Topic Page: Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) Definition: Hollywood from Philip's Encyclopedia Suburb of Los Angeles, California, USA. After 1911 it became the primary centre for film-making in the USA, and by the 1930s its studios dominated world cinema. From the 1950s onwards, television became increasingly important. Summary Article: Hollywood from Encyclopedia of American Studies Image from: UNITED STATES in World and Its Peoples: The Americas When most people around the world think of Hollywood, they think of the famous Hollywood sign on Mount Lee in Griffith Park. But Hollywood is more than a geographical place, more than the various studio lots, the Walk of Fame, the guided tours to houses of the stars. Hollywood is a cultural construct, an American export of dreams and democratic ideals. Hollywood is the second cinema, the other cinema in most countries around the world. When applied as an adjective, the term Hollywood cinema is synonymous with mainstream, dominant, narrative cinema. It implies a global system of distribution and marketing of feature films (ninety minutes or more), which excludes shorts, documentaries, animation, and independent films, although some independent productions, such as Sundance films (formerly an independent bastion), look more and more like Hollywood films. Put simply, such films are usually big-budget productions with known stars and special effects, high production values and a concentration in genre films, sequels, melodramas, comedies, and action films. Defining Hollywood is not unlike defining the Old West, which in reality referred to a period of twenty-five years after the Civil War and before the turn of the twentieth century and a small geographical area of about seven western states (and sometimes Mexico; rarely Canada). But in the same way that the Old West is more mythical than mappable, having more to do with cultural ideas of justice and violence, Hollywood has come to mean the dream factory domestically and the dominant film ideology abroad. Other countries have had to resort to ingenious quota systems in order to protect their home film industries against the invasion of American films. In Europe, for instance, quota systems were established after World War II, in which there were major and minor partnerships set up between two countries. European neighborhood cinemas were required by law to show a certain percentage of home product before they could show a Hollywood film. But through a major-minor production system, a film got double passport status in two different countries. Jean-Luc Godard's Contempt (1963) was seventy percent French funded, thirty percent Italian funded, and played as a home film in Italy as well as France. A subsequent coproduction by Carlo Ponti at Italy's Cinecitta reversed the percentages and played in France as a French film. In this way European films were able to compete for a while against big-budget Hollywood films. This major-minor production system in film became the basis for the foundation of the European Common Market. But Hollywood soon found a way to compete. While such studios as Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), Universal, Paramount, and Twentieth Century-Fox have always competed in the United States for
honors and Oscars, they banded together in France as Les Artistes Associés, combining their efforts to fight the competition. By the mid-1960s Hollywood had become the minor partner in several film enterprises and Les Artistes Associés found ways to purchase foreign studios as silent owners, thus continuing to profit from double citizenship. François Truffaut was the first director to use American money as the second partner in his film Two English Girls (1966). Hollywood at home always has attracted and repelled: attracting actors, aspiring directors, even writers, while repelling some clergy and moral conservatives. What was lost in moral integrity in the various Hollywood scandals of the 1920s and 1930s was regained, and more, in glamour. Examples of films made about Hollywood include Billy Wilder's Sunset Boulevard (1950), Robert Altman's The Player (1992), the Coen Brothers' Barton Fink (1991), Vincent Minelli's The Bad and the Beautiful (1952), Tim Burton's Ed Wood (1994), and many others. Of these examples, Ed Wood, a movie about a secondstring film director, is possibly the only sympathetic portrayal. Novels about Hollywood are less plentiful but no less scathing in their portrayals. Nathanial West's The Day of the Locust (1939), F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Last Tycoon (1941), and Budd Schulberg's What Makes Sammy Run (1941) are the best of a list that also includes Christopher Isherwood's Prater Violet (1945), Lisa Alther's Kinflicks (1975), and Bruce Wagner's Force Majeure (1991). Hollywood has weathered quite well the occasional critique of both film and novel, primarily because it is founded on economic, not artistic, concerns. It was never reality that audiences asked of Hollywood, a fact not lost in Hollywood's love-hate relationship with verisimilitude and occasional flights of excess. Robert Altman ends his film The Long Goodbye (1973) with Hooray for Hollywood, and the song ironizes the entire film preceding, making fun of any willing suspension of disbelief that might have occurred. And in an age some have called postmodernist, images on film no longer necessarily refer to things outside the cinema in real life but can instead refer to other film objects or icons. Such is the case with the ending of the film Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990). The emergence of an atmosphere on the planet Mars does not resemble any atmosphere that might have been seen in television documentaries about the space program. Rather, the mountain on the horizon line of Mars is in fact the Paramount mountain, the studio's icon, an example of the merging of fiction's denouement and studio's self-promotion. Nonetheless, these examples point out the enduring strength of Hollywood as an industry and a cultural icon. Hollywood continues to celebrate itself amid competition from television, video, digital video display (DVD), and CD-ROM.
Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, California. 2005. Aaron Logan, photographer. Wikimedia Commons. Hollywood Walk of Fame. 2005. Wikimedia Commons.
Hollywood Sign. 2006. Sten R Bibliography Baumann, Shyon, Hollywood Highbrow: From Entertainment to Art (Princeton Univ. Press 2007). Bernardi, Daniel; Murray Pomerance; Hava Tirosh-Samuelson, Hollywood's Chosen People: The Jewish Experience in American Cinema (Wayne State Univ. Press 2012). Bordwell, David, et al., The Classical Hollywood Cinema: Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960 (Columbia Univ. Press 1986). Bordwell, David, The Way Hollywood Tells It: Story and Style in Modern Movies (Univ. of Calif. Press 2006). Brownlow, Kevin, Hollywood: The Pioneers (Knopf 1979). David, Ronald L., The Glamour Factory: Inside Hollywood's Big Studio System (Southern Methodist Univ. Press 1993). Decherney, Peter, Hollywood and the Culture Elite: How the Movies Became American (Columbia Univ. Press 2005). Elsaesser, Thomas, European Cinema: Face to Face with Hollywood (Amsterdam Univ. Press 2005). Gomery, Douglas, The Hollywood Studio System (St. Martin's 1986). Hall, Sheldon; Steve Neale, Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History (Wayne State Univ. Press 2010). Higgins, Mary Ellen, Hollywood's Africa after 1994 (Ohio Univ. Press 2012). Humphries, Reynold, Hollywood's Blacklists (Edinburgh Univ. Press 2009). Kirshner, Jonathan, Hollywood's Last Golden Age: Politics, Society, and the Seventies Film in America (Cornell Univ. Press 2012). Mann, Denise, Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover (Univ. of Minn. Press 2008). Miller, Toby, et al., Global Hollywood 2 (British Film Institute 2005). Norman, Barry, The Story of Hollywood (New Am. Lib. 1987). Scott, Allen John, On Hollywood: The Place, The Industry (Princeton Univ. Press 2005). William F. Van Wert
APA Chicago Harvard MLA Van Wert, W. F. (2018). Hollywood. In S. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved from Copyright 2018 The American Studies Association Copyright 2018 The American Studies Association
APA Van Wert, W. F. (2018). Hollywood. In S. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Retrieved from Chicago Van Wert, William F. "Hollywood." In Encyclopedia of American Studies, edited by Simon Bronner. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018. Harvard Van Wert, W.F. (2018). Hollywood. In S. Bronner (Ed.), Encyclopedia of American studies. [Online]. Johns Hopkins University Press. Available from: [Accessed 17 March 2019]. MLA Van Wert, William F. "Hollywood." Encyclopedia of American Studies, edited by Simon Bronner, Johns Hopkins University Press, 1st edition, 2018. Credo Reference,. Accessed 17 Mar. 2019.