Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System

Posted on Jan 23, 2016

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Independent Stardom

Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System

Emily Carman 

“Carman upends conventional wisdom in this valuable and informative historical study of the business practices of freelance actresses during the 1930s.”—Publishers Weekly

During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood’s patriarchal structure.

Through extensive, original archival research, Independent Stardom uncovers this hidden history of women’s labor and celebrity in studio-era Hollywood. Carman weaves a compelling narrative that reveals the risks these women took in deciding to work autonomously. Additionally, she looks at actresses of color, such as Anna May Wong and Lupe Vélez, whose careers suffered from the enforced independence that resulted from being denied long-term studio contracts. Tracing the freelance phenomenon among American motion picture talent in the 1930s, Independent Stardom rethinks standard histories of Hollywood to recognize female stars as creative artists, sophisticated businesswomen, and active players in the then (as now) male-dominated film industry.

University of Texas Press

Texas Film and Media Studies Series

December 2015 236pp 37 b&w photos 9781477307816 PB £17.99 now only £14.39* when you quote CSL116DWFP when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/Book/52719/Independent-Stardom

Dirty Words and Filthy Pictures

Film and the First Amendment

Jeremy Geltzer Foreword by Alex Kozinski

“An important reference book for scholars of the law and cinema.”—Kirkus Reviews

From the earliest days of cinema, scandalous films such as The Kiss (1896) attracted audiences eager to see provocative images on screen. With controversial content, motion pictures challenged social norms and prevailing laws at the intersection of art and entertainment. Today, the First Amendment protects a wide range of free speech, but this wasn’t always the case. For the first fifty years, movies could be censored and banned by city and state officials charged with protecting the moral fabric of their communities. Once film was embraced under the First Amendment by the Supreme Court’s Miracle decision in 1952, new problems pushed notions of acceptable content even further.

Dirty Words & Filthy Pictures explores movies that changed the law and resulted in greater creative freedom for all. Relying on primary sources that include court decisions, contemporary periodicals, state censorship ordinances, and studio production codes, Jeremy Geltzer offers a comprehensive and fascinating history of cinema and free speech, from the earliest films of Thomas Edison to the impact of pornography and the Internet. With incisive case studies of risqué pictures, subversive foreign films, and banned B-movies, he reveals how the legal battles over film content changed long-held interpretations of the Constitution, expanded personal freedoms, and opened a new era of free speech. An important contribution to film studies and media law, Geltzer’s work presents the history of film and the First Amendment with an unprecedented level of detail.

University of Texas Press

February 2016 384pp 122 b&w photos 9781477307434 PB £20.99 now only £16.79* when you quote CSL116DWFP when you order

http://www.combinedacademic.co.uk/Book/52729/Dirty-Words-and-Filthy-Pictures

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