Academic literature on the topic 'American Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.) Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)'

This essay uses the 1960s, Gerald Wilson’s most prolific period, as a window into his life and work as a big band jazz trumpeter, soloist, arranger, conductor, and composer. This selective snapshot of Wilson’s career inserts him more fully into jazz—and California—history, while analyzing the influence of Latin music and Mexican culture on his creations. Tracing the black-brown connections in his Alta California art demonstrates an often-overlooked aspect of Wilson’s musical legacy: the fact that he wrote, arranged, recorded, and performed Latin-tinged tunes, especially several brassy homages to Mexican bullfighters, as well as Latin jazz originals. Wilson’s singular soul jazz reveals the drive and dedication of a disciplined artist—both student and teacher—who continually honed his craft and expanded his talents as part of his educational and musical philosophy. Wilson’s California story is that of an African American migrant who moves out west, where he meets a Chicana Angelena and starts a family—in the tradition of Cali-mestizaje—then stays for the higher quality of life, for the freedom to raise his children and live as an artist, further developing and fully expressing his style. However, because he never moved to New York, Wilson remains under-researched and underappreciated by academic jazz experts. Using cultural history and cultural studies research methods, this essay makes the case that Gerald Wilson should be more widely recognized and honored for his genius, greatness, and outstanding achievements in the field of modern jazz, from San Francisco to Monterey, Hollywood, and Hermosa Beach.

In Los Angeles, the influence of Hollywood and the film industry, combined with a non-stop barrage of media images, has blurred the line between the real and imaged. The literature reveals a city exploding with cultural, racial and social differences, making Los Angeles a confusing and alienating place. The literature of Los Angeles reflects the changing face of the city. Los Angeles was always a city with a promising future, economic booms and optimism seemed to suggest that here was a place where the American Dream really could come true. Thousands travelled west in search of sunshine, oranges and a life that formerly, they could only dream of having. Yet, the literature of Los Angeles has highlighted the city's actual history together with a realization of undercurrents of violence, prejudice, depression and shattered dreams. The past, present and future is used to reveal a city that is in stark opposition to the Los Angeles, waves of immigrants came to find. This thesis explores the idea of the dreamer coming west to Los Angeles within the literature and the variety of ways in the travellers' romantic notions of Los Angeles as a city of promise, is betrayed, leaving a desperate people in its wake. The literature shows that beneath the shiny surface of a city founded on sunshine and prosperity, corruption reached all levels of society and the 'mean streets' abound. Later, influenced by an overwhelming feeling of powerlessness caused by Post-war nuclear depression, McCarthyism, loss of identity, and living in a city fragmented by racial tension and an ever growing gap between the very rich and the very poor, the literature of Los Angeles reflects not only the fears of that city, but of American society as a whole. The collision of technology, rapid progression and population explosion turned Los Angeles into a disconnected city, where the real and imagined merge in a cityscape that demonstrates a conflicting combination of historical replication, original design and movie-set inspiration. Nothing is ever what it appears to be in Los Angeles.

Thesis (Ph.D) -- University of Western Sydney, 2007.<br>A thesis submitted to the University of Western Sydney, College of Arts, School of Humanities and Languages, in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Includes bibliography.

This thesis examines film and literary satires of Hollywood 1930 – 2003 and asserts that such satires are attacks on the Hollywood Dream. The study reveals that these satires focus on two common themes: the artificiality of Hollywood, and the amoral and corruptive nature of Hollywood. The study examines the depiction of the Hollywood Dream within satires of the industry and demonstrates its increasing importance in American culture. The similarity of themes in film and literary satires highlights an interesting dialogue between the two modes which has not been thoroughly investigated. Although satirists’ approaches towards the artificiality of Hollywood vary greatly, the most significant treatment of the theme in both literary and film satires is one which gains much understanding through use of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation. My examination also investigates the tendency of characters within satires of Hollywood to discard previous identities and create in their place a Hollywood identity. Such an identity is linked to the artificiality of Hollywood and is displayed by satirists as a prerequisite for one wishing to achieve the Hollywood Dream. While there have been numerous studies on novels on the Hollywood industry and its films, this study is unique in examining both literary and film satires of Hollywood together, and covering such an extended period of time. It hopes to show that satires of Hollywood have reached a critical juncture. The satire of many recent works has become moribund due to the public’s awareness of and apathetic attitude towards the amorality and hypocrisy of Hollywood, and because these satires fail to acknowledge the intrinsic artificiality of Hollywood.

This thesis examines film and literary satires of Hollywood 1930 – 2003 and asserts that such satires are attacks on the Hollywood Dream. The study reveals that these satires focus on two common themes: the artificiality of Hollywood, and the amoral and corruptive nature of Hollywood. The study examines the depiction of the Hollywood Dream within satires of the industry and demonstrates its increasing importance in American culture. The similarity of themes in film and literary satires highlights an interesting dialogue between the two modes which has not been thoroughly investigated. Although satirists’ approaches towards the artificiality of Hollywood vary greatly, the most significant treatment of the theme in both literary and film satires is one which gains much understanding through use of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulacra and simulation. My examination also investigates the tendency of characters within satires of Hollywood to discard previous identities and create in their place a Hollywood identity. Such an identity is linked to the artificiality of Hollywood and is displayed by satirists as a prerequisite for one wishing to achieve the Hollywood Dream. While there have been numerous studies on novels on the Hollywood industry and its films, this study is unique in examining both literary and film satires of Hollywood together, and covering such an extended period of time. It hopes to show that satires of Hollywood have reached a critical juncture. The satire of many recent works has become moribund due to the public’s awareness of and apathetic attitude towards the amorality and hypocrisy of Hollywood, and because these satires fail to acknowledge the intrinsic artificiality of Hollywood.

This dissertation challenges how Hollywood is typically imagined as monolithic, homogenous and homogenising, and separated from other cinemas by fixed and impermeable borders. This influential cinematic paradigm posits a centre-periphery model underpinned by binary oppositions in which most cinemas are negatively defined as Hollywood’s ‘other’ and perceived as fixed in permanent states of opposition and assimilation. It is a perception reinforced by the influential critical paradigm which focuses on the films’ formal stylistic and narrative properties. This conceptualisation ignores, or fails to observe, the larger picture, in which global, national and local cinemas relate to each other in complex and volatile ways. My argument is that a paradigm shift is required in which the main question asked is not ‘What is Hollywood?’ but ‘Where is Hollywood?’ Location is a crux of my argument because it offers a way of questioning the widespread conception of Hollywood as bounded and fixed in a stable cultural landscape. I apply Arjun Appadurai’s framework of disjunctive global cultural flows to the analysis of cinema to show the existence of a more dynamic and chaotic screenscape than is popularly imagined. I also develop a new model of textual analysis involving traces and tracings. This troubles the notion of impermeable borders by finding the traces of global cultural flows within the film frame and tracing their trajectories outside the frame to and from their points of origin and destination. From the creative tensions caused by these asymmetrical and, multidirectional flows a previously unobserved screenscape emerges in which it is possible to see globalising processes as hybridising processes. Within this interpretive framework Hollywood is decentred and can no longer be perceived as fixed and bounded, or as the paradigm by which most cinemas define themselves and are judged. It reveals that heterogeneity and flux rather than homogeneity and fixity characterise intercinematic relations. It shows the existence of porous borders permitting transnational flows. In linking a film’s formal stylistic properties to the disjunctions in the global flows, the new model I develop for textual analysis offers a way of re-imagining Hollywood within the transnational imaginary.<br>Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

190 pages<br>Twenty-first century American cinema is permeated by images of globalization and environmental change. Responding to what Yale researchers have described as a “sea change” in public perceptions of global warming occurring between 2004 and 2007, this dissertation provides the first extended examination of Hollywood’s response to the planet’s most pressing social and environmental challenge – global climate change. Among the most widely distributed and consumed forms of popular culture, Hollywood blockbuster films provide a unique textual window into the cultural logic of ecology during this important turning point in Americans’ perceptions of environmental risk. The term “cultural logic of ecology” is defined as the collective cultural expression of a society’s dominant perceptions and enactments of its relationships with other organisms and their shared bio-physical environments. Surveying the history of climate cinema, my second chapter examines the production and reception contexts of the two films most responsible for renewing public interest in global warming: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and An Inconvenient Truth (2006). Despite their generic differences, both films combine the formal techniques of melodrama and realism to translate the science of global warming into a moral vernacular. In subsequent chapters, I further intertwine textual and historical analysis to examine other films released during the period that portray aspects of global warming. Considered a children’s film, Happy Feet (2006) employs digital animation to illustrate the ecological impacts of globalization on Antarctica, thus presenting viewers with a more accurate picture of the threats facing emperor penguins than did the documentary March of the Penguins (2005). I next analyze There Will Be Blood (2007) as a critique of patriarchy and natural resource exploitation that resonated with American filmgoers as oil prices were skyrocketing and President George W. Bush admitted “America is addicted to oil.” Consumed on Imax screens and iPods, and as toys, t-shirts, and video games, blockbusters leave massive cultural and carbon footprints. I conclude by arguing that ecocritical scholarship offers the most effective scholarly toolkit for understanding contemporary cinema as a cultural, textual, and material phenomenon.<br>Committee in charge: Dr. Michael Aronson, Chairperson; Dr. Sangita Gopal, Member; Dr. Louise Westling, Member; Dr. Jon Lewis, Member, from Oregon StateUniversity; Dr. Patrick Bartlein, Outside Member