Overview

Beginning with the turn-of-the-century moving-picture pioneer Thomas Edison, this text traces the invention of Hollywood and the development of the studio system. It explores the movie-going experience, the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship, the impact of sound on the style and content of films, alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly including ""race"" films and documentaries, the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures, and Hollywood's self-proclaimed ""shining moment"" during the Second World War. The book concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government anti-trust action.

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9780801853166

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In this study the author has moved from his previous work on the treatment of African-Americans in film to a broader look at Hollywood itself in its studio heyday. * Washington Post *

In this study the author has moved from his previous work on the treatment of African-Americans in film to a broader look at Hollywood itself in its studio heyday. --'Washington Post' Students and general readers--and many specialists--will learn a great deal from Thomas Cripps. --Clayton Koppes, Oberlin College

Author Information

Thomas Cripps is University Distinguished Professor at Morgan State University. He is the author of Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900-1942 and Making Movies Black.

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