Saturday, January 13, 2024

January 13-14, 2024: Vaughn Joy’s Hollywood Histories

[January 10th marks the 100th anniversary of the renaming, rebranding, and relaunch of Columbia Pictures, one of the foundational and most iconic American film studios. So this week I’ve AmericanStudied a handful of Columbia’s many film innovations over its first few decades, leading up to this special weekend tribute to one of our preeminent 21st century FilmStudiers!]

I couldn’t write a weeklong series on a Hollywood film studio without paying tribute to the most thoughtful current FilmStudier and historian of all things Hollywood: the business and industry, the political and social ramifications, and those fraught and fantastic films themselves. You can learn a lot more about Vaughn Joy’s work on her website and her prolific Twitter account; here I’ll just highlight a handful of exemplary examples:

1)      Vaughn written a couple of excellent articles (both available at that hyperlink) on the Paramount Decrees, monopolization, and Hollywood for the University of Chicago Business School’s Promarket magazine;

2)      She’s compiled a number of vital Twitter threads on different aspects of the past, present, and future of Hollywood, with many compiled in this thread of threads…

3)      …and a new addition to the list from December on the proposed and deeply problematic merger between Warner Brothers and Paramount;

4)      Her article on Miracle on 34th Street for a special Christmas Studies issue of Comparative American Studies makes clear how she connects her multilayered analyses of films to those historical, social, and political contexts;

5)      And for lots more examples of those multilayered analyses, make sure to subscribe to her weekly Review Roulette newsletter!

I look forward to learning a lot more about Hollywood’s histories and future from Vaughn in 2024! Speaking of, a Spring semester previews series start Monday,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Hollywood histories or historians you’d highlight?

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