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...

What do Babes in Arms, Beau Geste, Gunga Din, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Only Angels Have Wings, and Young Mr. Lincoln all have in common? They are all classic films released in ...

As the film industry was establishing itself at the start of the twentieth century, trade associations played a pivotal role in the emergence of the studio system. These producer-d...

Mary C. McCall Jr. was the Screen Writers Guild’s most valuable asset from its earliest days through the blacklist. Eventually, she would publicly sacrifice her career in Hollywood...

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...