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There are few idols America holds dearer than the movie star, but it remains something of a mystery as to why a star either fades or persists in the public memory. This collection of essays attempts to examine the many factors that lead to either the longevity or brevity of a film career, such as nationality or age. Some of the stars analyzed here include Sophia Loren, Buster Keaton, and James Mason, and the collection goes beyond Hollywood to look at Bollywood, the Hungarian film industry, and European art-house cinema.

There’s no doubt that the films produced in Hollywood have provided a great deal of aesthetic pleasure for viewers in America and around the world. In this work, Berliner applies the psychology and philosophy of aesthetics to film history, and examines how the movies have managed to generate some of the most exhilarating aesthetic experiences mass audiences have ever known. Some of the movies examined here include His Girl Friday, Double Indemnity, and Raging Bull.

In the past, Hollywood was notoriously hostile to all people outside of the white mainstream, often portraying them in negative, stereotypical ways (such as in the infamous 1915 film The Birth of a Nation). This has improved over the years, however, and Garrett explores how movies might be used as vehicles for racial reconciliation. Through their potential for narrative truth-telling, they offer future hope for a departure from America’s racist history.

This scholarly work examines the age-old alliance between straight women and gay, bisexual, and queer men, and how that relationship has been portrayed in film and on television. Pullen argues that this archetype is both prolific and advancing in media, and examines the place it has under the “hetero media gaze.” As well, the book examines the films Rope and Suddenly Last Summer as prototypical representations of the queer gaze in film.

Adam Charles Hart seeks to discover just why it is that we enjoy the grotesque depictions of our fears in horror films. He notes that such movies, through their various innovations and stylistic choices, have had the profound ability to stimulate audiences continually over several decades. Through camera movement, jump scares, and off-screen monsters, horror flicks have always demanded a response from the viewer. Films examined in this work include Paranormal Activity, It Follows, and Get Out. It also looks at various video games, TV shows, and the presence of the genre across the Internet.

During World War II, it is no secret that Hollywood was quite cooperative with the major U.S. intelligence organizations, producing various propaganda films aimed at furthering the war effort and instilling patriotism in American citizens. However, the unwavering trust between Hollywood and the “secret state” began to change into a certain degree of incredulity by the 1960s (as evidenced in the James Bond films), and then morphed into dramatic skepticism and paranoia by the 1970s, as seen in such films as All the President’s Men (depicting Woodward and Bernstein’s investigation of the Watergate Scandal).

The twenty-first century has seen a major resurgence in the popularity of vampires and zombies, particularly in dystopian and post-apocalyptic settings. Dystopian vampires are usually thought of as seductive and alluring, while post-apocalyptic zombies are seen as repellent and infectious. Through an analysis of films like I Am Legend and 28 Days Later, as well as TV shows like Angel and The Walking Dead, author Stacey Abbott demonstrates that these two undead genres are actually “two sides of the same undead coin,” and that they have become increasingly interconnected.

Media studies researcher Sarah-Mai Dang notes that the “chick flick” is usually a genre that is not taken seriously by scholars. However, these films provide a great deal of aesthetic pleasure for the viewer—particularly the female spectator—which has led to their enduring popularity and significance in the culture. By linking feminist theory to the aesthetic film experience, this work shows that films aimed towards a female audience actually challenge the notion that “woman” is a clearly definable social category.

When Hitler became the chancellor of Germany in 1933, one of the many restrictions placed on Jews was to bar them from working in all sectors of the film industry. Therefore, many of the most talented Jewish directors working in Germany fled to Hollywood, including Fritz Lang (The Woman in the Window), Otto Preminger (The Man with the Golden Arm), and Billy Wilder (Some Like It Hot). They joined the previous generation of German filmmakers who had been scouted in the 1920s, such as F.M. Murnau (Sunrise) and Ernst Lubitsch (Ninotchka). Together, they helped to usher in the classical era of Hollywood cinema, and directed some of the most memorable films of that time.

This collection features rare celebrity interviews conducted over several decades by Hollywood journalists James Bawden and Ron Miller, who spoke with some of the most notable movie stars of the twentieth century. In it, Bette Davis talks about how she and Katharine Hepburn were rejected for the role of Scarlett O’Hara because they weren’t “gorgeous enough”; Janet Leigh analyzes her famous shower scene in the film Psycho and the years of nightmares it gave her; and Jimmy Stewart meditates on the idiosyncrasies of the famed “master of suspense,” Alfred Hitchcock. As a whole, the collection provides an intimate portrait of over six decades of the film industry in Hollywood.

This memoir tells the story of the successful director Edward Dmytryk, one of several Hollywood figures who were prosecuted for supposed communist affiliations. In 1947, he was called up by the House Un-American Activities Committee to be questioned about Tender Comrade—a 1943 film he had directed starring Ginger Rogers—that depicted women living communally while their husbands were off fighting in the Second World War. Accused of spreading communist propaganda, Dmytryk was defiant, and ultimately found to be in contempt of Congress. As a result, RKO fired him, and he had to serve a six-month jail sentence, after which he was questioned again and controversially gave evidence against several of his colleagues.

Practically since its inception, Hollywood has been a subject for writers of fiction in various forms. A common theme in these works is to focus on the American Dream, and Hollywood as a place of success and failure, betrayal and loss, and many other contradictory notions and images. For example, by the 1920s, the idea of the naïve movie-hopeful coming to town in hopes of achieving fame overnight had practically become a stock character in the American cultural imagination. Springer examines several notable fictional works with Hollywood as their subject, including They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? and The Day of the Locust.

It’s astounding that costume, makeup, and hair in film often are overlooked by scholars, for without these departments, movies simply couldn’t be made. In this fascinating work, McLean surveys the history of fashion and glamor in the movies from the 1890s to the present day. This includes an exploration of the transitions from stage to screen, monochrome to color, and analog to digital, all of which created new challenges for the costumers, makeup artists, and hairstylists of Hollywood. Here, costume designers such as Edith Head and Orry-Kelly, who inspired international fashion trends during their day, are finally given the recognition they deserve.

In the 1930s, actors like Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, and Katharine Hepburn became both famous and infamous for cross-dressing on the silver screen, transgressing the rigid gender norms of the time. However, gender-bending in film had been going on long before then—as early as the 1910s, women were regularly dressing as men on screen, and were not viewed as transgressive, but rather as wholesome. In this work, scholar Laura Horak explores why attitudes towards cross-dressing began to change in the 1920s and 30s, and how films depicting a wide array of gender-bending masculinities began to shape the public’s notion of lesbian identity at that time.

While cross-dressing women had found a place in mainstream cinema, drag queens and most depictions of gay subculture were confined to underground, avant-garde cinema. Films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising depicted the intersection of the gay and biker subculture, while Jack Smith’s experimental Flaming Creatures featured elaborate drag performances and graphic depictions of sexuality that led to obscenity charges. Suárez provides an overall intellectual and institutional history of underground American cinema, and how the works of these directors pioneered its success.

Judith Mayne takes a comprehensive look at how contemporary filmmakers have reinvented cinema as a narrative and visual form, specifically through what is known as “women’s cinema.” This does not refer to the often male-directed emotional melodramas of the 1930s-50s (known pejoratively as “the weepies”), but rather female-directed films that offer a rare depiction of the female point of view, with a specific focus on female desire. Mayne discusses how early pioneers such as Dorothy Arzner and Ida Lupino paved the way for modern day feminist film directors like Claudia Weill and Amy Heckerling, and explores how women’s cinema has stretched the limits of feminist theory and criticism.

In this reassessment of black film history, Mark Reid ponders whether white filmmakers can make truthful and accurate films about the black experience. In doing so, he is careful to distinguish between white-directed films starring black actors, and black-directed films starring black actors—something that has not been done by film scholars in the past. Since black directors were virtually nonexistent in the mainstream studio system of Hollywood during its early days, Reid focuses his examination on black independent film, a movement that began during the turn of the century, reached its zenith during the Civil Rights movement, and finally broke into the mainstream during the last decades of the twentieth century. During this latter time, there was a notable resurgence of feminism in black cultural production, leading to an avoidance of dramatizations of sexism, homophobia, and classism in the works of such directors as Spike Lee. However, Reid notes that even as black writers and directors have become more prominent in the film industry, the black perspective has still struggled to surface.