Includes bibliographical references (pages 325-350) and index.
Contents:
Logorrhea, or, How to watch a Hollywood movie -- Last of the independents : paranoid auteurs and the invention of neoclassical Hollywood -- The literal and the littoral : Jaws -- Paramount I : from the director's company to high concept -- Our man in Armani : the Ovitz interregnum -- The projections : neoclassicism in action -- Paramount II : the residue of design -- Let's make the weather : chaos comes to Hollywood -- Hollywood the day after tomorrow : neoclassical endings? -- That oceanic feeling : one merger too many -- The anxious epic and the qualms of empire : conglomerate overstretch.
Summary:
"Modern Hollywood is dominated by a handful of studios: Columbia, Disney, Fox, Paramount, Universal, and Warner Bros. Threatened by independents in the 1970s, they returned to power in the 1980s, ruled unquestioned in the 1990s, and in the new millennium are again beseiged. But in the heyday of this new classical era, the major studios movies - their stories and styles - were astonishingly precise biographies of the studios that made them. Movies became product placements for their studios, advertising them to the industry, to their employees, and to the public at large. If we want to know how studios work - how studios think - we need to watch their films closely. How closely? Maniacally so. In a wide range of examples, [this] explores the gaps between story and backstory in order to excavate the hidden history of Hollywood's second great studio era"--Publisher's description.
This resource is supported by the Institute of Museum and Library Services under the provisions of the Library Services and Technology Act as administered by State Library of Iowa.