Film Studios, the Studio System, and the Movie Business

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Afra, Kia.  The Hollywood Trust: Trade Associations and the Rise of the Studio System.  Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016.

Altman, Diana.  Hollywood East: Louis B. Mayer and the Origins of the Studio System.  New York: Birch Lane Press, 1992.

Balio, Tino.  United Artists: The Company Built by the Stars.  Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1976.

Balio, Tino.  MGM.  New York: Routledge, 2018.

Bingen, Steven.  The MGM Effect: How a Hollywood Studio Changed the World.  Guilford, CT: Lyons Press, 2022.

Biskind, Peter. Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004. 

Carey, Gary.  All the Stars in Heaven: Louis B. Mayer’s MGM.  New York: Dutton, 1981.

Cohen, Harvey G. “The Struggle to Fashion the NRA Code: The Triumph of Studio Power in 1933 Hollywood.” Journal of American Culture 50:4 (2016): 1039-1066.

Conant, Michael.  Antitrust in the Motion Picture Industry: Economic and Legal Analysis.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 1960.

Crowther, Bosley.  The Lion’s Share: The Story of an Entertainment Empire.  New York: Dutton, 1957. MGM

Custen, George.  Twentieth Century Fox:  Darryl F. Zanuck and the Culture of Hollywood.  New York: Basic Books, 1997.

Dick, Bernard F. City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1997.

Eams, John Douglas.  The MGM Story.  New York: Crown, 1977.

Eyman, Scott.  Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer.  New York: Simon & Schuster, 2005.

FitzGerald, Michael Ray.  “Adjuncts of Government: Darryl F. Zanuck and 20th Century Fox in Service to the Executive Branch, 1935-1971.”  Journal of Film, Radio, and Television 36:3 (2016): 373-391.

Flamini, Roland.  Thalberg: The Last Tycoon and the World of MGM.  New York: Crown, 1994.

Freedland, Michael.  The Warner Brothers.  London: Harrap, 1983.

Gabler, Neal.  An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood.  New York: Crown, 1988.

Gartenberg, Jon.  “Vitagraph Before Griffith: Forging Ahead in the Nickelodeon Era.” Studies in Visual Communication10:4 (Fall 1984): 7-23.

Gomery, Douglas.  The Hollywood Studio System, 1930-1949.  New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1989.

Gorham, Kindem, ed.  The American Movie Industry: The Business of Motion Pictures.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

Jewell, Richard B.  Slow Fade to Black: The Decline of RKO Radio Pictures. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2016.

Joyce, Simon, and Jennifer Putzi. ““Greatest Combination in Motion Pictures”: Film History and the Division of Labor in the New York Motion Picture Company.” Film History: An International Journal 21, no. 3 (2009): 189-207.

Kindem, Gorham, ed.  The American Movie Industry.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982.

King, Rob. “Made for the Masses With an Appeal to the Classes: The Triangle Film Corporation and the Failure of Highbrow Film Culture.” Cinema Journal 44:2 (Winter 2005): 3-33.

King, Rob.  The Fun Factory: The Keystone Film Company and the Emergence of Mass Culture.  Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009.

Lafontaine, Andree. “The Rise and Fall of Cosmopolitan Productions: William Randolph Hearst’s Cross-Promotional Strategies.”  JCMS: Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 60:2 (Winter 2021): 32-55.

Lev, Peter.  Twentieth-Century Fox: The Zanuck-Skouras Years, 1935-1965.  Austin: University of Texas Press, 2013.

Melnick, Ross. American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935. New York: Columbia University Press, 2012.

Menne, Jeff.  Post-Fordist Cinema: Hollywood Auteurs and the Corporate Counterculture.  New York: Columbia University Press, 2019.

Mordden, Ethan.  The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies. New York: Knopf, 1988.

Perkins, Edwin J. “Writing the Script for Survival and Resurgence: RKO Studio and the Impact of the Great Depression, 1932–1933.” Southern California Quarterly 93 (Fall 2011): 289–311.

Roddick, Nick.  A New Deal in Entertainment: Warner Brothers in the 1930s.  London: BFI, 1983.

Schatz, Thomas.  The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Thompson, David.  Warner Brothers: The Making of an American Movie Studio.  New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017.

Uricchio, William, and Robert E. Pearson.  Reframing Culture: The Case of Vitagraph Quality Films.  Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Yogerst, Chris.  From Headlines to Hollywood: The Birth and Boom of Warner Brothers. Lanham: Rowan & Littlefield, 2016.

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