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.

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.

Taboo breakers and trendsetters, shameless hucksters and famous directors. Exploitation filmmaking has seen it all. Fred Olen Ray made his first movie for $298. In 1936 Marijuana-Weed with Roots in Hell showed drug use and nudity on screen in an effort to "educate the public." Kroger Babb, the man behind Mom and Dad, spliced color medical footage of a baby's birth into his black and white "classic." Russ Meyer, John Waters, Andy Milligan, Doris Wishman, and many others are covered. "Classic" films such as The Immoral Mr. Teas, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Nude on the Moon are examined. Production techniques and innovations are also discussed.

The host of the podcast You Must Remember This explores Hollywood’s golden age via the cinematic life of Howard Hughes and the women who encountered him. Howard Hughes’s reputation as a director and producer of films unusually defined by sex dovetails with his image as one of the most prolific womanizers of the twentieth century. The promoter of bombshell actresses such as Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, Hughes supposedly included among his off-screen conquests many of the most famous actresses of the era, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, and Lana Turner. Some of the women in Hughes’s life were or became stars and others would stall out at a variety of points within the Hollywood hierarchy, but all found their professional lives marked by Hughes’s presence. In Seduction, Karina Longworth draws upon her own unparalleled expertise and an unpreceded trove of archival sources, diaries, and documents to produce a landmark—and wonderfully effervescent and gossipy—work of Hollywood history. It’s the story of what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during the industry’s golden age, through the tales of actresses involved with Howard Hughes. This was the era not only of the actresses Hughes sought to dominate, but male stars such as Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Robert Mitchum; directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges; and studio chiefs like Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and David O. Selznick—many of whom were complicit in the bedroom and boardroom exploitation that stifled and disappointed so many of the women who came to Los Angeles with hopes of celluloid triumph. In his films, Howard Hughes commodified male desire more blatantly than any mainstream filmmaker of his time and in turn helped produce an incredibly influential, sexualized image of womanhood that has impacted American culture ever since. As a result, the story of him and the women he encountered is about not only the murkier shades of golden-age Hollywood, but also the ripples that still slither across today’s entertainment industry and our culture in general. Praise for Seduction “Guaranteed to engross anyone with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.” —New York Times Book Review “The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.” —Atlantic “A compelling and relevant must-read.” —Entertainment Weekly

From the 1970s onward, “exploitation cinema” as a concept has circulated inside and outside of East Asian nations and cultures in terms of aesthetics and marketing. However, crucial questions about how global networks of production and circulation alter the identity of an East Asian film as “mainstream” or as “exploitation” have yet to be addressed in a comprehensive way. Exploiting East Asian Cinemas serves as the first authoritative guide to the various ways in which contemporary cinema from and about East Asia has trafficked across the somewhat-elusive line between mainstream and exploitation. Focusing on networks of circulation, distribution, and reception, this collection treats the exploitation cinemas of East Asia as mobile texts produced, consumed, and in many ways re-appropriated across national (and hemispheric) boundaries. As the processes of globalization have decoupled products from their nations of origin, transnational taste cultures have declared certain works as “art” or “trash,” regardless of how those works are received within their native locales. By charting the routes of circulation of notable films from Japan, China, and South Korea, this anthology contributes to transnationally-accepted formulations of what constitutes “East Asian exploitation cinema.”

Among early HollywoodÕs most renowned filmmakers, Lois Weber was considered one of the eraÕs Òthree great mindsÓ alongside D. W. Griffith and Cecil B. DeMille. Despite her accomplishments, Weber has been marginalized in relation to her contemporaries, who have long been recognized as fathers of American cinema. Drawing on a range of materials untapped by previous historians, Shelley Stamp offers the first comprehensive study of WeberÕs remarkable career as director, screenwriter, and actress. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood provides compelling evidence of the extraordinary role that women played in shaping American movie culture. Weber made films on capital punishment, contraception, poverty, and addiction, establishing cinemaÕs power to engage topical issues for popular audiences. Her work grappled with the profound changes in womenÕs lives that unsettled Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century, and her later films include sharp critiques of heterosexual marriage and consumer capitalism. Mentor to many women in the industry, Weber demanded a place at the table in early professional guilds, decrying the limited roles available for women on-screen and in the 1920s protesting the growing climate of hostility toward female directors. Stamp demonstrates how female filmmakers who had played a part in early HollywoodÕs bid for respectability were in the end written out of that industryÕs history. Lois Weber in Early Hollywood is an essential addition to histories of silent cinema, early filmmaking in Los Angeles, and womenÕs contributions to American culture.

In Trans Exploits Jian Neo Chen explores the cultural practices created by trans and gender-nonconforming artists and activists of color. They argue for a radical rethinking of the policies and technologies of racial gendering and assimilative social programming that have divided LGBT communities and communities of color along the lines of gender, sexuality, class, immigration status, and ability. Focusing on performance, film/video, literature, digital media, and other forms of cultural expression and activism that track the displaced emergences of trans people of color, Chen highlights the complex and varied responses by trans communities to their social dispossession. Through these responses, trans of color cultural workers such as performance artist Yozmit, writer Janet Mock, and organizer Jennicet Gutiérrez challenge dominating perceptions and institutions that kill, confine, police, and discipline trans people.