Hollywood versus Hollywood
In: Index on censorship, Band 5, Heft 2, S. 10-16
ISSN: 1746-6067
In: Index on censorship, Band 5, Heft 2, S. 10-16
ISSN: 1746-6067
In: FP, Heft 196
ISSN: 0015-7228
As the summer officially came to an end this Labor Day weekend, the major studios were in a funk. But these are actually boom times in Hollywood, thanks to the American entertainment industry's secret new weapon: foreigners. "Bingo!" exults Mark Gill, a veteran studio executive who serves as president of Millennium Films. Foreign box office has saved Hollywood. "International" revenue is up 35% over five years ago and accounted for 69% of the studios' box-office receipts in 2011, according to the Motion Picture Association of America. The emerging markets of China and Russia are the biggest drivers of Hollywood's overseas growth. But other countries have factored in too. Even India, which has long resisted American movies in favor of its own thriving Bollywood film industry, is opening up. Moviegoers may no longer be flocking to theaters in the US, but as Hollywood is finally recognizing, foreign revenues remain a bright light for one of the great domestic industries. Adapted from the source document.
In: Social science quarterly, Band 74, Heft 1, S. 136-149
ISSN: 0038-4941
On the basis that motion picture & TV media seem to serve as a powerful vehicle for mass learning, examined is the extent to which Hollywood opinion leaders demonstrate a consistent political bias that might result in profound long-term consequences for public opinion. Questions culled from the 1987 & 1990 national Times-Mirror poll, which surveyed the social & political attitudes of Americans, were administered to a sample of 35 Hollywood opinion leaders. The respondents indeed were found to be much more liberal than the national sample in general political ideology & in their views about economic & social issues. Moreover, these results are not explained by the opinion leaders' overrepresentation of artists, Jews, or educated people. In Hollywood Entertainment: Commerce or Ideology?, Herbert J. Gans (Columbia U, New York, NY) challenges some of the project's basic yet unproven assumptions, specifically that: the mass media affect public opinion in significant ways, political values can be ascertained through responses to standardized attitude questions, media content is ideological rather than a commercial product, the plurality of Jews in the business makes a difference, & the 35 interviews are generalizable. In Reply to Gans, Prindle & Endersby argue that the assumptions that Gans problematizes are not assumptions but matters for empirical investigation. Gans's criticisms regarding the sampling techniques & sample size reflect social reality within the industry & not the authors' biases. 5 Tables, 11 References. Adapted from the source document.
This thesis is an exploration into the ways that homeless people are stigmatized in the media, with particular emphasis on the misrepresentation of homelessness in contemporary Hollywood narrative films. Using a combination of semiotic film theory and ideological analysis, I examine the film language that is used to construct these myths and place them within a larger political context. In doing so, I inspect the relationship between the corporate Hollywood structure and the attitudes they reflect about homelessness. Based on the results of my analysis, I have produced a film that explores an alternative representation to the dominant Hollywood perspective.
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Dedication -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- About the Author -- Chapter 1: This Is the End -- Chapter 2: The Center Will Not Hold -- Chapter 3: The New Hollywood Economy -- Chapter 4: Hollywood under Attack -- Chapter 5: The Visible Invisible -- Works Cited -- Index
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In: FP, Heft 154, S. 74-78
ISSN: 0015-7228
Offers five key points to celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, Sean Penn, & Brad Pitt for using their "star power" to effect change at the global level: (1) focus advocacy efforts on a single issue; (2) draw on acting skills; (3) select "co-stars" -- be they people or locations -- carefully; (4) advocate a specific goal rather than a person; & (5) know when to leave Hollywood for full-time world service. D. Edelman
In: World policy journal: WPJ ; a publication of the World Policy Institute, Band 12, Heft 4, S. 51-60
ISSN: 0740-2775
In: Dissent: a journal devoted to radical ideas and the values of socialism and democracy, Band 60, Heft 4, S. 12-16
ISSN: 0012-3846
For a couple months, in every subway station in New York City, emblazoned on the sides of buses and atop taxi cabs, was the White House on fire. Old Glory, reduced to bullet-ridden tatters, floated before it. Across the bottom the ad read, "Olympus Has Fallen." (A good piece of film criticism would have been to cover up that text with a big "Coming Soon.") Olympus Has Fallen made $100 million in the United States, which means something like 10 million people saw the movie. But how many millions just saw the poster? The poster is indicative of a recent turn in the U.S. film industry. In the thirty years from 1981 to 2011, Hollywood depicted D.C. getting destroyed five times: aliens did it twice in 1996 and once in 2011, an earthquake destroyed it in 2009, and global warming froze the city in 2004. This summer alone it was destroyed three times, and it was done by people. People with politics. In all three of those films, G.I. Joe: Retaliation, White House Down, and Olympus Has Fallen, the drama centers on a U.S. president kidnapped by people who want control of America's nuclear arsenal. In all three, the White House is taken over by political forces hostile to American global hegemony, although all three villains ultimately end up caricatures of said hegemony -- holding the world hostage to their desires through the immediate threat of total nuclear destruction. Against them is arrayed the threatened but ultimately victorious image of America as a just, democratic superpower -- appearing in both the calm wisdom of the presidents and the badass violence of their saviors. Thank God the U.S. government has control of the bomb, these films suggest, and not these megalomaniac German super-terrorists (G.I. Joe), leftists and North Koreans (Olympus Has Fallen), or aggrieved parents who lost a son in combat(!) and military-industrial complex goons (White House Down). It has been a long time since we've seen, even briefly, people taking control of the U.S. government on the basis of counter-ideologies. Threaten it, even destroy it physically? Sure. But political usurpation? Not so much. These sort of moments lead some critics to look for an insurrectionary undercurrent in these films -- as if, in the absence of a mass movement, we can discover that the people want revolution by correctly reading the tea leaves coming out of Hollywood. Such readings are often built on the market-populist myth that Hollywood is "giving us what we want," or that it is instead producing some sort of blanket false consciousness, rather than engaging in a series of shifting strategic processes of identity and desire production, with inconsistent and often unreliable effects. These readings also sanctify the relationship between movie and moviegoer, assuming that the production of cinematic meaning occurs exclusively between the individual audience member (or worse, some mob-like group of homogenous moviegoers) and the images on the screen. Though this method can take into account aesthetic, generic, political, and historical currents, it ignores how movies are a social relation integrated into our daily lives through marketing, critical discourse, celebrity gossip, movie news, conversation, and more. It isn't that valuable or interesting things can't be said about individual movies, or that individual films shouldn't be read at all, but if the goal is a political engagement with cinema, nine times out of ten the helpful question is not, "What do these movies mean?" but, "What are these movies used for?". Adapted from the source document.