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Copyright is at once an engine of free expression and impediment to free expression. Copyright law underwrites much literature, journalism, music, art, and film. Yet copyright often stands in the way of speech that would build upon existing expression to convey new messages and artistic perspectives.

In a seminal 1970 article, Melville Nimmer, the leading copyright and First Amendment scholar of his day, aptly termed the copyright‐free speech conflict a “largely ignored paradox.” Yet today that conflict has come virulently to the fore, and copyright is increasingly chastised as a tool of private censorship.

Why has that happened? What values and practices does the copyright‐free speech conflict put at stake? How should the conflict be resolved?

These are the principal questions this book seeks to answer. This book explores the copyright‐free speech conflict as it cuts across traditional and digital media alike. In so doing, it juxtaposes the dramatic expansion of copyright holders' proprietary control against individuals' newly found ability to digitally cut, paste, edit, remix, and distribute popular sound recordings, movies, TV programs, graphics, and texts the world over. It tests whether, in light of these developments and others, copyright still serves as a vital engine of free expression and assesses how copyright does—and does not—burden speech. Taking First Amendment values as its lodestar, the book argues that copyright should be delimited by how it can best promote robust debate and expressive diversity, and it presents a blueprint for how that can be accomplished.

This book tells the remarkable personal and professional story of Lewis Milestone (1895-1980), one of the most prolific, creative and respected film directors of Hollywood’s Golden Age. Among his many films are the classics All Quiet on the Western Front, Of Mice and Men, A Walk in the Sun, Pork Chop Hill, the original Ocean’s Eleven and Mutiny on the Bounty, starring Marlon Brando. Born in Ukraine, he came to America as a teenager and learned about film in the U.S. Army in World War I. By the early 1920s he was editing silent films in Hollywood, and soon graduated to shooting his own features. His films were nominated for 28 different Academy Awards during a career that lasted 40 years. Among the many stars whom he directed were Barbara Stanwyck, Ingrid Bergman, Gregory Peck, Errol Flynn, Gary Cooper, Frank Sinatra, Joan Crawford and Kirk Douglas. Providing biographical information, production history and critical analysis, this first major scholarly study of Milestone places his films in a political, cultural and cinematic context. Also discussed in depth, using newly available archival material, is Milestone’s experience during the Hollywood Blacklist period, when he was one of the first prominent Hollywood figures to fall under suspicion for his alleged Communist sympathies. Drawing on his personal papers at the AMPAS library, my book gives Milestone the honored place herichly deserves in the American film canon.

Widely acknowledged as a highly innovative film, Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch was released in 1969. From the outset, the movie was considered controversial because of its powerful, graphic, and direct depiction of violence, but it was also praised for its lush photography, intricate camera work, and cutting-edge editing. Peckinpah’s tale of an ill-fated, aging outlaw gang bound by a code of honor is often regarded as one of the most complex and influential Westerns in American cinematic history. The issues dealt with in this groundbreaking film—violence, morality, friendship, and the legacy of American ambition and compromise—are just as relevant today as when the film first debuted. To honor the significance of The Wild Bunch, this collection brings together leading Peckinpah scholars and critics to examine what many consider to be the director’s greatest work. The book’s nine essays explore the function of violence in the film and how its depiction is radically different from what is seen in other movies; the background of the film’s production; the European response to the film’s view of human nature; and the role of Texas/Mexico milieu in the narrative.

This book tells the story of the “Emperor of Film”, who dominated the golden age of Chinese silent movies. Jin Yan achieved his greatest stardom in the 1930s, when women literally threw themselves at his feet. Married first to the Chinese actress Wang Renmei, his movie roles with “the Goddess” Ruan Ling-yu spurred public demand for more of them together in films made by the leading studio, Lianhua. It was Jin who made Ruan aware of film's awesome power to portray social problems while evading the censors with melodramatic soap opera formats. Jin's life spanned the most turbulent period in modern Chinese history — a childhood escape from Japanese-occupied Korea, through the long civil war, the bitter Cultural Revolution, and Deng Xiaoping's reformation. Jin's embodiment of the modernizing May Fourth ideals of the 1920s and 30s added a new layer of sexuality to the liberal movement, but the Communists later cast Jin aside in their campaign to “learn from Lei Feng”, a humble young soldier. As Jin's second wife Qin Yi rose to new heights in the politically charged film world, the sick and aging star languished in obscurity. This book reproduces dozens of stills from the personal collection of Qin Yi and the China Film Archive, and contextualizes Jin's tragic transformation with details on many fellow performers.

Infernal Affairs has received journalistic, popular and corporate notice but little vigorous critical attention. This book explores the way this example of Hong Kong's cinematic eclecticism has crossed borders as a story, a commercial product and a work of art; and has had an undeniable impact on current Hong Kong cinema. Moreover the author uses this film to highlight the way Hong Kong cinema continues to be inextricably intertwined with global film culture and the transnational movie market.

In the postwar era, the lure of controversy sold movie tickets as much as the promise of entertainment did. This book investigates the movie culture that emerged as official censorship declined and details how the struggle to free the screen has influenced our contemporary understanding of art and taste. These conflicts over film content were fought largely in the theaters and courts of New York City in the decades following World War II. Many of the regulators and religious leaders who sought to ensure that no questionable content invaded the public consciousness were headquartered in New York, as were the critics, exhibitors, and activists who sought to expand the options available to moviegoers. Despite Hollywood's dominance of film production, New York proved to be not only the arena for struggles over film content but also the market where the financial fates of movies were sealed. Advocates for a wider range of cinematic expression eventually prevailed against the forces of censorship, but Freedom to Offend is no simple homily on the triumph of freedom from repression. In this analysis of controversies surrounding films from The Bicycle Thief to Deep Throat, the book offers a cautionary tale about the responsible use of the twin privileges of free choice and free expression. It calls attention to what was lost as well as what was gained when movie culture freed itself from the restrictions of the early postwar years. It exposes the unquestioning defense of the doctrine of free expression as a form of absolutism that mirrors the censorial impulse found among the postwar era's restrictive moral guardians. Beginning in New York and spreading across America throughout the twentieth century, the battles between these opposing worldviews set the stage for debates on the social effects of the work of artists and filmmakers.

Rethinking the Teen Movie is the first academic monograph to theorise the construction of identity in the Hollywood Teen Movie, one of the most popular, yet academically overlooked film genres. As such, the book constitutes a significant intervention in Film Studies, providing a reconsideration of such key tropes as the male juvenile delinquent figure, the makeover and the teen vampire. Providing detailed case studies of key films from the genre, the book provides an innovative overview of the genre, and its relationship to performativity, intersectionality, post-feminism, and the post-human. Rebel Without a Cause, Grease, Pretty in Pink and Twilight are all considered here in a volume destined to be used widely in undergraduate teaching and academic scholarship alike

The “New Hollywood” that emerged in the late sixties is now widely recognized as an era of remarkable filmmaking, when directors enjoyed a unique autonomy to craft ambitious, introspective movies that evinced a cinematic world of hard choices, complex interpersonal relationships, compromised heroes, and uncertain outcomes. The New Hollywood Revisited brings together a remarkable collection of authors (some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood as it unfolded), to revisit this unique era in American cinema (circa 1967-1976). It was a decade in which a number of extraordinary factors – including the end of a half-century-old censorship regime and economic and demographic changes to the American film audience – converged and created a new type of commercial film, imprinted with the social and political context of the times: the civil rights movement, the Vietnam War, the sexual revolution, women’s liberation, economic distress, urban decay, and, looming, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon presidency. This volume offers the opportunity to look back, with nearly fifty years hindsight, at a golden age in American filmmaking.