Hollywood Babylon II

The backstudio picture, or movie about filmmaking, is a genre as old and as recent as commercial filmmaking itself. This genre’s longevity is due to its function in branding filmma...

Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard was a critical and commercial success on its release in 1950 and remains a classic of film noir and one of the best-known Hollywood films about Holl...

This chapter singles out accounts of three eras that have preoccupied backstudios. First it looks at films that depict fictionalized versions of real Hollywood scandals from the ea...

This chapter looks at two rather recent ways that backstudios have moved the virtual world of moviemaking off the screen. “Immersive Hollywood” occurs when fictional characters int...

Hollywood Online provides a historical account of motion picture websites from 1993 to 2008 and their marketing function as industrial advertisements for video and other media in t...

One of Hollywood's first openly Latin stars, Jennifer Lopez has held fast to her New York Bronx roots, while rising above them to become the highest paid Latina actress in history....

This chapter looks at female star narratives of the 1920s and 1930s, from The Extra Girl (1923) and Souls for Sale (1923) to Alice in Movieland (1940) and Star Dust (1940), discuss...

This chapter examines the discursive circulation of Kathryn Bigelow's 2008 film The Hurt Locker and the debates that broke out about the suppression of gender in her 2010 Academy A...