Review: The American Film Industry: A Historical Dictionary by Anthony Slide

1987 ◽  
Vol 40 (4) ◽  
pp. 45-45
Author(s):  
Ernest Callenbach
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
American Film ◽  
American Film Industry

Blind Trust: Market Control, Legal Environments, and the Dynamics of Competitive Intensity in the Early American Film Industry, 1893–1920

2005 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Mezias ◽  
Elizabeth Boyle
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
American Film ◽  
Market Control ◽  
Early American ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Media Reports ◽  
Trust Law ◽  
American Film Industry ◽  
The U.S ◽  
Mortality Analysis

This study of the emergence of the film industry in the U.S. between 1893 and 1920 contributes to the growing literature linking legal environments and population dynamics. This was an era characterized by a shift to active anti-trust policy, which manifested itself in legal action to disband a trust that had dominated the industry, the Motion Pictures Patents Corporation (MPPC). We use archival data to show that mortality was reduced by trust membership and increased with the market share of the trust members. The effects of litigation are varied, with litigation filed by trust members enhancing mortality and litigation filed against trust members decreasing mortality. Analysis of coded headlines from media reports on the emerging industry shows that a shift in the view of the trust in the normative environment toward a more negative view was also associated with decreased mortality. Results also show that learning and the compensatory fitness enjoyed before anti-trust law was enforced prevented the MPPC members from recognizing changes in the marketplace; as a result, they were less likely to move from making short films to making increasingly popular feature-length films.

The Corporate Gadabout

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
A. T. McKenna
Keyword(s):  
Film Industry ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
American Film ◽  
Corporate Executive ◽  
Charity Work ◽  
American Film Industry

This chapter examines Levine’s role as the president of Avco Embassy. Significantly, this was the quietest period of his career. The American film industry was in recession, and Levine did not enjoy being a corporate executive. He still loved the movies and the movie industry, but the evidence suggests that he was losing interest in films at this point in his career and was turning his attention to collecting art, doing charity work, and making appearances at society events.

Hollywood Studios

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Lev
Keyword(s):  
Los Angeles ◽  
Motion Picture ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The United States ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Natural Light ◽  
Gradual Change ◽  
American Film ◽  
Early 21St Century ◽  
American Film Industry

“Studio” and “Hollywood” are interestingly complex terms. “Studio” originally meant a room with abundant natural light. The first motion picture studios were large, glass-walled rooms designed for filming with natural light. The term “studio” expanded to refer to a motion picture production facility, and then it expanded again to mean a company that made motion pictures. By the late 1920s the best-known American studios were large, vertically integrated corporations that produced, distributed, and exhibited films: Paramount, MGM, Fox, Warner Bros., and RKO. Columbia, Universal, and United Artists were also considered major studios, though they owned few or no theaters, and there were smaller B-movie companies such as Monogram and Republic. “Hollywood” refers to a neighborhood north and west of downtown Los Angeles where a number of movie companies settled when they left the East Coast for California in the 1910s. This term has expanded in meaning as well; it now means all film production in the Los Angeles area, and even by synecdoche the entire American film industry. From about 1920 to 1950, film was the dominant entertainment industry in the United States, and the eight major studios firmly controlled this medium. The studios’ top executives, sometimes called “moguls” to emphasize their power, supervised thousands of employees and decided what films were made, how they were made, and how they were released. This is often called the “studio period,” or the “classic period,” or the “golden age of Hollywood.” After 1950 there was a gradual change to independent production as directors, producers, stars, and agents took over the creative aspects of filmmaking, with the studios mainly responsible for financing and distribution. Eventually, the Hollywood film studios expanded to other fields such as television, cable, music, home video, theme parks, and Internet, and they were bought or merged with larger corporations. The giant media conglomerates of the early 21st century (Disney, Time Warner, News Corp., Viacom, Comcast, and Sony) resemble the studios of old in their domination of the entertainment industry. This article will concentrate on the studio period, especially the economic and institutional histories of the eight major studios. However, since almost all of these companies still exist, and they are still called studios, some entries will discuss what happened to the American film industry and to the individual companies since the 1950s.

scholarly journals Iraq Wars from the other Side: Transmodern Reconciliation in Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer

Societies ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 79
Author(s):  
José Yebra
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Other ◽  
Muslim World ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Film ◽  
Iraq Wars ◽  
American Film Industry ◽  
Do So

In the last years, more and more literary accounts of recent and current wars in the Middle East have been published. In most cases, they are authored from a Western viewpoint and provide a narrow account of the Muslim world. This article focuses on Sinan Antoon’s The Corpse Washer because it opens the scope. That is, it constitutes an alternative to the imagery of the American film industry. Moreover, as Antoon is a Christian, his account of contemporary Iraq is particularly peripheral and hybrid. To analyse the novel, this article makes use of Transmodernity, a concept coined by Rosa María Rodríguez Magda in 1989. Yet, instead of Magda’s Transmodernity as a neatly Euro-centric phenomenon of worldwide connectivity, Ziauddin Sardar’s version of the concept is preferred. Sardar’s Transmodernity adds to connectivity a message of reconciliation between progress and tradition, particularly in the context of non-Western cultures. This paper defends that Antoon’s novel opens the debate on Islam to challenge the prejudiced Western discourses that have ‘legitimized’ war. To do so, Sardar’s ‘borders’ and Judith Butler’s grievability are particularly useful. In a Transmodern context, novels like Antoon’s show that humans should never be bare lives.

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