DIVCritical biography of Sessue Hayakawa, a Japanese actor who became a popular silent film star in the U.S., that looks at how Hollywood treated issues of race and nationality in the early twentieth century./div

In this one-of-a-kind Hollywood history, the creator of Instagram's celebrated @ThisWasHollywood reveals the forgotten past of the film world in a dazzling visual package modeled on the classic fan magazines of yesteryear. From former screen legends who have faded into obscurity to new revelations about the biggest movie stars, Valderrama unearths the most fascinating little-known tales from the birth of Hollywood through its Golden Age. The shocking fate of the world's first movie star. Clark Gable's secret love child. The film that nearly ended Paul Newman's career. A former child star who, at ninety-three, reveals her #metoo story for the first time. Valderrama unfolds these stories, and many more, in a volume that is by turns riveting, maddening, hilarious, and shocking. Drawing on new interviews, archival research, and an exhaustive library of photographs, This Was Hollywood is a compelling and visually stunning catalogue of the lost history of the movies.

Today, we are so accustomed to consuming the amplified lives of film stars that the origins of the phenomenon may seem inevitable in retrospect. But the conjunction of the terms "movie" and "star" was inconceivable prior to the 1910s. Flickers of Desire explores the emergence of this mass cultural phenomenon, asking how and why a cinema that did not even run screen credits developed so quickly into a venue in which performers became the American film industry's most lucrative mode of product individuation. Contributors chart the rise of American cinema's first galaxy of stars through a variety of archival sources--newspaper columns, popular journals, fan magazines, cartoons, dolls, postcards, scrapbooks, personal letters, limericks, and dances. The iconic status of Charlie Chaplin's little tramp, Mary Pickford's golden curls, Pearl White's daring stunts, or Sessue Hayakawa's expressionless mask reflect the wild diversity of a public's desired ideals, while Theda Bara's seductive turn as the embodiment of feminine evil, George Beban's performance as a sympathetic Italian immigrant, or G. M. Anderson's creation of the heroic cowboy/outlaw character transformed the fantasies that shaped American filmmaking and its vital role in society.

A history of the Japanese American saga, this text details the lives of first and second generation Japanese Americans before World War II with images drawn from interviews, songs, novels and newspaper articles.

As indelible components of the history of the United States, race and racism have permeated nearly all aspects of life: cultural, economic, political, and social. In this first anthology on race in early cinema, fourteen scholars examine the origins, dynamics, and ramifications of racism and Eurocentrism and the resistance to both during the early years of American motion pictures. Any discussion of racial themes and practices in any arena inevitably begins with the definition of race. Is race an innate and biologically determined "essence" or is it a culturally constructed category? Is the question irrelevant? Perhaps race exists as an ever-changing historical and social formation that, regardless of any standard definition, involves exploitation, degradation, and struggle. In his introduction, Daniel Bernardi writes that "early cinema has been a clear partner in the hegemonic struggle over the meaning of race" and that it was steadfastly aligned with a Eurocentric world view at the expense of those who didn't count as white. The contributors to this work tackle these problems and address such subjects as biological determinism, miscegenation, Manifest Destiny, assimilation, and nativism and their impact on early cinema. Analyses of The Birth of a Nation, Romona, Nanook of the North and Madame Butterfly and the directorial styles of D. W. Griffith, Oscar Micheaux, and Edwin Porter are included in the volume.

An in-depth look at the portrayal of Asian characters by non-Asian actors in classical Hollywood film. In the "classical" Hollywood studio era of the 1930s to the 1960s, many iconic Asian roles were filled by non-Asian actors and some—like Fu Manchu or Charlie Chan—are still familiar today. In Hollywood Goes Oriental: CaucAsian Performance in American Film, Karla Rae Fuller tracks specific cosmetic devices, physical gestures, dramatic cues, and narrative conventions to argue that representations of Oriental identity by Caucasian actors in the studio era offer an archetypal standard. Through this standard, Fuller shed light on the artificial foundations of Hollywood's depictions of race and larger issues of ethnicity and performance. Fuller begins by investigating a range of Hollywood productions, including animated images, B films, and blockbusters, to identify the elaborate make-up practices and distinct performance styles that characterize Hollywood's Oriental. In chapter 2, Fuller focuses on the most well known Oriental archetype, the detective, who incorporates both heroic qualities and darker elements into a complex persona. Moving into the World War II era, Fuller examines the Oriental character as political enemy and cultural outsider in chapter 3, drawing a distinction between the "good" Chinese and the "sinister" Japanese character. In chapter 4, she traces a shift back to a seemingly more benign, erotic, and often comedic depiction of Oriental characters after the war. While Hollywood Goes Oriental primarily focuses on representations of Oriental characters by Caucasian actors, Fuller includes examples of performances by non-Caucasian actors as well. She also delves into the origination, connotations, and repercussions of the loaded term "yellowface," which has been appropriated for many causes. Students, scholars of film, and anyone interested in Asian and cultural studies will appreciate this insightful study.