Davis's path-breaking study relating film-making to broader social issues explains in part why the world tolerated South Africa's apartheid and racial brutality for so long.

Hollywood and Africa - recycling the Dark Continent myth from 19082020 is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the colonial mastertext of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the terms development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of HollywoodAfrica film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave HollywoodAfrica phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate and even critique these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywoods whitewashing of African history.

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films—a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema—but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era—what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.

Taylor exposes the concept of 'art' as a tool of ethnocentricity and radical ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin.

Hollywood, Interrupted is a sometimes frightening, occasionally sad, and frequently hysterical odyssey into the darkest realms of showbiz pathology, the endless stream of meltdowns and flameouts, and the inexplicable behavior on the part of show business personalities. Charting celebrities from rehab to retox, to jails, cults, institutions, near-death experiences and the Democratic Party, Hollywood, Interrupted takes readers on a surreal field trip into the amoral belly of the entertainment industry. Each chapter — covering topics including warped Hollywood child-rearing, bad medicine, hypocritical political maneuvering and the complicit media — delivers a meticulously researched, interview-infused, attitude heavy dispatch which analyzes and deconstructs the myths created by the celebrities themselves. Celebrities somehow believe that it's their god-given right to inflict their pathology on the rest of us. Hollywood, Interrupted illustrates how these dysfunctional dilettantes are mad as hell... And we're not going to take it any more.

The illustrated history of the sex, excess, murder, suicide, ambition, betrayal, and compromise behind the silver screen. It is now over 100 years since Hollywood became the center of American cinema and, while it has always presented itself as a place of glamour and home to the beautiful and talented, from its very creation there was a darker side to Tinseltown. Filmmakers didn't just move to southern California for its sunny weather, they went west to evade the patent laws restricting the use of movie cameras. From its earliest days, Hollywood, the home of fantasy, created a hothouse of excess--too much money, too much adulation, too much expectation, and too much ego. But while stars have always been indulged, once their moment in the limelight has passed, their fall can be cruel. The History of Hollywood covers it all, from the setting up of the studios by the movie moguls to the corporations that run them today, from drug addictions to McCarthy-era witch-hunts to #metoo. Intensively researched and superbly entertaining, the book reveals that the stories behind the silver screen are at least as gripping as many of those on it.