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Routledge is a global publisher of academic books, journals and online resources in the humanities and social sciences.
The Hollywood film industry has dominated global film production, both in terms of style and sheer volume, for much of the twentieth century. To understand properly the phenomenon of Hollywood cinema, it must be examined both as a changing industrial system and as a distinctive stylistic approach to narrative film, since both of these make it much more than simply the geographical center of the American film industry.
Situated eight miles from Los Angeles, CA, Hollywood first began to attract attention as a base for film production in the early 1900s. Its ideal climate and location, close both to a big city and to the open countryside, made it a popular choice. Throughout the silentfilm era, Hollywood developed steadily towards the cherished status of its socalled “golden age,” the era of production from 1930–48 and the period during which it consolidated its “classical” style. Its international success was achieved through a rigorous approach to film production, built around the oligopoly of the studio system.
The studio system consisted of eight key players. The “Big Five,” namely Warner Bros, RKO, Twentieth Century FOX, Paramount and MGM, had all been active in taking over cinemas and expanding production throughout the 1920s. All five were selfsufficient in the areas of production, distribution and exhibition, and this “vertical integration” was crucial to their success. Beneath them in the hierarchy lay the “Little Three”: Universal, Columbia and United Artists. While not vertically integrated, they were notable because they held agreements allowing them to show their films in the prestigious cinemas owned by the Big Five.
By 1930 these eight companies had carved up the American industry between themselves into a community of interests which allowed very little access to outsiders or independents. The key organizing principles of the studios involved the specialized division of labor, mass production along assembly-line methods, and the star system where careers were carefully masterminded and managed. Genre production led to certain studios gaining specialist reputations and developing an attendant “studio look,” for example in the gritty gangster movies of Warner Bros. While highly successful, this process has since been criticized as an example of the industry’s mass standardization during this period.
In 1948 the Supreme Court reached a decision in the Paramount Decree that vertical integration was in fact unlawful. The studios were forced to sell off their cinemas, thus ending their monopoly. At the same time, a number of additional cultural and demographic changes heralded a new age for Hollywood. The rise of television meant a new arena of competition. Furthermore, the return of GIs after the war led to a baby boom, with a surge of interest in domestic leisure and the development of new suburbs away from the city locations of prestige cinemas. Cinema audiences dropped dramatically Hollywood fought back bravely in the 1950s with new innovations such as drive-ins, 3-D and a range of wide-screen formats, but the golden age had ended.
Though the end of vertical integration should have meant a far more accessible industry, the major studios ultimately remained dominant by retaining their control in the area of distribution. Nevertheless, some forty years later the independents of the 1990s arguably hold more influence and a bigger share of the audience than ever before. Most of the major studios are still active, but their survival has only been possible through a series of shifts in ownership since the 1960s so that most are currently owned by multinationals and conglomerates. The business interests of these companies are broad and often mutually supportive so that, for example, merchandising, television and video can be used both to promote interest in a film and ensure a long-term profit.
The studios of the golden age have acquired a mixed reputation over the years. They have often been rather pejoratively compared to factories, where a capitalist business ethic and concern with profits means that artistic concerns are low on the list of priorities.
But the factory analogy while apposite in some ways, does not always do the studios justice. Not only did this era produce some of cinema’s most feted “auteurs,” such as Howard Hawks and John Ford, it also established the “classical Hollywood” style, still evident in mainstream cinemas worldwide, that remains one of Hollywood’s lasting legacies.
The keynote of classical style is continuity editing, an aesthetic of “transparency” which disguises the construction of the film-making process. Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson’s seminal analysis of classical style (1985) identifies additional features such as the construction of a believable world, the centrality of clearly motivated characters, a cause—effect logic, linear narrative progression and a momentum directed at overcoming initial disruption with a strong sense of resolution and closure. However, stylistic variations since the 1970s–the so-called “New Hollywood” period—have demonstrated that these conventions are not immutable.
Reservations about the quality of Hollywood cinema are often indicative of the enduring cultural debate over whether the aims of “entertainment” and “art” are somehow intrinsically incompatible, raising fundamental issues as to what constitutes “art.” The conglomerates and multinationals controlling the studios now are still accused of producing mindless, predictable blockbusters, and the classical Hollywood style, though resilient, is not without its critics. Left-wing critiques of Hollywood and its adherence to verisimilitude maintain that it was, and largely remains, a “dream-factory” churning out escapist fantasies for the masses. While contemporary Hollywood undeniably enjoys more freedom to negotiate the boundaries of classical style, such critiques suggest that Hollywood has an ideological agenda where naturalization and the emphasis on closure continue to distract the audience from the more irresolute nature of real-life conflicts.
Industry:Culture
The X-Files is an American science fiction horror drama television series created by Chris Carter. The program originally aired from September 10, 1993 to May 19, 2002, spanning nine seasons and 202 episodes. The series recounted the exploits of FBI Special Agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson) who investigate X-Files: marginalized, unsolved cases involving paranormal phenomena. Mulder believes in the existence of aliens and the paranormal while Scully, a skeptic, is assigned to make scientific analyses of Mulder's discoveries to debunk his work and thus return him to mainstream cases. Early in the series, both agents become pawns in a larger conflict and come to trust only each other. They develop a close relationship, which begins as a platonic friendship, but becomes a romance by series end. In addition to the series-spanning story arc, "Monster-of-the-Week" episodes formed roughly two-thirds of the episodes. In such stand-alone episodes, Mulder and Scully investigated strange crimes that had no effect on the show's mythology, though the episodes enriched the show's background.
Industry:Culture
While this may refer to traditions of white hymnody (which intersect with country music), “gospel” is more often identified with a black genre that emerged from spirituals after the turn of the nineteenth century alongside ragtime, blues and jazz. This free-form singing, with emotive solos, antiphonal responses of repeated spiritual messages, instrumental back-up (piano and tambourine) and rhythmic choral support, was also associated with the rise of charismatic and spiritual churches. In fact, mainline black Protestant denominations avoided it for decades. Among its guiding spirits was Thomas Dorsey, who turned from blues to the composition of classic gospel hymns like “Precious Lord, Take my Hand” (1932). Gospel influenced—and was influenced by—rhythm and blues and soul; artists Sam Cooke and Aretha Franklin embody this intersection in their work.
Industry:Culture
When one refers to the Right, or right wing, in the cuts across currents associated with Jeffersonian United States, one begins with a tradition which and Jacksonian democracy.
One must initially note that confusions between conservatives and reactionaries muddy the waters. A conservative tradition, resting on aspects of Puritanism, a more sober view of human nature and behavior, the elitism of the Federalists and, in part, the Whigs, and, importantly the Southern traditionalism associated with John C. Calhoun, must be distinguished from reactionary and characteristically xenophobic movements and moments, ranging from the Alien and Sedition Acts of the 1790s to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings to the antiReconstruction Ku Klux Klan.
In the twentieth century, the Right stood against the emergence of the welfare state most identified with the New Deal and against the secular trends towards moral relativism, which have engendered what many call “the culture wars.” As such, the Right, in the 1930s through the Liberty League and neo-fascist voices like Father Charles Coughlin, and in the early Cold-War years in the form of McCarthyism, was, for the most part, a reactive force, able to scare and sometimes slow, but never able to halt the tides of modernization and modernity During the 1950s, the contemporary Right began to take form under the leadership of William F. Buckley, Jr. and his National Review, which produced a “fusion” of Cold War anti-communism, economic free-market laissez-faire and cultural traditionalism. When liberalism faltered during the 1960s, battered by failures in Vietnam, racial and generational tensions and the beginnings of economic stagnation, the Right responded with impressive success. The Goldwater campaign of 1964, despite its defeat, formed the cadre and organizational base for the Reagan Revolution of the 1980s. George Wallace pointed the way with his “law-and-order” attacks on liberals, black militants, hippies, student activists and feminists. Richard Nixon modified Wallace’s appeal to his Southern strategy of 1968 and proceeded to mobilize successfully his “Silent Majority” hardhats in the name of patriotism, traditional moral values and racial backlash.
The Right flourished because the challenges posed by the 1960s and early 1970s were so profound and, therefore, frightening (e.g. racial, gender and sexual-choice equalities, a more permissive approach to sexuality language, dress, environmental constraints and challenges to “my country right or wrong”). During the 1970s, the Right was augmented by the rise of a religious Right under the leadership initially of Jerry Falwell and his Moral Majority and by the emergence of the neo-conservatives, mostly ex-liberals chastened by what they saw as the excesses of the 1960s. With the deepening economic stagflation of the late 1970s, combined with foreign-policy crises, such as hostages in Iran and Soviets in Afghanistan, the Right marched into power under the sunny Ronald Reagan.
The end of the Cold War has fragmented the Right, as has the relative success of Bill Clinton’s New Democratic strategy of co-opting conservative issues like crime and welfare. The Right, since the high point of the 1994 Gingrich congressional victory has suffered from the mistrust between economic conservatives, mostly focused on probusiness, anti-tax policies, and its cultural conservatives, intent on rolling back what they perceive as secular humanism and cultural relativism.
Industry:Culture
Situated in South Central Texas, San Antonio combines a long Mexican heritage and later immigrants with rapid recent development that has made it one of America’s ten largest cities, passing Dallas by 2000. Hence, the “Fiesta City” illustrates multiple fractures of border and global relations.
Mission churches shaped San Antonio’s eighteenth-century foundation, the best known of which is the Alamo, site of an iconic battle in the American Texans war against Mexico, now a shrine in the center city. A large Mexican American population nonetheless still shapes the city its festivals and even recent architecture like Legorreta’s vivid public library. Author Sandra Cisneros, however, has fought authorities to paint her house in colors she feels true to a Mexican spirit.
Other settlers included Germans and Anglo-Americans. Military development, livestock and service industries have all spurred growth, bringing problems of ethnic and class antagonism, gangs and gated communities. The city gained national attention in 1999 through its NBA championship basketball team, the Spurs. Yet the heart of a livable downtown remains the charming Paseo del Rio, a WPA project that offers walkways, restaurants and other amenities along the bends of the San Antonio River.
Industry:Culture
Since the 1960s, “gourmet” (sometimes “continental”) food has been associated with vague derivatives of classical French cuisine, using cream or wine sauces, expensive ingredients outside the northern European palate (olives, snails, pâté, wines) and elaborate presentations. As Jane and Michael Stern discuss this evolution in American Gourmet (1991), this cuisine, as American as chop suey established itself in hotels and kitchens across the country and often constitutes a separate section in supermarkets and cookbooks. Yet it is also a style many view with suspicion because of its “upper-class” associations.
Industry:Culture
The green hills and broad valleys of the Appalachian Mountains evoke profoundly dichotomous meanings in American life. The largest chain in the East, these mountains often have been portrayed as natural havens, escapes from coastal urbanization. At the same time, the region has been characterized by isolation and poverty that symbolize for policy-makers and media the failure of the American dream.
The Appalachian Mountains stretch across fourteen states, from Maine to Georgia; they include ranges known locally as the Berkshires, Taconics, Lehighs, Shenandoahs and Smokies. These relatively gentle slopes and broad valleys have influenced generations of painters and writers; the Berkshires in Massachusetts, for example, harbor artist colonies, while other ranges shelter elegant resorts and tourist development (especially the Smokies and Virginia’s Shenandoahs). State and national forests, as well as federal parks like Great Smoky Mountain National Park in Tennessee and North Carolina now protect the beauty of the Appalachians. The 2,000 mile (3,200 km) Appalachian trail, first developed by volunteers in the 1920s, traverses much of the East Coast, a journey explored in Bill Bryson’s (1998) A Walk in the Woods.
Yet Appalachia’s natural beauty contrasts with another brutal image, which developed after the Civil War, that portrayed its Southern ranges as a region of extreme backwardness and poverty In literature and film (476 movies between 1904 and 1929), local residents or “hillbillies” came to denote ignorance, isolation and internecine violence, even if they were occasionally championed as decadent heirs of an English yeoman tradition. The problem of Appalachia was tackled with the Tennessee Valley Authority and other development projects of the New Deal; in 1965, it became special target in the War on Poverty, defended by politicians from West Virginia, Kentucky and Tennessee. Yet, in 1999, Appalachia still figured in the itinerary when President Bill Clinton looked at American poverty.
Both images miss the complexity of Appalachian social ecology and history The decline of farming and community for example, was linked to largescale outside acquisitions of the land and the dangers of the coal mines that made the region a constant source of emigration to the North. Moreover, Appalachian peoples have included African Americans and Native Americans, as well as diverse white populations—all of whom “hillbilly” images ignore (a point underscored in John Sayle’s 1993 film Matewan).
Compelling voices, nonetheless, have spoken from and for Appalachia, from John Fox’s romantic turn-of-the-century portraits to Harry Caudill’s Nïght Comes to the Cumberland (1963). Barbara Kopple’s compelling Harlan County, USA (1976) chronicles the travails of coal miners and unions. Generations of bluegrass and country and western musicians have conveyed the soul of Appalachia over local radio and through recordings. Appalshop, a grassroots media cooperative, has also fought stereotypes while preserving the complexity of local traditions and struggles.
Industry:Culture
Style of African American music that started in the South, particularly in New Orleans, around the end of the nineteenth century Syncopated and polyrhythmic, jazz’s early influences can be found in nineteenth-century vernacular forms: ragtime, spirituals, stringbands, Dixieland. Jazz bands used European symphonic instruments, but emphasized the brass sections. Bands often had more than one trumpet or saxophone player as well as a string section, piano and rhythm sections. As jazz spread throughout the country and into Europe by the 1920s, bandleaders and composers such as Louis Armstrong became prominent. Bands became larger in the 1930s, and the complex music became simplified by white big bands such as those led by Glenn Miller and Jimmy Dorsey.
In the 1940s, swing music ended and bop emerged as the predominant form, originating from jazz clubs of New York City, NY. A new generation of musicians emerged such as Charlie Parker (saxophone), Dizzy Gillespie (trumpet) and Thelonious Monk (piano) who left the big bands to start their own smaller, more experimental ensembles. The great jazz vocalists of the era—Ella Fitzgerald, Sarah Vaughn, Betty Carter—took bop’s vigorous rhythms and harmonic changes into singing styles and took up what came to be called scat singing: improvisations based on—but not necessarily loyal to—a recurring melody that mimicked instruments in their phrasing.
In the 1950s, jazz splintered off into a few styles. On the West Coast, a “cool” school emerged with practitioners such as Dave Brubeck, Gerry Mulligan and Chet Baker. In the late 1950s, a fusion between jazz and classical music emerged, exemplified by the Modern Jazz Quartet. Hard bop or soul jazz also emerged as a style that used blues themes in the music—this was performed by Art Blakey’s Jazz Messengers. Also in the 1950s, an avant-garde developed that was less concerned with improvisations built around the melody and harmonic structure, but were investigating sound textures. These innovators were Miles Davis on the trumpet, Ornette Coleman on the saxophone, trumpet and violin and John Coltrane on the saxophone.
In the 1960s, jazz music was influenced by the rise of protest in the African American community Saxophonist Charlie Shepp, for example, played angry plaintive music that rejected the standard theme-improvisational solos-theme format of small ensembles. This music, however, never developed great commercial appeal. Instead, fusion music of the 1970s that moved to the more standard rhythms of rock ’n’ roll and utilized electronic instruments reached a mass audience.
By the end of the century neo-classicist virtuosos such as Wynton Marsalis emerged as key players in the world of jazz, bringing back the melodycentered musics of the 1920s and 1930s. Marsalis is currently artistic director of the jazz program at Lincoln Center of Performing Arts in New York City, signaling that jazz is now considered an officially recognized form of music, alongside European-based classical music in its rigor and history.
Industry:Culture
The “hot dog” style of surfing based on a traditional Hawai’ian practice began on the west coast of the United States in the mid-1950s, made possible by the development of new boards manufactured from light synthetic materials. Surfing quickly became a cult, popularized by the teen movie, like the series and later television sitcom, Gidget (1959), the Frankie Avalon and Annette Funicello movies Beach Party (1963), Bikini Beach (1964) and Beach Blanket Bingo (1965), the documentary The Endless Summer (1966), as well as the music of the Beach Boys.
Californians introduced their Malibu boards to Australia and a few years later, in 1962, an Australian won the first unofficial world championship. This began a long rivalry between Australia, California and Hawai’i for dominance in surfing.
In conjunction with this emerging rivalry, surfing became a big business. Gerry Lopez, a leading surfer in his own right, began to sell boards through a shop outlet in Honolulu.
Then he established the Bolt Corporation with partners in California, and set up a franchise arrangement that gave manufacturing rights to companies in all the major surfing countries. In conjunction with business growth came technological developments, such as the introduction of V-bottoms on boards, which improved the surfer’s ability to surf waves for longer.
The possibility that surfing will become an Olympic sport in the future has increased with the opening of indoor surfing pools in Japan and Arizona.
Industry:Culture
The US census was established largely for the purpose of determining the reapportionment of legislative districts. As population shifts around the country congressional seats are taken from cities of declining population and added to those where population has grown.
The gathering of data has become cause for significant political debate with regard to the 2000 census. Democrats feel that previous censuses have grossly undercounted urban populations and so have unfairly taken seats away from areas where the electorate has tended to vote for them. As a result, they wish to institute sampling techniques to compensate for any potential undercount. Republicans, whether or not they agree that an undercount has occurred, are happy with traditional census-gathering techniques.
Further debates have occurred over the establishment of districts to allow for or limit minority representation. A state in the South with a large African American population may nevertheless elect few black Congress members due to the way districts are drawn.
In 1982 efforts were made to change this when the Voting Rights Act was amended to require certain jurisdictions to take steps to give minority voters an opportunity to elect candidates of their choice. However, first attempts to accomplish this by making constituencies out of dispersed populations have been declared unconstitutional “racial gerrymanders” by the Supreme Court.
Industry:Culture
