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