You didn’t pick up an Oscar this year at the Academy Awards? Well, with Hollywood films in mind, here’s a book you’ll want to pick up: Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross. In addition, it’s this week’s book giveaway on Facebook.

Liberal and radical films declined in the 1920s as an emerging Hollywood studio system, pressured by censors and Wall Street investors, pushed American film in increasingly conservative directions. Appealing to people’s dreams of luxury and upward mobility, studios produced lavish fantasy films that shifted popular attention away from the problems of the workplace and toward the pleasures of the new consumer society. While worker filmmakers were trying to heighten class consciousness, Hollywood producers were suggesting that class no longer mattered. Working-Class Hollywood shows how silent films helped shape the modern belief that we are a classless nation.

“Steve Ross has written an absorbing and important book about a time when working-class life and working-class filmmakers occupied a central place in American cinema. I strongly recommend that anyone interested in the politics of American film read this book.”–Michael Moore, Director of Roger and Me and TV Nation

Anyone who LIKES us on Facebook is automatically entered in our weekly draws. This Friday at 3:30 p.m. EST, check out our facebook page to find out, “And the winner is….”

Working-Class Hollywood by Steven J. Ross

On December 1, the Modern Language Association of America (MLA) declared Anton Kaes, author of Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, winner of the ninth Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione Prize for Studies in Germanic Languages and Literatures. The award recognizes outstanding scholarly work on the linguistics or literatures of of the Germanic languages.

The committee’s citation for the winning book reads:
The thread count of Anton Kaes’s Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War is high. Selecting from all the filaments of the most innovative genealogies of media, politics, and psychoanalysis, Kaes has woven a central thread tying the epidemic breakdown of war neurosis to the expressive breakthrough of German film. Shell Shock Cinema is one of those enviable books that we can now not imagine being without. How did we not see before the ways in which aberrant mourning, the technical media, traumatic neurosis, and projective politics met and crossed over during the Weimar period? As a new standard work, Shell Shock Cinema will guide the study of German expressionist film in its many contexts for years to come.

The prize will be presented on January 7, 2011 during the association’s annual convention in Los Angeles.

To read the rest of the press release, click here.

Every year, the German Studies Association (GSA) gives out a book prize funded through the North American office of the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD). The prize alternates between two groups of academic disciplines represented by the GSA. During odd years, the award is offered to books in the fields of history, political science, and other social sciences. During even years, the award applies to books about German language and literature, cultural studies, and the humanities. This year, an even year, the prize was given to Anton Kaes’ book, Shell Shock Cinema: Weimar Culture and the Wounds of War, which was declared the best work about German culture that was published in the past two years.

In Shell Shock Cinema, Kaes discusses the representation of cultural trauma in Germany following World War I in classical German cinema. The book has been declared “landmark in film studies” by Choice magazine and “cinema scholarship at its most mature and also most adventuresome” by author Tom Gunning.

Kaes will receive an award of $1000 for his hard work and excellent scholarship. Well done and congratulations!

To see a complete listing of other recent PUP award-winning books, please click here.

BOOK FACT: Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms.

Today’s moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products–even some blockbusters–to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie “art.” In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public’s perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves.

Read chapter one online:
Hollywood Highbrow:
From Entertainment to Art
By Shyon Baumann

For more books in the online sale catalog, visit:
http://press.princeton.edu/booksale/

Do you know “Bluebeard”? Maria Tatar, Harvard professor and author several Princeton titles including Secrets beyond the Door: The Story of Bluebeard and His Wives, is interviewed in an article about Catherine Beillat’s recent film adaptation of the dark European folk tale in this weekend’s New York Times:

“I’m always astonished at how few people know this story,” she said in a phone interview, “especially considering how many films and other works it has inspired.” Ms. Tatar noted that Charlotte Brontë’s “Jane Eyre” and Daphne du Maurier’s “Rebecca” owe something of their plots to the spirit of “Bluebeard.” And she devotes a section of her book to a raft of films made in the 1940s, including George Cukor’s “Gaslight” (1944), Alfred Hitchcock’s “Notorious” (1946) and Fritz Lang’s “Secret Beyond the Door …” (1948), that do not overtly reference the tale but nevertheless turn on a wife’s fear of her largely unknown husband and his possible desire for her throat. More recently, Jane Campion featured a Bluebeard pantomime in her 1993 film “The Piano.”

Read the full article here.

I admit, I had never heard of The Black List until I read Elizabeth Currid’s article in today’s Los Angeles Times.

So, for those of you not “in the know” either, here’s a quick description from Currid:

Known as the Black List, this annual ranking of the year’s most-talked-about unproduced screenplays has the power to catapult an unknown screenwriter into instant talks with a major studio. That’s how Diablo Cody, writer of “Juno,” got her break.

Currid, who previously examined the importance of cultural sites for economics in The Warhol Economy, looks at the box-office success of past black list scripts. This practical approach is fascinating.

Altogether, 67 Black List scripts from 2005 were turned into movies between 2006 and 2008, and they collectively generated $2.5 billion in U.S. box-office receipts. That figure is equivalent to the total of the top 10 earners in 2008.

Given this track record, why has the Black List achieved such inordinate influence?

Head over to the LA Times web site to read the complete article, and for a sneak preview of this year’s possible black list scripts, visit Indie Movies Online. The official list is circulated only to industry executives, though it almost always slips out into the media.

Al and Marilyn*

Tony Rothman

Film lovers over forty may remember the scene in Nicholas Roeg’s 1985 Insignificance where “The actress,” who bears an uncanny resemblance to Marilyn Monroe, explains the theory of relativity to “The Professor,” whose wild hair leaves no doubt as to his identity.  One wonders whether Roeg could make his film today with impunity, because Albert and Marilyn have more in common than relativity; they have in common celebrity.

Several years ago I had a book in press, Everything’s Relative and Other Fables From Science and Technology.  Given the title, the publisher’s house artist not unreasonably designed a cover that included a photographic image of Albert Einstein.  The publisher (Wiley) had properly licensed the photo from Bill Gates’ firm Corbis.  One would have thought that would end the matter.