Hollywood is currently one of the largest and most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy. In just a few decades, it has transformed itself from a dying company town into a merchandising emporium of movies, games, and licensed characters. It is quickly moving even further into cyberspace, virtual reality, and digital imaging. Aida Hozic writes of these enormous changes in the film industry from a novel perspective: by tracing shifts in spatial organization of film production from the enclosed worlds of old Hollywood studios through globally dispersed location shooting to digital production and distribution. Hozic's fascinating tale of latter-day capitalism suggests that the physical reorganization of production—across the American economy, but in Hollywood in particular—alters material and conceptual boundaries between work and leisure, public and private, reality and fantasy. Particular economic regimes and forms of spatial organization have specific moral implications, and so the story of Hollywood's cultural production is partly a story of censorship and moral surveillance. Hozic's account of industrial change in Hollywood, and of its attempts at moral control over the production of fantasy, is an illuminating confrontation with the peculiar nature of Hollywood's political authority and of its complex power.

The Film Studio sheds new light on the evolution of global film production, highlighting the role of film studios worldwide. The authors explore the contemporary international production environment, identifying various types of film studios and investigating the consequences for Hollywood, international film production, and the studio locations. Visit our website for sample chapters!

Hollywood’s global influence from the 1960s to the present age of terrorism. The team of Sarah and Ryan Eisley film Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, then divorce, but stay in touch. Ryan directs studio pictures for Universal, takes up with a much younger actress, attends the Woodstock festival and turns countercultural in his Beverly Hills mansion. Inspired to film a documentary of the black civil rights, hippie and anti-Vietnam War movements, he encounters President Kennedy, Martin Luther King, Jr. and the Manson gang. Their son Davin goes to Vietnam as a medic and their daughter Karen leaves her husband and disappears with her three kids. Living apart from Ryan in San Francisco, Sarah goes back to graduate school and tries to hold their family together while earning a doctorate at Berkeley. She becomes a film critic, then moves to Portland and becomes a teacher in the Hollyworld of higher education. The story of the Eisley family is interwoven with major films, including Billy Budd, Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, Woodstock, Easy Rider, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Close Encounters, Apocalypse Now, Reds, The Big Chill and The Player. The novel also exposes Communist propaganda movies such as Fail-Safe, The Way We Were, The Front and Coming Home. It deflates the show business Blacklist myth, satirizes political correctness and ridicules Marxist movie stars and professors. Third in trilogy including Holywood (2004) and Follywood (2005).

When a young woman falls down a flight of stairs and is left brain dead, her family agrees to donate her organs. Dr. Jesse Travis oversees the grim task, saving several other seriously ill patients. But one of the organ recipients returns to the hospital with a complication no one could have seen coming-West Nile Virus. Soon, other patients who received organs at Community General begin dying of West Nile-related illnesses, and Jesse is suspected as being at fault... Dr. Mark Sloan knows his friend isn't to blame-and he soon uncovers a conspiracy of greed and personal revenge that may mean the end of his career.

Mark Olmstead is a young pest control exterminator whose company, Eco PC, becomes politically incorrect in the ultra green yet polluted city of Portland, where he is besieged by animal rights protesters, including the Militant Insect Alliance, who spank him with fly swatters. He moves back to rural eastern Oregon and commutes, only to find that his hometown Morehead Gap is now mostly owned by his new landlord, Wes Titus, a politically correct developer from Portland. The town church has decayed, is infested by vermin and occupied by Waldo Ralph, an old hippie who has reconsecrated the structure as the ecocentric Church of Highs, a refuge for wildlife where he grows medical marijuana in the basement. While trying to make enough money to buy a house, Mark courts a former classmate, Sally Chan, who is half Chinese, and takes a side job as an illegal marijuana distributor, involving him with violent hippies, a black drug gang, Islamic terrorists, political assassins, the FBI and a cabal of computer hackers playing God in real life through an Internet video game called Oz and the Flying Monkeys. Mark is targeted for deletion by the Monkeys when he turns informer and he suspects that one of the Monkeys is Yakov Tete, a radical professor visiting his neighbor Diana Hartfield, a book editor vacationing from New York.

In Documentary Across Platforms, noted scholar of film and experimental media Patricia R. Zimmermann offers a glimpse into the ever-evolving constellation of practices known as "documentary" and the way in which they investigate, engage with, and interrogate the world. Collected here for the first time are her celebrated essays and speculations about documentary, experimental, and new media published outside of traditional scholarly venues. These essays envision documentary as a complex ecology composed of different technologies, sets of practices, and specific relationships to communities, engagement, politics, and social struggles. Through the lens of reverse engineering—the concept that ideas just like objects can be disassembled to learn how they work and then rebuilt into something new and better—Zimmermann explores how numerous small-scale documentary works present strategies of intervention into existing power structures. Adaptive to their context, modular, and unfixed, the documentary practices she explores exploit both sophisticated high-end professional and consumer-grade amateur technologies, moving through different political terrains, different platforms, and different exhibition contexts. Together these essays demonstrate documentary’s role as a conceptual practice to think through how the world is organized and to imagine ways that it might be reorganized with actions, communities, and ideas.

From its beginnings, Disneyland was destined to be something entirely different from the standard mid-century amusement park. To sell his dream park to investors and the public, Walt Disney recruited Hollywood art directors and sketch artists to design the grounds around the mythic settings and high-minded ideals commonly expressed on the silver screen. This book focuses on the initial planning of Disneyland and its first year of operation, a time when Walt personally oversaw every detail of the park's development. Divided into chapters by park zone, it reveals how the five sectors were constructed using illusionistic tricks of stage design. Reaching beyond structure and design, chapters also explore how the sectors--Main Street, U.S.A., Frontierland, Tomorrowland, Adventureland and Fantasyland--represented themes found in Disney stories, familiar movie genres and American culture at large.