A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate


Book Description

A History of Hollywood’s Outsourcing Debate: Runaway Production provides a critical history of runaway production from its origins in postwar Hollywood to its present uses in describing a global network of diverse television and film production communities. Through extensive archival research, Camille Johnson-Yale chronicles Hollywood’s postwar push for investment in European production markets as a means for supporting the economy of America’s wartime allies while also opening industry access to lucrative trade relationships, exotic locations, and inexpensive skilled labor. For Hollywood’s studio production labor, however, the story of runaway production documents the gradual loss of power over the means of television and motion picture production. Though the phrase has taken on several meanings over its expansive history, it is argued that runaway production has ultimately served as a powerful, metaphorical rallying cry for a labor community coming to terms with a globalizing Hollywood industry that increasingly functions as an exportable process and less as a defined, industrial place.




Work in the Digital Media and Entertainment Industries


Book Description

This book is a first-of-its-kind critical interdisciplinary introduction to the economic, political, cultural, and technological dimensions of work in the rapidly growing digital media and entertainment industries (DMEI). Tanner Mirrlees presents a comprehensive guide to understanding the key contexts, theories, methods, debates, and struggles surrounding work in the DMEI. Packed with current examples and accessible research findings, the book highlights the changing conditions and experiences of work in the DMEI. It surveys the DMEI’s key sectors and occupations and considers the complex intersections between labor and social power relations of class, gender, and race, as well as tensions between creativity and commerce, freedom and control, meritocracy and hierarchy, and precarity and equity, diversity, and inclusivity. Chapters also explore how work in the DMEI is being reshaped by capitalism and corporations, government and policies, management, globalization, platforms, A.I., and worker collectives such as unions and cooperatives. This book is a critical introduction to this growing area of research, teaching, learning, life, labor, and organizing, with an eye to understanding work in the DMEI and changing it, for the better. Offering a broad overview of the field, this textbook is an indispensable resource for instructors, undergraduates, postgraduates, and scholars.




Hollywood or History?


Book Description

The FOX television show The Simpsons has been around for over 30 years, with more than 700 episodes. A satirical, animated comedy, The Simpsons has millions of fans around the world and its numerous characters are instantly recognizable. Two of the main characters, children Bart and Lisa, are in elementary school and their educational experience is satirized frequently, with episodes taking place at Springfield Elementary and featuring their teachers, classmates, and administration—often with biting criticism of curriculum, privatization, and standardized testing, to name a few. The Simpsons also features episodes retelling historical events, where the family experiences different countries and cultures, and participates in the political process. The Simpsons is unique in that the show itself is also a historical source, having been on the air since 1989. Issues that were current in the early 1990s at the height of popularity of The Simpsons are now considered historical, and there is room in classrooms to critically analyze the show with students about whether the show has adapted well to the 2020s, particularly with the show’s use of cultural stereotypes. This edited book offers a collection of classroom-ready tools based on the Hollywood or History? strategy and designed to foster historical inquiry through the careful use of episodes or clips from The Simpsons. This book will be organized by the 10 Themes of Social Studies as outlined by the National Council for the Social Studies (NCSS, 2010). Each of these 10 sections of the book feature two or three lesson plans from the massive catalog of The Simpsons. There is also an 11th section featuring two lesson plans using episodes of The Simpsons that satirize public education more broadly, which can be used by teacher candidates in methods classrooms to examine the realities of the history of public education and current issues that affect the profession.




Hollywood or History?


Book Description

Traumagenic events—episodes that have caused or are likely to cause trauma—color the experiences of K-12 students and the social studies curriculum they encounter in U.S. schools. At the same time that the global COVID-19 pandemic has heightened educators’ awareness of collective trauma, the racial reckoning of 2020 has drawn important attention to historical and transgenerational trauma. At a time when social studies educators can simply no longer ignore “difficult” knowledge, instruction that acknowledges trauma in social studies classrooms is essential. Through employing relational pedagogies and foregrounding voices that are too often silenced, the lessons in Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Acknowledge Trauma in Social Studies engage students in examining the role of traumatic or traumagenic events in social studies curriculum. The 20 Hollywood or History? lessons are organized by themes such as political trauma and war and genocide. Each lesson presents film clips, instructional strategies, and primary and secondary sources targeted to the identified K-12 grade levels. As a collection, they provide ready-to-teach resources that are perfect for teachers who are committed to acknowledging trauma in their social studies instruction.




Hollywood Exiles in Europe


Book Description

Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces like Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films like The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, director). At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American “lost generation” and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material, Hollywood Exiles in Europe suggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema’s changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.




Hollywood or History


Book Description

Teaching and learning through Hollywood, or commercial, film productions is anything but a new approach and has been something of a mainstay in the classroom for nearly a century. Purposeful and effective instruction through film, however, is not problem-free and there are many challenges that accompany classroom applications of Hollywood motion pictures. In response to the problems and possibilities associated with teaching through film, we have collaboratively developed a collection of practical, classroom-ready lesson ideas that might bridge gaps between theory and practice and assist teachers endeavoring to make effective use of film in their classrooms. We believe that film can serve as a powerful tool in the social studies classroom and, where appropriately utilized, foster critical thinking and civic mindedness. The College, Career, and Civic Life (C3) framework, represents a renewed and formalized emphasis on the perennial social studies goals of deep thinking, reading and writing. We believe that as teachers endeavor to digest and implement the platform in schools and classrooms across the country, the desire for access to structured strategies that lead to more active and rigorous investigation in the social studies classroom will grow increasingly acute. Our hope is that this edited book might play a small role in the larger project of supporting practitioners, specifically K-12 teachers of United States history, by offering a collection of classroom-ready tools based on the Hollywood or History? strategy and designed to foster historical inquiry through the careful use of historically themed motion pictures. The book consists of K-5 and 6-12 lesson plans addressing the following historical eras (Adapted from: UCLA, National Center for History in Schools).




Hollywood Made in China


Book Description

"In a race to capture new audiences, Hollywood moguls began courting Chinese investors to create branded entertainment on an international scale--from behemoth theme parks to blockbuster films--after China's 2001 World Trade Organization entry. Hollywood Made in China examines this compelling dynamic, where the distinctions between Hollywood's "Dream Factory" and the "Chinese Dream" of global influence become increasingly blurred. What is revealed illuminates how China's influence is transforming the global media industries from the inside out"--Provided by publisher.




Runaway Hollywood


Book Description

After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon “runaway” production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry’s creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.




The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture


Book Description

Research on popular culture is a dynamic, fast-growing domain. In scholarly terms, it cuts across many areas, including communication studies, sociology, history, American studies, anthropology, literature, journalism, folklore, economics, and media and cultural studies. The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture provides an authoritative, up-to-date, intellectually broad, internationally-aware, and conceptually agile guide to the most important aspects of popular culture scholarship. Specifically, this Companion includes: interdisciplinary models and approaches for analyzing popular culture; wide-ranging case studies; discussions of economic and policy underpinnings; analysis of textual manifestations of popular culture; examinations of political, social, and cultural dynamics; and discussions of emerging issues such as ecological sustainability and labor. Featuring scholarly voices from across six continents, The Routledge Companion to Global Popular Culture presents a nuanced and wide-ranging survey of popular culture research.




Cultural Adaptation


Book Description

Cultural borrowing is exploding across the world. Creative ideas are transferred and modified in ever increasing number and complexity making new products ranging from TV shows to architectural style in new cities. But what do we really know about the spread of creative ideas? This intriguing, engrossing, and comprehensive collection looks at the cultural and commercial dimensions of creative borrowing world wide with an international cast of contributors and case studies from India to Ireland, Canada to China. Cultural Adaptation explores how creative ideas are packaged and nationalised to meet local taste, maps the cultural economy of adaptation in entertainment media ranging from motion pictures to mobile phones, and even probes the role of cultural recipes and formats in mutating participatory experiences of theme parks and sporting spectacles. Written in a lively and accessible manner, the book also provides insight into remaking in lifestyle and consumption cultures including fashion, food, drink, and gambling. Essential for communication, cultural, media, leisure and consumption studies scholars and students alike, this book opens up important new perspectives on how we understand global creativity. This book was published as a special issue of Continuum: Journal of Media and Cultural Studies.