Hollywood by Hollywood

The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies

Steven Cohan

Full history, from silent era to the present
A new approach to genre
Features over fifty films, from canonical to obscure
Critical account of how and why this genre has endured for nearly a full century

Hollywood by Hollywood

The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies

Steven Cohan

Description

The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, is a staple of Hollywood film production harking back to the silent era and extending to the present day. What gives backstudios their coherence as a distinctive genre, Steven Cohan argues in Hollywood by Hollywood, is their fascination with the mystique of Hollywood as a geographic place, a self-contained industry, and a fantasy of fame, leisure, sexual freedom, and modernity. Yet by the same token, if backstudio pictures have rarely achieved blockbuster box-office success, what accounts for the film industry's interest in continuing to produce them? The backstudio picture has been an enduring genre because, aside from offering a director or writer a chance to settle old scores, in branding filmmaking with the Hollywood mystique, the genre solicits consumers' strong investment in the movies. Whether inspiring the "movie crazy" fan girls of the early teens and twenties or the wannabe filmmakers of this century heading to the West Coast after their college graduations, backstudios have given emotional weight and cultural heft to filmmaking as the quintessential American success story. But more than that, a backstudio picture is concerned with shaping perceptions of how the film industry works, with masking how its product depends upon an industrial labor force, including stardom, and with determining how that work's value accrues from the Hollywood brand stamped onto the product. Cohan supports his well theorized and well researched claims with nuanced discussions of over fifty backstudios, some canonical and well-known, and others obscure and rarely seen. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, Hollywood by Hollywood offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.

Hollywood by Hollywood

The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies

Steven Cohan

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments
About the companion website
List of illustrations in the book
List of illustrations on the website
List of film clips on the website

Introduction: The Backstudio Picture
Chapter 1. Self-Reflexive Hollywood
Chapter 2. Elusive Hollywood
Chapter 3. Movie-Struck Hollywood
Chapter 4. Monstrous Hollywood
Chapter 5. Masculine Hollywood
Chapter 6. Historical Hollywood
Chapter 7. Virtual Hollywood
Conclusion

Works Cited
Filmography
Index

Hollywood by Hollywood

The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies

Steven Cohan

Author Information

Steven Cohan is Dean's Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Film and Screen Studies in the Department of English at Syracuse University.

Hollywood by Hollywood

The Backstudio Picture and the Mystique of Making Movies

Steven Cohan

Reviews and Awards

"Steven Cohan has written an outstanding and extremely readable book that strikingly and convincingly establishes the 'backstudio film' as one of Hollywood's most pervasive, variegated, and essential genres. Insightful in developing larger themes and issues relating American filmmaking as well as in providing concise, rich readings of several major and secondary American films, Hollywood by Hollywood is an original and important study." --Alan Nadel, author of Containment Culture and Demographic Angst: Cultural Narratives and American Films of the 1950s

"Characterized by extensive archival research and compelling analyses of well-known as well as rare films, Cohan's book offers masterful scholarship on the back-studio picture over decades of Hollywood history. His innovative and lively account of Hollywood's longstanding tendency to make movies about itself explores the implications such films have for studies of industry history, stardom, and gender. This book is sure to become a gold standard in and beyond the field." --Barbara Klinger, Provost Professor Emerita, The Media School, Indiana University

"This pioneering book explores the backstudio picture as a long-standing genre in its own right. Considering an impressive array of diverse films, Cohan defines Hollywoodâs depiction of itself as a dream factory, a ruthless business, a dispersed physical space, and finally a branded logo, while deftly historicizing these iterations in the context of the industryâs structural transformations and gendered power dynamics. Cohan provides an important theoretical reevaluation of a previously understudied topic." --Merrill Schleier, University of the Pacific

"Recommended." -- CHOICE