The Hollywood History of the World


Book Description

The author analyzes historic film moments alongside historical facts. The result is a highly entertaining book on Hollywood's extravagant relationship with the past, a celebration of the cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind. By the author of the bestselling Flashman novels. 200 photos.







The World According to Hollywood, 1918-1939


Book Description

The most visible cultural institution on earth between the World Wars, the Hollywood movie industry tried to satisfy worldwide audiences of vastly different cultural, religious, and political persuasions. The World According to Hollywood shows how the industry's self-regulation shaped the content of films to make them salable in as many markets as possible. In the process, Hollywood created an idiosyncratic vision of the world that was glamorous and exotic, but also oddly narrow. Ruth Vasey shows how the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), by implementing such strategies as the industry's Production Code, ensured that domestic and foreign distribution took place with a minimum of censorship or consumer resistance. Drawing upon MPPDA archives, studio records, trade papers, and the records of the U.S. Department of Commerce, Vasey reveals the ways the MPPDA influenced the representation of sex, violence, religion, foreign and domestic politics, corporate capitalism, ethnic minorities, and the conduct of professional classes. Vasey is the first scholar to document fully how the demands of the global market frequently dictated film content and created the movies' homogenized picture of social and racial characteristics, in both urban America and the world beyond. She uncovers telling evidence of scripts and treatments that were abandoned before or during the course of production because of content that might offend foreign markets. Among the fascinating points she discusses is Hollywood's frequent use of imaginary countries as story locales, resulting from a deliberate business policy of avoiding realistic depictions of actual countries. She argues that foreign governments perceived movies not just as articles of trade, but as potential commercial and political emissaries of the United States. Just as Hollywood had to persuade its domestic audiences that its products were morally sound, its domination of world markets depended on its ability to create a culturally and politically acceptable product.




Hollywood or History?


Book Description

The challenges of teaching history are acute where we consider the world history classroom. Generalized world history courses are a part of many, if not most, K-12 curricular frameworks in the United States. While United States history tends to dominate the scholarship and conversation, there are an equally wide number of middle-level and secondary students and teachers engaged in the study of world history in our public schools. And the challenges are real. In the first place, if we are to mark content coverage as a curricular obstacle in the history classroom, generally, then we must underscore that concern in the world history classroom and for obvious reasons. The curricular terrain to choose from is immense and forever expanding, dealing with the development of numerous civilizations over millennia and across a wide geographic expanse. In addition to curricular concerns, world historical topics are inherently farther away from most students’ lives, not just temporally, but often geographically and culturally. Thus the rationale for the present text, Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach World History. The reviews of the first volume Hollywood or History? An Inquiry-Based Strategy for Using Film to Teach Untied States History strategy have been overwhelmingly positive, especially as it pertains to the application of the strategy for practitioner. Classroom utility and teacher practice have remained our primary objectives in developing the Hollywood or History? strategy and we are encouraged by the possibilities of Volume II and the capacity of this most recent text to impact teaching and learning in world history. We believe that students’ connection to film, along with teachers’ ability to use film in an effective manner, will help alleviate some of the challenges of teaching world history. The book provides 30 secondary lesson plans (grades 6-12) that address nine eras in world history.




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).




The Oxford History of World Cinema


Book Description

Featuring nearly three thousand film stills, production shots, and other illustrations, an authoritative history of the cinema traces the development of the medium, its filmmakers and stars, and the evolution of national cinemas around the world.




World War II on Film


Book Description

World War II on Film examines the war through the lens of 12 films. The movies selected include productions made during World War II and in each succeeding decade, providing a sense of how different generations perceive the war. World War II on Film provides a succinct yet well-grounded appraisal of that war as seen through 12 representative films. The book separates fact from fiction, showing where the movies were accurate and where they departed from reality, and places them in the larger context of historical and social events. Each movie chosen represents a particular aspect of the conflict, including the air war over Europe, the condition of prisoners of war, Nazi atrocities, and the British evacuation at Dunkirk. Unlike most histories of Hollywood during World War II or the genre of war movies, World War II on Film examines in depth the relation between the depictions of events, beliefs, attitudes, and ways of life as seen on film with reality as documented by historians or recorded by journalists or eye-witnesses to the war. The volume will appeal to high school and college readers, as well as general interest readers and film buffs.




The Hollywood Studio System


Book Description

Despite being one of the biggest industries in the United States, indeed the World, the internal workings of the 'dream factory' that is Hollywood is little understood outside the business. The Hollywood Studio System: A History is the first book to describe and analyse the complete development, classic operation, and reinvention of the global corporate entitles which produce and distribute most of the films we watch. Starting in 1920, Adolph Zukor, Head of Paramount Pictures, over the decade of the 1920s helped to fashion Hollywood into a vertically integrated system, a set of economic innovations which was firmly in place by 1930. For the next three decades, the movie industry in the United States and the rest of the world operated by according to these principles. Cultural, social and economic changes ensured the dernise of this system after the Second World War. A new way to run Hollywood was required. Beginning in 1962, Lew Wasserman of Universal Studios emerged as the key innovator in creating a second studio system. He realized that creating a global media conglomerate was more important than simply being vertically integrated. Gomery's history tells the story of a 'tale of two systems 'using primary materials from a score of archives across the United States as well as a close reading of both the business and trade press of the time. Together with a range of photographs never before published the book also features over 150 box features illuminating aspect of the business.




Selling Hollywood to the World


Book Description

This book investigates European efforts to overcome the American film industry's international pre-eminence.




Hollywood's History Films


Book Description

The story of mankind -- Economic history -- Thrill history -- Political history -- Social history -- Researching history -- Living history -- Intellectual history.