Hollywood's High Noon: Moviemaking & Society Before Television (The American Moment Series) - Hardcover

Cripps, Professor Thomas

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080185315X ISBN 13: 9780801853159

Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996

Synopsis

Over the last twenty-five years, the field of cinema studies has offered a dramatic reassessment of the history of film in general and of Hollywood in particular. Writers have drawn on the methodologies of a number of disciplines--literary criticism, sociology, psychology, women's studies, and minority and gay studies--to deepen our understanding of motion pictures, the film industry, and movie theater audiences.

In Hollywood's High Noon, noted film historian Thomas Cripps offers a lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age that brings the insights of recent scholarship to students and general readers. From its origin during the First World War to the beginning of its decline in the 1950s, Cripps writes, Hollywood operated as did other American industries: movies were created by a rational production system, regulated by both government and privately organized interests, and subject to the whims of a fickle marketplace. Yet these films did offer consumers something unique: in darkened movie palaces across the country,audiences projected themselves--their hopes and ideas -- onto silver screens, profoundly mediating their reception of Hollywood's flickering images.

Beginning with turn-of-the-century moving-picture pioneer Thomas Edison, Cripps traces the invention of Hollywood and the development of the studio system. He explores the movie-going experience, the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship, the impact of sound on the style and content of films, alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly including "race" films and documentaries, the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures, and Hollywood's self-proclaimed "shining moment" during the Second World War. Cripps concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government anti-trust action.

About this title

Book Description

A lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age.

From the Back Cover

In Hollywood's High Noon, Thomas Cripps brings together both the insight of recent scholarship in the field of film studies and the results of his own extensive research to trace the history of Hollywood from its turn-of-the-century beginning through the invention and development of the studio system to its heyday in the 1950's, just before television eclipsed the movies as America's Dominant entertainment medium.

About this edition

• Publisher: The Johns Hopkins University Press
• Publication date: 1996
• ISBN 10: 080185315X
• ISBN 13: 9780801853159
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200