Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) marked a transition in American film-making, and its success - as a work of art, as a creative 'property' exploited by its studio, Paramount Pictures; and as a model for aspiring auteurist film-makers - changed Hollywood forever. Jon Lewis's study of The Godfather begins with a close look at the film's audacious visual style (the long, theatrical set pieces; the chiaroscuro lighting, the climactic montage paralleling a family baptism with a series of brutal murders). The analysis of visual style is paired with a discussion of the movie's principal themes: Vito and Michael's attempt to balance the obligations of business and family, their struggle with assimilation, the temptations and pitfalls of capitalist accumulation, and the larger drama of succession from father to son, from one generation to the next. The textual analysis precedes a production history that views The Godfather as a singularly important film in Hollywood's dramatic box-office turnaround in the early 1970s. And then, finally, the book takes a long hard look at the gangster himself both on screen and off. Hollywood publicity attending the gangster film from its inception in the silent era to the present has endeavoured to dull the distinction between the real and movie gangster, insisting that each film has been culled from the day's sordid headlines. Looking at the drama on screen and the production history behind the scenes, Lewis uncovers a series of real gangster backstories, revealing, finally, how millions of dollars of mob money may well have funded the film in the first place, and how, as things played out, The Godfather saved Paramount Studios and the rest of Hollywood as well.

This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority - school, church, family. Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston, Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, Theodor Adorno, Simon Frith, and Dick Hebdige, the author draws an innovative and flexible model of a cultural history of youth. Originally published in 1992.

What do we talk or write about when we talk and write about American film history? The answer is predictably complex and elusive. The American Film History Reader acknowledges and accommodates this complex task by showcasing a range of historical writing demonstrating that when we talk or write about film history we, by necessity, talk and write about a lot of different things. The American Film History Reader provides a selective history of American cinema and offers an introduction to historiographic practice in relation to American moviemaking and moviegoing. The Reader is composed of eighteen essays organized into six thematic sections: Industrial Practice Technology Reception Films and Filmmakers Censorship and Regulation Stardom Appreciating that methods and materials change over time, this structure allows the editors to showcase a breadth of historiographic approaches and a range of research materials within each section. Each essay acts as a point of entry into a history that accounts for the essential and inherent commercial, experiential, social, and cultural aspects of the medium. All eighteen essays are individually introduced by the editors, who provide additional context and suggestions for further reading, making it an ideal resource for students of film studies and particularly for students taking courses on film history.

This book analyses the teen film as the rare medium able to represent the otherwise chaotic and conflicting experience of youth. The author focuses on six major issues: alienation, deviance and delinquency, sex and gender, the politics of consumption, the apolitics of youth(ful) rebellion, and regression into nostalgia. Despite the many differences within the genre, this book sees all teen films as focused on a single social concern: the breakdown of traditional forms of authority - school, church, family. Working with the theories of such diverse scholars as Kenneth Keniston, Bruno Bettelheim, Erik Erikson, Theodor Adorno, Simon Frith, and Dick Hebdige, the author draws an innovative and flexible model of a cultural history of youth. Originally published in 1992.

Written in an engaging narrative style, this text provides a thorough overview of the fascinating intersection of economics, culture, artistry and technology that has defined American film from its beginnings. The Second Edition features a NEW four-colour design, hundreds of new images, greater emphasis on film analysis, increased coverage of women and minority filmmakers and an epilogue that speculates on the future of film.

Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather, Part II (1974) is a magisterial cinematic work, a gorgeous, stylized, auteur epic, and one of the few sequels judged by many to be greater than its predecessor. This despite the fact that it consists largely of meetings between aspiring 'Godfather' Michael Corleone and fellow gangsters, politicians and family members. The meetings remind us that the modern gangster's success is built upon inside information and on strategic planning. Michael and his father Vito's days resemble those of the legitimate businessmen they aspire or pretend to be. Jon Lewis's study of Coppola's masterpiece provides a close analysis of the film and a discussion of its cinematic and political contexts. It is structured in three sections: "The Sequel," "The Dissolve," and "The Sicilian Thing" - accommodating three avenues of inquiry, respectively: the film's importance in and to Hollywood history, its unique, auteur style and form; and its cultural significance. Of interest, then, is New Hollywood history, mise-en-scene, and a view of the Corleone saga as a cautionary capitalist parable, as a metaphor of the corruption of American power, post-Vietnam, post-Watergate.

"When it comes to censorship in Hollywood, the bottom line is the ticket line. That's the central message in Jon Lewis's provocative and insightful investigation of the movie industry's history of self-regulation.a]Lewis shows that Hollywood films are a triumph of commerce over art, and that the film industry has consistently used internal censorship and government-industrial collusion to guarantee that its cash flow is never seriously threatened."
"-- The New York Times Book Review"

"a]an accomplished, comprehensive, and provocative new history of censorship and the American film industrya]And what of the perennial tussles between politicos and the film industry? All show business, suggests Lewis, make-believe veiling the real power structure that has nothing to do with morals, let alone art (it would be interesting to get his take on the recent marketing brouhaha and its relationship to the recent threatened actors and writers strikes). A staggering saga worthy itself of a Hollywood movie, Hollywood v. Hardcore is film history at its most illuminating and intense."
" --The Boston Phoenix"

"As provocative as his sometimes X-rated subject matter, film scholar Lewis detects an intimate relationship between the seemingly strange bedfellows of mainstream Hollywood cinema and hardcore pornography. From postal inspector Anthony Comstock to virtue maven William Bennett, from the Hays Office that monitored the golden age of Hollywood to the alphabet ratings system that labels the motion pictures in today's multiplex malls, Lewis's wry, informative, and always insightful study of American film censorship demonstrates that the most effective media surveillance happens before yousee the movie. Hollywood v. Hard Core is highly recommended for audiences of all ages."
"--Thomas Doherty, author of Pre-Code Hollywood"

"Jon Lewis weaves a compelling narrative of how box office needs-rather than moral strictures-have dictated the history of film regulation. Telling the complex and fascinating story of how Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and developed the ratings system and then telling the even more compelling story of how the X rating became a desirable marketing device when hard core pornography became popular, Hollywood v. Hard Core reveals a great deal about the true business of censorship."
"--Linda Williams, author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible""

"This is a fascinating account, both entertaining and scholarly."
--"Journal of the West"

In 1972, "The Godfather" and "Deep Throat" were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance."

Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together.

Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films werefaltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films--from foreign art house film "Last Tango in Paris" to hard-core pornography like "Behind the Green Door"--that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.

"Brief on brilliant cocktail conversation? This reader-friendly collection will help you apply Foucault to Keanu, Derrida to Spielberg, Macbeth to Blair Witch, and pull it off with panache. Stimulating in small doses, its 34 essays deconstruct 1990s cinema, and the decade too, with intellectual vigor and a wry sense of humor."
--"Variety"

"The End of Cinema As We Know It is at once academic and popular in the best sense of both terms-intelligent and erudite critical analysis conveyed through accessible and gracefully written prose. Just like the cinema of the '90s itself, this collection of thirty-four smart and sprightly essays refuses to be bound by traditional categories. Free from the homogenized consensus that too often results from the supposed advantage of historical distance, these broadly ranging essays on a period still fresh in our memory necessarily pose more questions than they answer. But they are good provocative questions and it is precisely this spirit of free-wheeling inquiry and fearless speculation that makes the book so enjoyable to read."
--Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television

""The End of Cinema" provides an enjoyable reading with a good balance of academic and popular qualities."
--American Studies International, June 2002

"The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties, is an encouraging step in a new direction. In it, we find an impressive assembly of established as well as younger scholars grappling both with pop-film and industry concerns."
--"Cineaste"

Almost half a century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, "I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have beenwaiting forand wondering aboutthis prophecy ever since. The way films are made and exhibited has changed significantly. Films, some of which are not exactly "films" anymore, can now be projected in a wide variety of wayson screens in revamped high tech theaters, on big, high-resolution TVs, on little screens in minivans and laptops. But with all this new gear, all these new ways of viewing films, are we necessarily getting different, better movies?

The thirty-four brief essays in The End of Cinema as We Know It attend a variety of topics, from film censorship and preservation to the changing structure and status of independent cinemafrom the continued importance of celebrity and stardom to the sudden importance of alternative video. While many of the contributors explore in detail the pictures that captured the attention of the nineties film audience, such as "Jurassic Park," "Eyes Wide Shut," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "The Wedding Banquet," "The Matrix," "Independence Day," "Gods and Monsters," "The Nutty Professor," and "Kids," several essays consider works that fall outside the category of film as it is conventionally definedthe home "movie" of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon and the amateur video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King.

Examining key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles and audio-visual technologies, the contributors to this volume spell out the end of cinema in terms of irony, cynicism and exhaustion, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the decline of what we once used to call film culture.

Contributors include: Paul Arthur, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Thomas Doherty, Thomas Elsaesser, KrinGabbard, Henry Giroux, Heather Hendershot, Jan-Christopher Hook, Alexandra Juhasz, Charles Keil, Chuck Klienhans, Jon Lewis, Eric S. Mallin, Laura U. Marks, Kathleen McHugh, Pat Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, Hillary Radner, Ralph E. Rodriguez, R.L. Rutsky, James Schamus, Christopher Sharrett, David Shumway, Robert Sklar, Murray Smith, Marita Sturken, Imre Szeman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Maureen Turim, Justin Wyatt, and Elizabeth Young.

How a new generation of counterculture talent changed the landscape of Hollywood, the film industry, and celebrity culture. By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies. Road Trip to Nowhere examines a ten-year span (from 1967 to 1976) rife with uneasy encounters between artists caught up in the counterculture and a corporate establishment still clinging to a studio system on the brink of collapse. Out of this tumultuous period many among the young and talented walked away from celebrity, turning down the best job Hollywood-and America-had on offer: movie star. Road Trip to Nowhere elaborates a primary-sourced history of movie production culture, examining the lives of a number of talented actors who got wrapped up in the politics and lifestyles of the counterculture. Thoroughly put off by celebrity culture, actors like Dennis Hopper, Christopher Jones, Jean Seberg, and others rejected the aspirational backstory and inevitable material trappings of success, much to the chagrin of the studios and directors who backed them. In Road Trip to Nowhere, film historian Jon Lewis details dramatic encounters on movie sets and in corporate boardrooms, on the job and on the streets, and in doing so offers an entertaining and rigorous historical account of an out-of-touch Hollywood establishment and the counterculture workforce they would never come to understand.

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood's glitzy facade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence when the company town's many competing subcultures-celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients-came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, where reality was anything but glamorous."

What do we talk or write about when we talk and write about American film history? The answer is predictably complex and elusive. The American Film History Reader acknowledges and accommodates this complex task by showcasing a range of historical writing demonstrating that when we talk or write about film history we, by necessity, talk and write about a lot of different things. The American Film History Reader provides a selective history of American cinema and offers an introduction to historiographic practice in relation to American moviemaking and moviegoing. The Reader is composed of eighteen essays organized into six thematic sections: Industrial Practice Technology Reception Films and Filmmakers Censorship and Regulation Stardom Appreciating that methods and materials change over time, this structure allows the editors to showcase a breadth of historiographic approaches and a range of research materials within each section. Each essay acts as a point of entry into a history that accounts for the essential and inherent commercial, experiential, social, and cultural aspects of the medium. All eighteen essays are individually introduced by the editors, who provide additional context and suggestions for further reading, making it an ideal resource for students of film studies and particularly for students taking courses on film history.

Producers raise money and supervise development, they procure a script or book or 'pre-sold property' (like Harry Potter or Batman) & more. This book is all about what producers have actually done during Hollywood's history, delving into the careers of the exemplary figures, from Irving Thalberg to the multiple co-producers of 7 Years a Slave. This is also a great introduction to the ways in which the Hollywood industry works as a business; producers are at the money, business end and their work runs through the entire process of getting a movie onto the screen - or failing to do so.

In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

How a new generation of counterculture talent changed the landscape of Hollywood, the film industry, and celebrity culture. By 1967, the commercial and political impact on Hollywood of the sixties counterculture had become impossible to ignore. The studios were in bad shape, still contending with a generation-long box office slump and struggling to get young people into the habit of going to the movies. Road Trip to Nowhere examines a ten-year span (from 1967 to 1976) rife with uneasy encounters between artists caught up in the counterculture and a corporate establishment still clinging to a studio system on the brink of collapse. Out of this tumultuous period many among the young and talented walked away from celebrity, turning down the best job Hollywood-and America-had on offer: movie star. Road Trip to Nowhere elaborates a primary-sourced history of movie production culture, examining the lives of a number of talented actors who got wrapped up in the politics and lifestyles of the counterculture. Thoroughly put off by celebrity culture, actors like Dennis Hopper, Christopher Jones, Jean Seberg, and others rejected the aspirational backstory and inevitable material trappings of success, much to the chagrin of the studios and directors who backed them. In Road Trip to Nowhere, film historian Jon Lewis details dramatic encounters on movie sets and in corporate boardrooms, on the job and on the streets, and in doing so offers an entertaining and rigorous historical account of an out-of-touch Hollywood establishment and the counterculture workforce they would never come to understand.

In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

The tragic and mysterious circumstances surrounding the deaths of Elizabeth Short, or the Black Dahlia, and Marilyn Monroe ripped open Hollywood's glitzy facade, exposing the city's ugly underbelly of corruption, crime, and murder. These two spectacular dead bodies, one found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947, the other found dead in her home in August 1962, bookend this new history of Hollywood. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence when the company town's many competing subcultures-celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients-came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, where reality was anything but glamorous."

Of all the job titles in the screen credits, 'producer' is the most amorphous, partly because these people are uniquely involved in several aspects of a movie project at once, partly because there are so many different kinds: businesswomen and businessmen producers, writer, director, film star producers & executive producers. Producers raise money and supervise development, they procure a script or book or 'pre-sold property' (like Harry Potter or Batman) & more. This book is all about what producers have actually done during Hollywood's history, delving into the careers of the exemplary figures, from Irving Thalberg to the multiple co-producers of 7 Years a Slave. This is also a great introduction to the ways in which the Hollywood industry works as a business; producers are at the money, business end and their work runs through the entire process of getting a movie onto the screen - or failing to do so.

This major 1984 study of South African trade unionism traces the history of the South African Trades and Labour Council (TLC) from its origins in the 1920s to its demise in the early 1950s. The book focuses on South Africa's secondary industrialisation and subsequent changes in work organization. By analysing trade union structures and strategies Dr Lewis shows how divisions within the labour movement were bound up with the development of production processes and the division of labour, rather than being the inevitable outcome of racial antagonisms. The early chapters analyse the emergence of different trade union strategies. As work processes were transformed by the rapid industrialisation of the 1940s, the traditional craftsmen lost their technical indispensability and increasingly performed supervisory functions. Faced with dilution and undercutting, and increasingly hostile to the majority of black production workers, the craft unions responded by redefining membership on the basis of race rather than skill.

"Brief on brilliant cocktail conversation? This reader-friendly collection will help you apply Foucault to Keanu, Derrida to Spielberg, Macbeth to Blair Witch, and pull it off with panache. Stimulating in small doses, its 34 essays deconstruct 1990s cinema, and the decade too, with intellectual vigor and a wry sense of humor."
--"Variety"

"The End of Cinema As We Know It is at once academic and popular in the best sense of both terms-intelligent and erudite critical analysis conveyed through accessible and gracefully written prose. Just like the cinema of the '90s itself, this collection of thirty-four smart and sprightly essays refuses to be bound by traditional categories. Free from the homogenized consensus that too often results from the supposed advantage of historical distance, these broadly ranging essays on a period still fresh in our memory necessarily pose more questions than they answer. But they are good provocative questions and it is precisely this spirit of free-wheeling inquiry and fearless speculation that makes the book so enjoyable to read."
--Robert Rosen, Dean of the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television

""The End of Cinema" provides an enjoyable reading with a good balance of academic and popular qualities."
--American Studies International, June 2002

"The End of Cinema as We Know It: American Cinema in the Nineties, is an encouraging step in a new direction. In it, we find an impressive assembly of established as well as younger scholars grappling both with pop-film and industry concerns."
--"Cineaste"

Almost half a century ago, Jean-Luc Godard famously remarked, "I await the end of cinema with optimism." Lots of us have beenwaiting forand wondering aboutthis prophecy ever since. The way films are made and exhibited has changed significantly. Films, some of which are not exactly "films" anymore, can now be projected in a wide variety of wayson screens in revamped high tech theaters, on big, high-resolution TVs, on little screens in minivans and laptops. But with all this new gear, all these new ways of viewing films, are we necessarily getting different, better movies?

The thirty-four brief essays in The End of Cinema as We Know It attend a variety of topics, from film censorship and preservation to the changing structure and status of independent cinemafrom the continued importance of celebrity and stardom to the sudden importance of alternative video. While many of the contributors explore in detail the pictures that captured the attention of the nineties film audience, such as "Jurassic Park," "Eyes Wide Shut," "South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut," "The Wedding Banquet," "The Matrix," "Independence Day," "Gods and Monsters," "The Nutty Professor," and "Kids," several essays consider works that fall outside the category of film as it is conventionally definedthe home "movie" of Pamela Anderson and Tommy Lee's honeymoon and the amateur video of the LAPD beating of Rodney King.

Examining key films and filmmakers, the corporate players and industry trends, film styles and audio-visual technologies, the contributors to this volume spell out the end of cinema in terms of irony, cynicism and exhaustion, religious fundamentalism and fanaticism, and the decline of what we once used to call film culture.

Contributors include: Paul Arthur, Wheeler Winston Dixon, Thomas Doherty, Thomas Elsaesser, KrinGabbard, Henry Giroux, Heather Hendershot, Jan-Christopher Hook, Alexandra Juhasz, Charles Keil, Chuck Klienhans, Jon Lewis, Eric S. Mallin, Laura U. Marks, Kathleen McHugh, Pat Mellencamp, Jerry Mosher, Hamid Naficy, Chon Noriega, Dana Polan, Murray Pomerance, Hillary Radner, Ralph E. Rodriguez, R.L. Rutsky, James Schamus, Christopher Sharrett, David Shumway, Robert Sklar, Murray Smith, Marita Sturken, Imre Szeman, Frank P. Tomasulo, Maureen Turim, Justin Wyatt, and Elizabeth Young.

"When it comes to censorship in Hollywood, the bottom line is the ticket line. That's the central message in Jon Lewis's provocative and insightful investigation of the movie industry's history of self-regulation.a]Lewis shows that Hollywood films are a triumph of commerce over art, and that the film industry has consistently used internal censorship and government-industrial collusion to guarantee that its cash flow is never seriously threatened."
"-- The New York Times Book Review"

"a]an accomplished, comprehensive, and provocative new history of censorship and the American film industrya]And what of the perennial tussles between politicos and the film industry? All show business, suggests Lewis, make-believe veiling the real power structure that has nothing to do with morals, let alone art (it would be interesting to get his take on the recent marketing brouhaha and its relationship to the recent threatened actors and writers strikes). A staggering saga worthy itself of a Hollywood movie, Hollywood v. Hardcore is film history at its most illuminating and intense."
" --The Boston Phoenix"

"As provocative as his sometimes X-rated subject matter, film scholar Lewis detects an intimate relationship between the seemingly strange bedfellows of mainstream Hollywood cinema and hardcore pornography. From postal inspector Anthony Comstock to virtue maven William Bennett, from the Hays Office that monitored the golden age of Hollywood to the alphabet ratings system that labels the motion pictures in today's multiplex malls, Lewis's wry, informative, and always insightful study of American film censorship demonstrates that the most effective media surveillance happens before yousee the movie. Hollywood v. Hard Core is highly recommended for audiences of all ages."
"--Thomas Doherty, author of Pre-Code Hollywood"

"Jon Lewis weaves a compelling narrative of how box office needs-rather than moral strictures-have dictated the history of film regulation. Telling the complex and fascinating story of how Hollywood abandoned the Production Code and developed the ratings system and then telling the even more compelling story of how the X rating became a desirable marketing device when hard core pornography became popular, Hollywood v. Hard Core reveals a great deal about the true business of censorship."
"--Linda Williams, author of Hard Core: Power, Pleasure, and the "Frenzy of the Visible""

"This is a fascinating account, both entertaining and scholarly."
--"Journal of the West"

In 1972, "The Godfather" and "Deep Throat" were the two most popular films in the country. One, a major Hollywood studio production, the other an independently made "skin flick." At that moment, Jon Lewis asserts, the fate of the American film industry hung in the balance."

Spanning the 20th century, Hollywood v. Hard Core weaves a gripping tale of censorship and regulation. Since the industry's infancy, film producers and distributors have publicly regarded ratings codes as a necessary evil. Hollywood regulates itself, we have been told, to prevent the government from doing it for them. But Lewis argues that the studios self-regulate because they are convinced it is good for business, and that censorship codes and regulations are a crucial part of what binds the various competing agencies in the film business together.

Yet between 1968 and 1973 Hollywood films werefaltering at the box office, and the major studios were in deep trouble. Hollywood's principal competition came from a body of independently produced and distributed films--from foreign art house film "Last Tango in Paris" to hard-core pornography like "Behind the Green Door"--that were at once disreputable and, for a moment at least, irresistible, even chic. In response, Hollywood imposed the industry-wide MPAA film rating system (the origins of the G, PG, and R designations we have today) that pushed sexually explicit films outside the mainstream, and a series of Supreme Court decisions all but outlawed the theatrical exhibition of hard core pornographic films. Together, these events allowed Hollywood to consolidate its iron grip over what films got made and where they were shown, thus saving it from financial ruin.

Film scholarship has long been dominated by textual interpretations of specific films. Looking Past the Screen advances a more expansive American film studies in which cinema is understood to be a social, political, and cultural phenomenon extending far beyond the screen. Presenting a model of film studies in which films themselves are only one source of information among many, this volume brings together film histories that draw on primary sources including collections of personal papers, popular and trade journalism, fan magazines, studio publications, and industry records.Focusing on Hollywood cinema from the teens to the 1970s, these case studies show the value of this extraordinary range of historical materials in developing interdisciplinary approaches to film stardom, regulation, reception, and production. The contributors examine State Department negotiations over the content of American films shown abroad; analyze the star image of Clara Smith Hamon, who was notorious for having murdered her lover; and consider film journalists' understanding of the arrival of auteurist cinema in Hollywood as it was happening during the early 1970s. One contributor chronicles the development of film studies as a scholarly discipline; another offers a sociopolitical interpretation of the origins of film noir. Still another brings to light Depression-era film reviews and Production Code memos so sophisticated in their readings of representations of sexuality that they undermine the perception that queer interpretations of film are a recent development. Looking Past the Screen suggests methods of historical research, and it encourages further thought about the modes of inquiry that structure the discipline of film studies. Contributors. Mark Lynn Anderson, Janet Bergstrom, Richard deCordova, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Sumiko Higashi, Jon Lewis, David M. Lugowski, Dana Polan, Eric Schaefer, Andrea Slane, Eric Smoodin, Shelley Stamp