Hollywood 1938 Motion Pictures' Greatest Year [Hardcover]

InHollywood 1938, Catherine Jurca brings to light a tumultuous year of crisis that has been neglected in histories of the studio era. With attendance in decline, negative publicity about stars that were poison at the box office, and a spate of bad films, industry executives decided that the public was fed up with the movies. Jurca describes their desperate attempt to win back audiences by launching Motion Pictures Greatest Year, a massive, and unsuccessful, public relations campaign conducted in theaters and newspapers across North America. Drawing on the records of studio personnel, independent exhibitors, moviegoers, and the motion pictures themselves, she analyzes what was wrongand rightwith Hollywood at the end of a heralded decade, and how the industrys troubles changed the making and marketing of films in 1938 and beyond.

Catherine Jurcais Professor of English at California Institute of Technology. She is the author ofWhite Diaspora: The Suburb and the Twentieth Century American Novel.

While 1938 may have been a turkey of a year for Hollywood cinema, Catherine Jurcas book is a genuine feast.Hollywood 1938is both an intense, up-close study of the big budget films and box office tactics behind the film industrysannus horribilis, and a savvy meditation on the whole swoop and scope of cinema in Hollywoods Golden Age. Scrupulously researched and engagingly written, Jurca captures the industry infighting, publicity battles, and audience responses to Hollywoods greatest year with easy erudition and penetrating insight.Thomas Doherty, author ofHollywood's Censor: Joseph I. Breen and the Production Code Administration.

Catherine Jurca has taken a nearly forgotten event in the history of Hollywood and demonstrated how much it can tell us about the state of the motion picture industry and its frailties, as well as its relationship with its audience, at a critical moment in its dlÃj