The Politics of Industrial Change in Hollywood

Abstract

Hollyworld: Space, Power, and Fantasy in the American Economy. By Aida Hozic. Cornell University Press, 2001. 256 pp., $29.95 (ISBN: 0-8014-3926-4). The film industry is relatively unexplored territory for most political scientists. Despite decades of global dominance and Hollywood's archetypal centrality in projecting images of the United States to the world, very few scholars have used the industry to understand more general political patterns. None to date have situated the film industry adequately in the politics of global cultural production. This lack of attention is surprising, given that the film industry's intersection with politics, economics, and culture creates an opportunity to illuminate the interconnections between these areas. In recent years, moreover, the industry has become a prominent and dynamic focal point in the new economy and in the process of globalization, allied with key strategic sectors that require a much better understanding. In this light, Aida Hozic's Hollyworld takes a valuable first step to explore a new frontier. This innovative, absorbing, and multilayered work is much more than a narrow sectoral analysis, a conventional historical account, or a general discussion of cultural production and state regulation. Hollyworld unites substantive and disciplinary concerns from several areas—including political economy, economic and social geography, and film studies—to examine the causes of industrial change in filmmaking and to reveal their implications for the world economy, political authority, and cultural representation as a whole. Wrestling with filmmaking's fundamental ambiguity, it considers the seventh art to be essentially similar to but unmistakably different from other industries. In so doing, it treats Hollywood as both emblematic of a range of larger concerns and influential in the construction …