Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.001.0001
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn ...
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The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.Less
The history of Hollywood’s postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era’s last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood’s awkward adolescence during which the company town’s many competing subcultures -- celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients – came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood: Crime and Punishment in Postwar Los Angeles focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War.
Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.003.0004
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal ...
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The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.Less
The gossip industry underwent a fundamental transition after the war, from the gawking clatter of the classical era fan magazines to the gossip columns of Hedda Hopper and Louella Parsons and scandal sheets that so successfully harried the Hollywood community after the war. Movie stars were lucky and pretty, rich and famous. But they were as well political neophytes and their everyday lives were, thanks to the columnists after the war, lumbered with undue consequence. It was one thing for the columnists to bemoan the unearned privileges of celebrity, and then to cut folks so lucky and full of themselves down to size. But it was quite another to cast the private and personal lives of these celebrities as fundamentally anti-social and un-American, to subject the lives and loves of movie stars to a narrow and frankly unrelated notion of patriotism, one that asked movie stars to behave, or at least pretend to behave, like the rest of us.
Jon Lewis
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9780520284319
- eISBN:
- 9780520959910
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of California Press
- DOI:
- 10.1525/california/9780520284319.003.0005
- Subject:
- Film, Television and Radio, Film
Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads ...
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Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.Less
Transition-era Hollywood began with the dead body of Elizabeth Short and ended with two more discarded young women, Barbara Payton and Marilyn Monroe, two more casualties found at the crossroads between a dreamed-of life in the sunny city of angels and the reality lived by so many naïve arrivals after the Second World War. Payton and Monroe were glamorous movie stars who began their careers at the very moment Short ended hers. The Black Dahlia murder maybe did not register much with them. Or maybe it did and they figured a shot at movie celebrity was worth the risk. Payton and Monroe believed they were going to be different. They believed in what men had for years been whispering in their ears: “you’re so pretty you should be in pictures.” They were (pretty that is)… and they did (appear in pictures). But movie-land success was for them a mixed blessing at best, their dreamed-of Hollywood celebrity hopelessly complicated by a new breed of industry middlemen, gangsters, and gossip, their lives cut short before their fortieth birthdays.
Jing Jamie Zhao
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- January 2018
- ISBN:
- 9789888390809
- eISBN:
- 9789888390441
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Hong Kong University Press
- DOI:
- 10.5790/hongkong/9789888390809.003.0005
- Subject:
- Society and Culture, Gay and Lesbian Studies
This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian ...
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This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.Less
This chapter presents a critical analysis of Chinese fans’ queer gossip discourse surrounding the American actress Katherine Moennig, most famous still for her breakthrough role as a butch lesbian character in the television series The L Word (Showtime, 2004–2009). Through a deconstructive reading of the gossip that imagines Moennig’s real-life lesbian gender identities and homoerotic relationships in one of the largest cross-cultural fandoms in Chinese cyberspace, The Garden of Eden (Yidianyuan), the author reveals that, rather than simply assimilating or rejecting the normative understandings of the West as a civilized, queer-friendly haven and China as a backward, heterocentric nation, the fans’ intricate fantasies about the Western queer world reflect their subjective, hybridized reappropriation and reinscription of the Chinese queer Occidentalist imaginations. Ultimately, she argues that the queer Occidentalism exemplified in this cross-cultural gossip functions as a survival strategy for queer fans to interrogate the depressing, heteropatriarchal realities in contemporary mainstream Chinese society.
Jon Schubert
- Published in print:
- 2017
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781501713699
- eISBN:
- 9781501709692
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7591/cornell/9781501713699.003.0005
- Subject:
- Anthropology, Asian Cultural Anthropology
This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals ...
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This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals the tensions between what people see as the real functioning of society, and their perspectives on how society should work. However, the idea of kinship an oppositional discourse must be complicated through the exploration of the everyday practice of mobilising cunhas (personal connections) for one’s own purposes. Exploring these cunhas — based on intimate knowledge of Luandan family networks — allows us to trace the multiple linkages between state and society, combine in the analysis social strata commonly studied separately, and complicate any overly simplistic notions of nepotism and corruption. Less
This chapter looks at practices of situative kinship in everyday interactions between citizens and agents of the state, and the ideas of power and hierarchy expressed in these practices. This reveals the tensions between what people see as the real functioning of society, and their perspectives on how society should work. However, the idea of kinship an oppositional discourse must be complicated through the exploration of the everyday practice of mobilising cunhas (personal connections) for one’s own purposes. Exploring these cunhas — based on intimate knowledge of Luandan family networks — allows us to trace the multiple linkages between state and society, combine in the analysis social strata commonly studied separately, and complicate any overly simplistic notions of nepotism and corruption.
Wendy Parkins
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- September 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780748641277
- eISBN:
- 9780748684403
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9780748641277.003.0001
- Subject:
- Literature, 19th-century and Victorian Literature
This chapter introduces the material and discursive aspects of life writing that underpin this study. That is, it outlines both the textual archive on which previous accounts of Jane Morris have been ...
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This chapter introduces the material and discursive aspects of life writing that underpin this study. That is, it outlines both the textual archive on which previous accounts of Jane Morris have been based (letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies, especially biographies of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the artefacts which may also have a role in re-telling the story of a life, such as embroidery, designs and keepsake books produced by Jane Morris. Integral to this book’s project to present an alternative account of Jane Morris is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus which seeks to foreground how a sense of self and agency are shaped through the conjunction of larger social structures (such as class) and specific material environments and locations (such as the family home or the workplace).Less
This chapter introduces the material and discursive aspects of life writing that underpin this study. That is, it outlines both the textual archive on which previous accounts of Jane Morris have been based (letters, diaries, memoirs and biographies, especially biographies of William Morris and Dante Gabriel Rossetti) and the artefacts which may also have a role in re-telling the story of a life, such as embroidery, designs and keepsake books produced by Jane Morris. Integral to this book’s project to present an alternative account of Jane Morris is Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of habitus which seeks to foreground how a sense of self and agency are shaped through the conjunction of larger social structures (such as class) and specific material environments and locations (such as the family home or the workplace).
Rebecca Roach
- Published in print:
- 2018
- Published Online:
- September 2018
- ISBN:
- 9781474412537
- eISBN:
- 9781474445054
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Edinburgh University Press
- DOI:
- 10.3366/edinburgh/9781474412537.003.0014
- Subject:
- Literature, Women's Literature
This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping ...
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This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.Less
This chapter traces the figure of the female or ‘Lady Interviewer’ across the interwar period. A target of satire in the media, the Lady Interviewer was regularly conceived as a garrulous, gossiping figure. Yet she also had her real-life counterparts: women who used this stereotype to break into the print and broadcast media industries in increasing numbers, and who in turn supported the expansion of print media oriented towards women’s professional and social interests. Increasingly close associations between female journalists and Hollywood fan magazines in the 1920s and 1930s, would however, see a decline in the reputation of both the Lady Interviewer and her female readers. This chapter explores the constructions of specific reading communities forged through interviewing in popular media.
Christopher Prior
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780719083686
- eISBN:
- 9781781704998
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Manchester University Press
- DOI:
- 10.7228/manchester/9780719083686.003.0003
- Subject:
- History, Imperialism and Colonialism
This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school ...
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This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school system, the colonial services of Africa were in fact riven with tensions along a number of axes, including age and different approaches to governance. Most significant of these, however, was officials' ongoing search for individualistic self-fulfillment untrammelled by the endeavours and attitudes of others. Whilst many recognised that socialising was essential to their morale, many officials simultaneously resented the constraints that being a member of a small, inward-looking, and gossip-driven European community placed upon them. Public schools therefore failed in their efforts to inculcate all with a sense of an esprit de corps amongst Britain's overseas officials.Less
This chapter will argue that, in contrast with the usual argument that officials worked effectively alongside one another, bound by fraternal sentiments fostered in large part by the public school system, the colonial services of Africa were in fact riven with tensions along a number of axes, including age and different approaches to governance. Most significant of these, however, was officials' ongoing search for individualistic self-fulfillment untrammelled by the endeavours and attitudes of others. Whilst many recognised that socialising was essential to their morale, many officials simultaneously resented the constraints that being a member of a small, inward-looking, and gossip-driven European community placed upon them. Public schools therefore failed in their efforts to inculcate all with a sense of an esprit de corps amongst Britain's overseas officials.
- Published in print:
- 2009
- Published Online:
- March 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780226068633
- eISBN:
- 9780226068664
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- University of Chicago Press
- DOI:
- 10.7208/chicago/9780226068664.003.0009
- Subject:
- History, History of Science, Technology, and Medicine
The move from books to magazines takes us into different territory, although there was some overlap between the kind of popular science written for self-education in the two formats. Magazines were ...
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The move from books to magazines takes us into different territory, although there was some overlap between the kind of popular science written for self-education in the two formats. Magazines were published for a wide range of different readers, from those with a serious interest in science to those seeking news about how technical developments might affect their everyday lives. The total readership of all kinds seems to have been limited; so many publications tried to reach both the serious and the general reader, but satisfied neither. Peter Broks charts a decline in the coverage of science in popular magazines during the first decade of the twentieth century, and there was even less science during the interwar period. Items relating to science featured regularly in some special-interest publications where there was an obvious link with a particular area of science. Three relatively serious popular science magazines founded in the late Victorian period were Science Gossip, Knowledge, and Illustrated Science News.Less
The move from books to magazines takes us into different territory, although there was some overlap between the kind of popular science written for self-education in the two formats. Magazines were published for a wide range of different readers, from those with a serious interest in science to those seeking news about how technical developments might affect their everyday lives. The total readership of all kinds seems to have been limited; so many publications tried to reach both the serious and the general reader, but satisfied neither. Peter Broks charts a decline in the coverage of science in popular magazines during the first decade of the twentieth century, and there was even less science during the interwar period. Items relating to science featured regularly in some special-interest publications where there was an obvious link with a particular area of science. Three relatively serious popular science magazines founded in the late Victorian period were Science Gossip, Knowledge, and Illustrated Science News.
