The world according to Hollywood, 1918-1939

From Booklist

Why are golden age Hollywood's versions of history so strange? It is a matter of money, of course. The Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), on which Vasey focuses, was basically a marketing group primarily concerned with maximizing movie exportability. To that end, it enforced cultural and political innocuousness. Here is an instance of how MPPDA policy was practiced, absurdly: Warner Brothers' West of Shanghai (1937) was based on a story about a Mexican bandit. To avoid offending Mexicans, the setting was changed to China. To avoid offending Chinese, Warner Brothers ran it by the Chinese consul, who complained that the bandit army's duds too closely resembled Chinese army uniforms. Well, the uniforms appeared throughout the movie, so reshooting was impossible. Solution: a drippy written introduction about how bandits just might choose uniforms that looked like army gear; this, of course, only drew attention to the uniforms. And that's just one tale of corporate lunacy in this highly enjoyable study. Mike Tribby

Product Description

Explores some of the influences that shaped the world created by the movie industry between the world wars, especially the worldwide audience it was beginning to produce entertainment for. Shows how some themes and treatments survived the period, others were transmuted into different forms, and still other vanished. Among the topics are public relations, technology, regulations, the foreign market, and the politics of industry policy. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.

Review

"The World According to Hollywood will be a useful and important work, appealing to scholars interested in questions of national cinema and national identity, as well as the history of censorship and the MPPDA."-Lea Jacobs, author of The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film, 1928-1942 -- Lea Jacobs, author of The Wages of Sin: Censorship and the Fallen Woman Film , 1928-1942

About the Author

Ruth Vasey is a lecturer in the School of Theatre and Film Studies at the University of New South Wales, Australia. She is a contributor to two forthcoming books, The Oxford History of World Cinema and Movie Censorship and American Culture.