A unique perspective on half a century of American cinema—from the audience's point of view. Tom Stempel goes beyond the comments of professional reviewers, concentrating on the opinions of ordinary people. He traces shifting trends in genre and taste, examining and questioning the power films have in American society. Stempel blends audience response with his own observations and analyzes box office results that identify the movies people actually went to see, not just those praised by the critics. Avoiding statistical summary, he presents the results of a survey on movies and moviegoing in the respondents' own words—words that surprise, amuse, and irritate. The moviegoers respond: "Big bad plane, big bad motorcycle, and big bad Kelly McGillis."—On Top Gun "All I can recall were the slave girls and the Golden Calf sequence and how it got me excited. My parents must have been very pleased with my enthusiasm for the Bible."—On why a seven-year-old boy stayed up to watch The Ten Commandments "I learned the fine art of seduction by watching Faye Dunaway smolder."—A woman's reaction to seeing Bonnie and Clyde "At age fifteen Jesus said he would be back, he just didn't say what he would look like."—On E.T. "Quasimodo is every seventh grader."—On why The Hunchback of Notre Dame should play well with middle-schoolers "A moronic, very 'Hollywoody' script, and a bunch of dancing teddy bears."—On Return of the Jedi "I couldn't help but think how Mad magazine would lampoon this." —On The Exorcist

Recaptures the lost history of the physical and moral perils that faced audiences at American movie theatres during the first fifty years of the cinema.

During the first fifty years of the American cinema, the act of going to the movies was a risky process, fraught with a number of possible physical and moral dangers. Film fires were rampant, claiming many lives, as were movie theatre robberies, which became particularly common during the Great Depression. Labor disputes provoked a large number of movie theatre bombings, while low-level criminals like murderers, molesters, and prostitutes plied their trades in the darkened auditoriums. That was all in addition to the spread of disease, both real (as in the case of influenza) and imagined (""mo.

No Marketing Blurb

Pairing significant research with primary documents, Moviegoing in America charts the evolution of film exhibition and reception as a function of changing patterns of American community, identity, consumption, and the fabric of everyday life. "Moviegoing in America is an important, groundbreaking book." -- The Moving Image "Waller assembles an impressive collection that should become a key resource in the teaching of film exhibition history." -- Screen

Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartland—the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers. Using a broad range of research sources, essays from scholars including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Terry Lindvall, and Greg Waller examine in detail the social and cultural changes this new form of entertainment brought to towns from Gastonia, North Carolina to Placerville, California, and from Norfolk, Virginia to rural Ontario and beyond. Emphasizing the roles of local exhibitors, neighborhood audiences, regional cultures, and the growing national mass media, their essays chart how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main Streets across America.

Looks at the often secretive process of audience testing Hollywood movies and how it can help shape movies, with first-hand accounts from directors such as Ron Howard, Cameron Crowe, Drew Barrymore and Ed Zwick.