Search Results

Industries, firms, and entrepreneurs in the Bay Area and Los Angeles did not plan the economic divergence of their regions. They faced challenges from the restructuring of the Old Economy and benefited from the opportunities of the New Economy. Their successes and failures widened the income gap between the two regions. This chapter presents comparative case studies of entertainment, aerospace, information technology, logistics, and biotechnology in San Francisco and Los Angeles, showing how they developed differently and shaped specialization, wages, and income divergence in the two regions.

This concluding chapter explores how Hollywood's “technological tentpoles”—films that strategically promote cross-media commodities and new generations of devices, platforms, and hardware—serve as vehicles for the advancement of a broader technological system. In light of this cross-media industrial circumstance, the highly visible, international, big-budget blockbuster production makes manifest the developing relationships among media forms. The blockbuster, in a time of expanding talk and exploitation of “long tail” microcultural economies, advances multiple products and devices at once, and it does so through the formal mechanisms of cross-media promotional deals as well as through indirect support by being the most highly valued content for various platforms. Moving between entertainment industry events and a proliferating field of consumer electronics, the chapter then shows how audiovisual infrastructure is a product not only of economic priorities, but also of the conceptual frames that are circulated about them.

The 1984 film Gremlins is a classic example of how wondrous innocence can go astray. The adorable Gizmos on which we lavish love and attention in our typical middle-class homes can become the bratty Gremlins almost without our seeing why. In real life, most parents today think that this transformation has to do with their “breaking the rules”. Ironically, the ways that adults have shared the image of wondrous innocence with their children explains part of the shift from the cute to the cool. Adult fascination with the image of the cute child — the naughty-but-nice boy and the sweet and coquettish girl — redefined adult understanding of childhood in the rituals of family life in the early 20th century. Even more important, parents passed that fascination on to the children themselves. It is no surprise, then, that the entertainment industry appealed directly to children, in effect, accelerating the parents' penchant for passing the cute to the cute.

The focus of this chapter is twofold. First, to change industry perceptions, the Broadcasting and Film Commission launched a high-profile film awards program that would become the public face of the changes taking place within the Protestant agency. Second, under new leadership, the BFC tried to fully integrate its West Coast operation into the agency’s overall strategy in order to facilitate genuine dialogue between the church and entertainment industries. In a parallel move, the Legion of Decency adopted a new name and posture; the two church agencies began offering joint film awards. These events set the stage for extensive church cooperation with the film industry in finally bringing the Production Code Era to an end.

Following an initial consideration of some approaches and ideas put forward in recent writing on film and music, the “Great Divide” is explained and film music historically located in a cultural-critical space between the power of the entertainment industry and gendered notions about pleasure and consumption; arising out of the musical style of so-called late romanticism, it comes to represent the repressed, yet richly present, Other of Modernism in a critical discourse that predates the development of film.

What is at stake with the study of agenting is more than just bringing out of the shadows formerly invisible participants in the manufacture of popular culture. There are lessons to learn from this case study for understanding other types of activity and social worlds, and first of all other art and entertainment industries. Beyond the sole creative worlds, studying “talent agenting” also has an important analytic impact because it sheds light on the crucial role of intermediation and brokerage in highly specialized, differentiated societies. At a more structural level, what this book unveils of Hollywood may be useful for exploring power and action in other social worlds that are also experienced by the participants as relationship-driven all the while being highly institutionalized and organizationally structured spaces.

This chapter focuses on new technology and its impact on acting as an occupation. It begins by describing how the advent of film transformed patterns of employment in the commercial entertainment industry. Returning to the theme of cultural hierarchy, it goes on to argue that even as the legitimate theater drifted toward the periphery of the nation's cultural life, the old theatrical elite continued to claim the right, through the mechanism of the Actors' Equity Association (AEA), to speak for the entire acting community. After examining working conditions in the motion picture studios, it turns its attention to the Equity campaign to organize the film industry, asserting that its architects were less concerned with negotiating a standard contract than with imposing their authority upon the men and women of the silver screen. The chapter argues that an overwhelming majority of motion picture actors reacted with hostility to what they saw as the AEA's attempt to “Broadwayize” Hollywood, interpreting it as a threat to their collective autonomy and a denial of the specificity of their work. By refusing to obey the strike call in the summer of 1929, they were declaring their independence from the traditions of the legitimate stage.

This chapter is an overview of the business and political landscape of Swing-Era jazz music. Music arranging was a steadily growing field in America during the 1930s and 1940s, when the job was integral to many areas of the entertainment industry. Moreover, the music format most commonly associated with the Swing Era is the jazz dance big band. Although a number of bandleaders were notably capable arrangers themselves, most Swing Era stars lacked either the time or inclination to write large numbers of works for their own bands. Music arrangers thus found a central role within the business apparatus that supported the rise of big bands during the mid-1930s—an entertainment industry expansion enabled in part by a consolidation of radio, recording, and management enterprises during the Depression.

The introduction provides the theoretical argument of the book. It explains why the backstudio picture is not a cycle but a genre in its own right, and how the genre depicts Hollywood as a geographic place in Los Angeles, as an industry, and as a symbol. It goes on to show how the backstudio picture has historically served to brand the motion picture industry as “Hollywood,” working in much the same way as consumer brands do today. Additionally, the introduction provides a historical overview of the genre, focusing on its four major cycles of production, from the silent era to the present day. Finally, it briefly describes the content of the seven chapters.

This chapter begins with an investigation of the arrival in New York City of Rick’s Cabaret, a publicly traded, clean-cut topless strip club based in Houston. Rick’s Cabaret International, Inc. owns fourteen clubs in six states and in Argentina, as well as several adult Internet sites, and in 2007 moved to the NASDAQ Global Market. Rick’s consolidation model acquires “independently owned mom-and-pop operations” that can be easily converted into Rick’s outlets. Rick’s is useful for this study because it has developed different specialized brands for its different chains according to the niches they serve: Rick’s Cabaret for “high-end white-collar business travelers”; XTC clubs for working-class men, a “little louder and rowdier”; and Club Onyx, which caters “largely to Black and Hispanic professionals and athletes.” When Rick’s opened in midtown Manhattan in September 2005, it introduced the notion of strip clubs as a potential site for shareholder profit making.

This chapter examines conspiracy thinking about the end of the days. It describes how each generation of Christian Americans, believing itself to be the last one, reinterpreted bible verses so that current events came to be perceived as the fulfillment of biblical prophecies. Evangelists aggressively called for repentance and mobilized the faithful by stoking the belief in exceptionalism, distrust of government, and a sense of national decline. The imminence of the millennium helped bring their cause to the center of American politics and society. The entertainment industry also supported these efforts by mainstreaming the apocalyptic message and its conspiracy theme.

This chapter discusses Swing Era nightclub and theater revues and how they extended the vaudeville entertainment format of previous decades. Few figures of the Swing Era roamed more widely than a freelance musician or a freelance arranger. In particular, the chapter focuses on Chappie Willet's arranging work in several prominent venues. While touring revues presented Willet's arrangements in venues across the country, his workspaces in New York City ranged from Broadway theaters to basement bars, from exclusive nightclubs to amateur talent shows. This chapter provides accounts which offer a media snapshot of the arranger's working world—an extensive network of people and places that stretched from Harlem to Times Square.

This chapter defines the product Fred Astaire sold and how he made it. Astaire worked within a popular music culture that relied on songs, originating as sheet music and presented to the public in a variety of routined forms. From his position in Hollywood, the entertainment industry was a realm where songs both old and new were sold by professionals with distinctive, personal styles, and who were eager to please their audiences and keep them wanting more. In an interview with Joseph McBride in 1981, Astaire described his life's work as “trying to make a buck and make it look good and knock a lot of people on their ass in the aisle.” The chapter considers how he went about doing this, looking briefly at his relationships with the songwriters who wrote specifically for him and his collaborative work with several kinds of showbusiness professionals who assisted him in routining songs for film, television, and records. It also looks at Astaire's primary creative focus on making musical numbers, rather than musical films.

This chapter examines the relationship between race and sexuality in the entertainment industry and how speculations about aberrant sexuality cohere to a range of black bodies and genders. It expands traditional definitions of the down low—a phenomenon in which black men engage in sex with both men and women even though they do not identify as gay, queer, or bisexual—as well as its focus on black masculinity and secretive sexual practice to include a range of genders subject to homosexual or transsexual speculations. It also explicitly takes up the question of what is queer about black celebrity by analyzing gossip blogs such as Queerty.com, the Rodonline blog, Starpulse.com, and Bossip.com. It argues that we must understand how rumor and gossip articulate with modes of popular panopticism that regulate queer and black bodies through seemingly innocuous acts of consumption.

Chapter 2 explores the relationship between the Victorian entertainment industry and the emergent ‘professional’ classical archaeological establishment at mid-century. It offers the first overview of the role that classical sculpture and architecture played in nineteenth-century shows of London, spanning actors posing in bodystockings, medical wax work museums, casts at Madame Tussauds, and the Regent’s Park Colosseum. It provides the first detailed assessment of the public display of classical sculpture in 1850s Britain, at the British Museum and beyond, and situates these displays within the history of classical archaeology. It features detailed discussion of 1850s archaeological engagements at the Crystal Palace, looking at polychromy and the relationship between Greek ‘originals’ and Roman ‘copies’ of sculpture. It argues that in 1850s London, ‘amateur’ and ‘professional’, ‘entertainment’, and ‘education’ ought to be seen in tandem, rather than as polar opposites. It foregrounds the Crystal Palace as a prime location for exploring such connections.

This chapter describes a genre-based variety in Swing Era music programs, where commercial and artistic success depended on a musical fluency across a range of genres; including classics, jazz concertos, novelty songs, vocal ballads, jazz dance instrumentals, and exotic numbers. It provides case studies exploring the communicative power behind these negotiations of genre, performer identity, and arranging style. In addition to the celebration of artistic versatility, Chappie Willet's legacy as a commercially successful black musician working in a segregated entertainment industry that often invoked racialized conceptions of style and creativity suggests additional motivations behind some of these Swing Era arranging strategies. His work for the Jimmie Lunceford orchestra offers an example of “jazzing the classics” that highlights some of the commercial, political, and artistic forces at work behind these hybrid creations.