Hollywood in Crisis is a detailed study of the workings of the American film industry during the 1930s. Colin Schindler, looking at Hollywood as an agent of Roosevelt's New Deal and the attempts made by film moguls and movie makers to withstand the political turmoil that threatened to engulf America. Schindler illustrates how the studios and their products, from the glamour of MGM stars and escapist musicals to gangster movies and Westerns, even to the 'radical' films of the Warner studios, helped foster ideas of social unity and patriotism.

This book discusses the collapse and transformation of the Hollywood movie machine in the twenty-first century, and the concomitant social collapse being felt in nearly every aspect of society. Wheeler Winston Dixon examines key works in cinema from the era of late-stage capitalists, analyzing Hollywood films and the current wave of cinema developed outside of the Hollywood system alike. Dixon illustrates how movies and television programs across these spaces have adopted, reflected, and generated a society in crisis, and with it, a crisis for the cinematic industry itself.

Using the media's coverage of the death of Princess Diana as a departing point, Wheeler Dixon presents a sharply critical assessment of the current state of movies--from the cult of celebrity, to the nature of public surveillance, to the role of print and television media in shaping our shared consciousness--unveiling our fascination with disaster. Dixon argues that movies such as James Cameron's Titanic replay the same Hollywood disaster plotlines with greater wizardry and less humanity than the films of fifty years ago. Contemporary cinema has become simply a memory of itself. Dixon draws on the effects of new technologies, the role of the "star" system, and the development of media conglomerates to explain why Hollywood has become so repetitive. Looking at a wide range of film genres, from obscure horror to blockbuster disaster movies, Dixon weaves together the elements that entice and manipulate audience expectations and emotions. Throughout the book, he examines the role of televisual media (cable, video, instant print magazines, digitally stored photos) in capturing the public's attention, and how these media could instead be used to open movie audiences to new stories and experiences.With its broad scope and frank tone, Disaster and Memory offers a refreshing and controversial perspective on the past, present, and future of Hollywood.

White Masculinity in Crisis in Hollywood’s Fin de Millennium Cinema claims that Hollywood cinema had a significant relationship with the millennial crisis of masculinity. From Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) and American Psycho (Harron, 2000), to Office Space (Judge, 1999), The Matrix (Wachowski’s, 1999) and American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), Pete Deakin attests that alongside the emergent “crisis” came a definitive body of some twenty-five Hollywood “crisis” titles; each film with a representational concern for the apparent “masculine malaise”. Asking whether Hollywood helped create, propel or sooth the very notion of the crisis-of-masculinity at this time, Deakin engages with some important cultural questions: how discursive—or even authentic—was it, and more vitally, whose actual crisis was this? To this end, scholars of film studies, media studies, gender studies, history, and sociology will find this book particularly useful.

This book provides an interdisciplinary and collaborative anthology that seeks to make a compelling and exciting analysis of contemporary Hollywood film texts (and the larger industry and society to which they are dialectically related) in light of Giroux's ideas about public pedagogy. Foreword by Lawrence Grossberg.

Examines how Hollywood responded to and reflected the political and social changes that America experienced during the 1930sIn the popular imagination, 1930s Hollywood was a dream factory producing escapist movies to distract the American people from the greatest economic crisis in their nations history. But while many films of the period conform to this stereotype, there were a significant number that promoted a message, either explicitly or implicitly, in support of the political, social and economic change broadly associated with President Franklin D. Roosevelts New Deal programme. At the same time, Hollywood was in the forefront of challenging traditional gender roles, both in terms of movie representations of women and the role of women within the studio system. With case studies of actors like Shirley Temple, Cary Grant and Fred Astaire, as well as a selection of films that reflect politics and society in the Depression decade, this fascinating book examines how the challenges of the Great Depression impacted on Hollywood and how it responded to them.Topics covered include:How Hollywood offered positive representations of working womenCongressional investigations of big-studio monopolization over movie distributionHow three different types of musical genres related in different ways to the Great Depression the Warner Bros Great Depression Musicals of 1933, the Astaire/Rogers movies, and the MGM akids musicals of the late 1930sThe problems of independent production exemplified in King Vidors Our Daily BreadCary Grants success in developing a debonair screen persona amid Depression conditionsContributors Harvey G. Cohen, King's College LondonPhilip John Davies, British LibraryDavid Eldridge, University of HullPeter William Evans, Queen Mary, University of LondonMark Glancy, Queen Mary University of LondonIna Rae Hark, University of South CarolinaIwan Morgan, University College LondonBrian Neve, University of BathIan Scott, University of ManchesterAnna Siomopoulos, Bentley UniversityJ. E. Smyth, University of WarwickMelvyn Stokes, University College LondonMark Wheeler, London Metropolitan University

By March 2020, the spread of COVID-19 had reached pandemic proportions, forcing widespread shutdowns across industries, including Hollywood. Studios, networks, production companies, and the thousands of workers who make film and television possible were forced to adjust their time-honored business and labor practices. In this book, Kate Fortmueller asks what happened when the coronavirus closed Hollywood. Hollywood Shutdown examines how the COVID-19 pandemic affected film and television production, influenced trends in distribution, reshaped theatrical exhibition, and altered labor practices. From January movie theater closures in China to the bumpy September release of Mulan on the Disney+ streaming platform, Fortmueller probes various choices made by studios, networks, unions and guilds, distributors, and exhibitors during the evolving crisis. In seeking to explain what happened in the first nine months of 2020, this book also considers how the pandemic will transform Hollywood practices in the twenty-first century.