Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy

by Aida Hozic

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 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.

256 pages, Hardcover

First published December 20, 2001

Reviews

[Jeffrey Hart · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hollyworld is an attempt to understand the Hollywood film industry from the perspective of international political economy. Professor Hozic wanted to know, in particular, how power was distributed within the industry. She took as her point of departure the theories of Gary Gereffi about the relative power of manufacturers and distributors in what Gereffi calls “commodity chains.” In the book, she argued that the industry was controlled by manufacturers (the studios) from the 1920s to the 1950s, but after that it increasingly was controlled by the distributors.

She also argued that the film industry came to be strongly influenced by the defense industry from the 1970s on, incorporating many advanced electronics and simulation technologies that had been developed for the military. In my view, this argument was not as well supported as the one about the relative power of manufacturers and distributors.

Nevertheless, the book is a solid work of a serious scholar. There really is nothing like it in the field. The closest previous work would be that of Mae Huttig, Economic Control of the Motion Picture Industry (1944). More recent works by Douglas Gomery, David Waterman, and Edward Jay Epstein do not focus specifically on the power of manufacturers vs. distributors but do provide additional evidence in support of Professor Hozic’s thesis. Take the four books together and you have the foundations for a new political economy of the film industry.

[Sarah · Rating 1 out of 5]

Mired in its own anecdotal evidence, this books interesting premise is a complete and total fabrication. Epstein "The Big Picture" is approximately three thousand times more readable and informative.