virtual urbanity. This idea leads to a notion of a "global urban" and, ultimately, the "global mass ornament". This concept of a global mass ornament is developed here with reference to Sloterdijk’s concept of a world of "spheres". The latter is used to understand the new mode of spatiality of mediatized spaces. The book makes the point that our world is involved in a process of mass ornamentalization that has only just begun. The concept of the global mass ornament is the first to come to grips with a culture in which branding is effectively changing the physiognomy of the earth. The global mass ornament is a banner for a cultural transformation that employs architecture, sign theory and mechanisms borrowed from traditional advertising and from social media, as well as social processes – and that we have yet to properly understand. This book is a significant step forward in this respect.

"In a race to capture new audiences, Hollywood moguls began courting Chinese investors to create branded entertainment on an international scale--from behemoth theme parks to blockbuster films--after China's 2001 World Trade Organization entry. Hollywood Made in China examines this compelling dynamic, where the distinctions between Hollywood's "Dream Factory" and the "Chinese Dream" of global influence become increasingly blurred. What is revealed illuminates how China's influence is transforming the global media industries from the inside out"--Provided by publisher.

The story behind the massive white block letters set into a steep Los Angeles hillside—and the city and culture they represent: “Terrific.”—San Francisco Chronicle To so many who see its image, the Hollywood sign represents the earthly home of that otherwise ethereal world of fame, stardom, celebrity—the American and worldwide aspiration to be in the limelight, to be, like the Hollywood sign itself, instantly recognizable. How an advertisement erected in 1923, touting the real estate development Hollywoodland, took on a life of its own is a story worthy of a movie itself. Leo Braudy traces the remarkable life of this distinctly American landmark, which has been saved over the years by a various fans and supporters, among them Alice Cooper and Hugh Hefner, who spearheaded its reconstruction in the 1970s. He also uses the sign’s history to offer an intriguing look at the rise of the film business from its earliest, silent days through the development of the studio system that helped define modern Hollywood. Mixing social history, urban studies, literature, and film, along with forays into such topics as the lure of Hollywood for utopian communities and the development of domestic architecture in Los Angeles, The Hollywood Sign is a fascinating account of how a temporary structure has become a permanent icon of American culture. “An entertaining tale.”—The Washington Post