Golden Age, Blue Pencils: The Hal Roach Studios and three case studies of censorship during Hollywood's studio era

Media History ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 103-119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Ward
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Studio Era

Produced by Irving Thalberg

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ana Salzberg
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Conceptual Understanding ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Theoretical Perspective ◽  
Turning Points ◽  
Romeo And Juliet ◽  
Mass Audience ◽  
Production Code ◽  
Studio Era

Irving Thalberg was not just a critically important producer during Hollywood’s Golden age, but also an innovative theorist of studio-era filmmaking. Drawing on archival sources, this is the first book to explore Thalberg’s insights into casting, editing, story composition and the importance of the mass audience from a theoretical perspective. The book argues that Thalberg’s views represent a unified conceptual understanding of production – one that is still significant in the modern day. It examines Thalberg’s impact on film-historical turning points, including the transition from silent to sound cinema and the development of the Production Code, and features in-depth analyses of his productions at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer from 1924 to 1936. Indeed, each chapter offers a reading of Thalberg’s films through his own theoretical lens, thus highlighting his insights into production and introducing new ways of considering his classic pictures, including The Big Parade (1925), The Broadway Melody (1929) and Romeo and Juliet (1936). The work concludes by assessing his resonance in popular culture, tracing the mythology of Thalberg as it evolved after his death in 1936.

Introduction: Searching for Gold in an Age of Iron

2018 ◽  
pp. 1-24
Author(s):  
Meredith E. Safran
Keyword(s):  
Classical Tradition ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Iron Age ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Popular Media ◽  
Technological Innovations ◽  
Television Series ◽  
Ancient Greek ◽  
Cultural Patrimony ◽  
Historical Societies

This volume introduction analyzes a pervasive fantasy in American popular media: the desire to escape an “iron age” deemed materially and morally degraded in comparison with an idealized lost world that people hope somehow to recover. This idealized “golden age” is viewed with the painful longing of nostalgia and the sorrow of belatedness from the degraded “iron age” of the viewer’s present time, often accompanied by inquiry into how and why golden conditions no longer obtain. Self-proclaimed heirs to classical antiquity’s cultural patrimony adopted this myth with alacrity, and its deployment can be traced continuously throughout the classical tradition, including in popular media not conventionally associated with classicism. The introduction reviews key strands of golden-age discourse in ancient Greek and Roman texts, including views on human-divine relations, gender relations, and technological innovations; and modern receptions of historical societies as golden ages to be emulated, especially Periclean Athens, Thermopylae-era Sparta, and Augustan Rome. Case studies include the Vergilian concept of “Arcadia” as deployed in the sci-fi television series The 100 and “golden age thinking” as a psychological malady in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.

scholarly journals «Strong Curtains» and «Dramatic Punches»: The Legacy of Playwriting in the Screenwriting Manuals of the Studio Era

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (1) ◽  
pp. 109-122
Author(s):  
Raffaele Chiarulli
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Narrative Structures ◽  
Art Form ◽  
The Sixties ◽  
History Of ◽  
Production Practices ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Classical Hollywood Cinema ◽  
Narrative Conventions ◽  
Classical Hollywood

The Hollywood Golden Age was a revolutionary moment in the history of cinema and is pivotal to understanding the historical passage of a peculiar new art form –screenwriting. This early film period, from the Tens to the Sixties, was determined by key interactions between the respective forms of cinema and stage. Together, these interactions form a wider screenwriting “discourse.” There are reoccurring disputes in film scholarship over the paternity of the conventions and techniques of screenwriting. One solution is that techniques of theatre playwriting persisted extensively in the production practices of classical Hollywood cinema. Whether or not its professionals were aware of this is at the heart of this dispute. It is possible to identify the contribution of screenwriting manuals from Hollywood’s Golden Age toward the standardization of screenwriting techniques. The article aims to examine in the screenwriting manuals of this period some statements by practitioners who document the normalization and codification of the narrative structures used in screenwriting over time –in particular, the three-act structure. The validity and origin of the three-act structure are constantly debated among screenwriters. While this formula was known to the early writers of the Silent Era due to its legacy throughout centuries of playwriting and literature, it reappeared in the Seventies in the guise of a new theory. This article attempts to fill in certain gaps in the history of the theorization of screenwriting practices by juxtaposing statements found in screenwriting manuals and the statements of scholars and educators of this field. Ultimately, narrative conventions belonging to the tradition of theatre, as well as technological exigencies were integral in shaping the cinema techniques in use today.

Proximal Relations in the Cinema of Tom Kalin

2021 ◽  
pp. 44-74
Author(s):  
Laura Stamm
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Health Crisis ◽  
Observational Mode ◽  
Studio Era ◽  
Normative Models

The case studies of Tom Kalin’s Swoon (1992) and Savage Grace (2007) are the basis of Chapter 2’s return to cinema’s biomedical history, as well as to psychoanalytic models of suturing, to excavate queer filmmakers’ disruption of normative models of spectatorship. By examining the modes of looking and investigating already established by the studio-era scientist biopics, this second chapter argues that queer filmmakers returned to this observational mode in the midst of a health crisis. Kalin’s films are concerned with the biopic’s premise of proximity, being close to a historically or socially significant individual, but in such a way that puts forth alternative modes of vision and inspection. The biopic’s promise of closeness to an individual follows the Hollywood cinema’s conventions of cinematic suturing; the spectators identify with the narration of the biopic’s subject and locate themselves in the depicted cinematic world.

scholarly journals ‘Everybody’s Free to Fail’

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Browne
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
National Theatre ◽  
Broadway Musical ◽  
Broadway Musicals

This chapter explores the ways in which the British model of subsidizing arts-related activities has encouraged theatres to programme ambitiously and afforded directors the freedom to adopt a fresh, innovative, and often daring approach to their work for the stage. Whilst staging a revival of a Broadway musical classic may seem far from daring, the case studies in this chapter elucidate the ways in which subsidy has allowed directors to address this material in a radical fashion. Exploring two very different theatrical venues reveals methods of programming: whilst the National Theatre chooses to present well-loved golden age Broadway musicals, the Donmar Warehouse focuses on intimate chamber musicals, rarely staged or revived in Britain. This chapter analyses how these musicals have been cast, staged, and received and, in doing so, highlights the manner in which directors have reimagined the Broadway musical for British audiences.

scholarly journals La edición del diálogo teatral (siglos XVI-XVII)

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Textual Criticism ◽  
Spanish Golden Age ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
The Relationship

The contributions that compose this book were presented at the XIV Taller Internacional de Estudios Textuales (Perugia 2018), where different issues related to the transmission of Spanish Golden Age plays and its relevance for modern editing were discussed. The relationship between autograph manuscripts and prompt books, the usus scribendi of professional copyists, the textual variant readings in the transmission of printed texts, the importance of meter for establishing texts and proving authorships, the comparison of Spanish and Anglo-American editing practices, and the adaptation of plays for the modern stage, are all issues addressed by means of case studies that elucidate unexpected angles of textual criticism.

scholarly journals The golden age of social science

2021 ◽  
Vol 118 (5) ◽  
pp. e2002923118
Author(s):  
Anastasia Buyalskaya ◽  
Marcos Gallo ◽  
Colin F. Camerer
Keyword(s):  
Social Networks ◽  
Best Practices ◽  
Social Science ◽  
Behavioral Economics ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Interdisciplinary Research ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
The Past ◽  
Interdisciplinary Approaches ◽  
Career Incentives

Social science is entering a golden age, marked by the confluence of explosive growth in new data and analytic methods, interdisciplinary approaches, and a recognition that these ingredients are necessary to solve the more challenging problems facing our world. We discuss how developing a “lingua franca” can encourage more interdisciplinary research, providing two case studies (social networks and behavioral economics) to illustrate this theme. Several exemplar studies from the past 12 y are also provided. We conclude by addressing the challenges that accompany these positive trends, such as career incentives and the search for unifying frameworks, and associated best practices that can be employed in response.

What “Golden Age”?

2019 ◽  
pp. 164-176
Author(s):  
Phillip Lopate
Keyword(s):  
Golden Age ◽  
Hollywood Cinema ◽  
New Hollywood ◽  
Counter Culture ◽  
Studio Era

In this chapter Phillip Lopate offers a dissent from the main themes of The New Hollywood Revisited, suggesting that the movement did not live up to the standards set by the best of the classic studio era and foreign art cinemas. The New Hollywood, in Lopate’s estimation, tapped into a zeitgeist dominated by the anti-war movement and the counter-culture that too often surrendered to a didactic, simplistic moralism. He acknowledges that there were wonderful passages in these films, with an energetic, cinematic daring. But the films were as well mired in a willful confusion and irresolution. In this introspective essay, Lopate assesses the styles of Cassavetes, Lumet and Altman, among others, and finds much to praise, despite his enduring wariness of New Hollywood cinema.

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