BOOK DATA Ross Melnick, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power around the World. New York: Columbia University Press, 2021. $145 cloth, $35.00 paper, $34.99 e-book. 496 pages.You may have seen Nicole Kidman last September, in a commercial for AMC theaters, stepping into an empty movie theater. “We come to this place for magic,” she says in voice-over, inviting patrons back into movie theaters after the hiatus forced by the worldwide spread of COVID-19. Pitching a return to normalcy while also emphasizing the theater’s cleanliness, safety, and, yes, magic, the commercial is also symptomatic of a delicate moment for movie exhibition.There was a time, not too long ago, when Hollywood devised far more expensive, more aggressive, and riskier tactics than a celebrity advertisement to persuade audiences to flock to its films. From the lavish architecture and air-conditioning offered by the picture palaces of the past to the reclining seats and Dolby sound of the nineties, and to IMAX even today, film exhibition has always been about far more than just the movies themselves. Aware of the power of the moviegoing experience to contribute to profits, Hollywood invested early on in global exhibition, owning and operating theaters in strategic urban centers around the world. The political and cultural repercussions of this exhibition strategy for both Hollywood and the national film industries “invaded” by these foreign-owned movie theaters are explored in great detail by Ross Melnick in his new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power around the World.Focusing on the global expansion of Paramount, MGM/Loew’s, Fox, and Warner Bros. during 1923–2013, Melnick’s book fills a key lacuna in film history by tracing the global, dialogical, and comparative aspects of Hollywood’s exhibition network as it spread its tentacles across disparate countries. While the domination of most overseas markets by Hollywood productions is well studied, much rarer is the discussion and understanding of Hollywood’s ownership, control, and operation of movie theaters abroad and how these endeavors impacted and engaged with local politics, economics, and culture. Melnick breaks new ground in framing this history on a vast scale, definitively identifying both the global and local agents at play. Taking Hollywood as a point of departure for a global history of exhibition, Melnick uses this framework to reveal Hollywood’s persistent concerted efforts toward global dominion and to demonstrate, through an analysis of those efforts’ varied impacts around the world, that this expansion had much less to do with film and money than with American soft power.Melnick refers to these American-owned-and-operated movie theaters across the world as Hollywood’s cultural “embassies”—a term that highlights their ideological and imperialist function. If Hollywood has traditionally packaged its films to appeal to a presumably universal audience, Melnick’s deliberate selection highlights Hollywood’s position as a nonofficial extension of the US State Department. In fact, Hollywood’s soft-power diplomacy, with its clear and effective ideological, political, and cultural functions, would prove particularly valuable to US efforts against Nazism and communism during the twentieth century. As Melnick playfully summarizes, Hollywood actively “sought to vertically integrate the mind of the global moviegoer, to watch American films in an American cinema in a distinctly American way and context” (11).To achieve that goal, Hollywood developed the foreign-exhibition strategy of “shop window” cinemas. These were opulent movie houses designed not only to attract an audience through offering a luxurious, technologically advanced, and outwardly American form of theatrical exhibition, but also to encourage local theaters to upgrade their facilities and, by then charging more for their tickets, ultimately benefit Hollywood distributors. In this sense, locally owned and operated theaters were less competitors than unwilling partners in Hollywood’s project of uplift domination. Melnick makes the ambitious claim that in both the filmgoing experience they offered and the industry practices they encouraged, these American-style theaters “may have had just as large an impact” as the films they screened in exporting American culture across the globe (10).These theaters, however, were not mere replicas of American theaters; the studios understood early on that integrating familiar, local aesthetics and practices into their overseas theaters was imperative for their success. Examples abound: in Tokyo, Hollywood-owned theaters incorporated benshi, the famed Japanese silent-film narrators, into their screenings, while in Egypt, Fox’s Cairo Palace catered to its diverse, cosmopolitan audience by accompanying its English-language screenings with slides to provide subtitles in Arabic and Greek. But despite Hollywood’s efforts to incorporate national domestic culture—and sometimes even screen domestic films—this territorial “invasion” was not exactly welcomed with open arms. While exhibitors wanted to show American films, given the high demand for them, they were less keen to cede a share of their market to a foreign competitor.As it travels across the globe—from Paris to Rio to Johannesburg to Tokyo—Melnick’s book acquires an encyclopedic breadth that in no way compromises the depth and implications of his central argument that Hollywood sold not just movies, but a culture, a lifestyle, an ideology through its global exhibition network. Split into six distinct parts, Hollywood’s Embassies focuses on the endeavors of four major Hollywood studios in the continental regions of Europe, Australasia, Latin America, the Middle East, Africa, and Asia. Each section is organized thematically and chronologically into chapters that map the entangled interactions of these Hollywood companies in foreign exhibition markets spanning ninety years in over thirty countries. Through this structure, Melnick has produced a truly transcontinental historical narrative guided by a careful analytical perspective.Paramount and MGM raced to build showcase cinemas in major European urban cities, setting the stage for decades of Hollywood’s theatrical expansion across the world. This initial phase begins in the 1920s with MGM’s renovation of the Gaumont Palace in Paris and Paramount’s purchase of the Parisian Vaudeville Theater, turning it into Le Paramount—an opulent shop-window cinema that replicated the (American) aesthetics of the company’s flagship theater in New York. This period of prosperity would be relatively short-lived, for as Germany occupied more of the European territory and comprehended the importance of controlling film exhibition, most Hollywood-owned cinemas disappeared from the map, to return only in the postwar period. One, however—Le Paramount—became an important site for the French Resistance in Paris after the city’s occupation by the Nazis. Underground operations went undetected for a few years while the theater displayed a Nazi flag outside to maintain the appearance of conformity. Not incidentally, Le Paramount was the first theater to reopen in Paris after the war.In Australia and New Zealand, Fox spearheaded a different strategy. Whereas other Hollywood companies established shop-window cinemas in key cities, Fox purchased and operated prominent domestic chains Hoyts and Amalgamated, “camouflaging” their American corporate ownership behind a familiar façade. In doing so, Fox prioritized market control and technological innovation over the uniquely American filmgoing experience offered by showcase cinemas elsewhere.Of all the regions covered in the book, perhaps Latin America is where Hollywood’s function as a cultural embassy is most apparent, as the continent became a key ideological battleground for Germany and the United States during the Second World War and the preceding years. In promoting democracy, consumption, and a sense of prosperity with their architectural design and the films and newsreels they projected, Hollywood shop-window cinemas in Brazil would effectively perform “key work for the local U.S. embassy and the U.S. State Department” against German influence (162). They competed not only with the affection of Brazil’s then-dictator, Getúlio Vargas, toward the Nazi Party, but also with German-owned theaters such as the Cine Ufa-Palácio in São Paulo, which would host the Brazilian premiere of Leni Riefenstahl’s 1938 Olympia (162). By 1941, when Brazil officially joined the Allies and Axis films were banned from the country, Hollywood companies deployed the slogan “America Free and United” to advertise their films and promote unity across the continent. Hollywood’s cultural imperialism, inaugurated initially to counter ideological investments on the part of Nazi Germany, would go on to prove useful in the postwar fight against Soviet influence and to have a profound impact on the cultural, economic, and political development of Latin America.In the postwar years, troubles abounded in American-operated theaters in the Middle East, especially in Egypt, where they were targets of boycotts, protests, and even terrorist attacks in response to Hollywood’s support of (and operations in) Israel. In Africa, decolonization came up against Jim Crow. Melnick relates the troubled “Europeans-only” premiere of South Pacific in Salisbury, Rhodesia, where the government’s policy of “multiracial partnership” was in direct conflict with Fox’s policy of racial segregation. In apartheid South Africa, Fox’s ACT theaters premiered a different version of that same film, shortened by thirty minutes by the removal of scenes featuring Black characters. Fox also invested in local filmmaking, producing films that conformed to South Africa’s institutionalized segregation. Analyzing the impact of varied racial policies in South Africa, Rhodesia, and Kenya, Melnick maintains that Fox and MGM—and, one might say, Hollywood more broadly—both facilitated segregation and racialized politics across the African continent and profited from their embrace of them.The Asian market proved the most challenging of all for Hollywood. In Japan, earlier local praise for the presence of benshi in Hollywood-owned theaters turned to resentment about their dismissal upon the industry’s transition to synchronized sound. In India, the strong domestic film culture and industry (which would later become known as Bollywood) virtually insulated the market from Hollywood despite multiple offensives, the most successful of which was the Bombay Metro Cub Club, a children’s film society geared toward cultivating the next generation of Hollywood moviegoers. And in China the revolutionary government’s ban on foreign imports in 1950 and, later, strict protectionist measures prevented a more robust Hollywood presence (with the exception of a brief period in the early 2000s). New laws forbidding majoritarian foreign ownership of exhibition companies led Warner Bros. International Theatres to definitively exit China in 2006 after a few years of an ascendant presence in Shanghai.As Melnick notes, the example of China also serves as a fitting ending for his book, given that a Chinese exhibitor—the Dalian Wanda Group—has given Hollywood a taste of its own medicine in the last decade. While Hollywood closed many of its theaters across the world, including in the United States, Dalian Wanda swept in to purchase and upgrade some of them, turning the Chinese company into a global exhibition behemoth.Melnick’s historical framework helps expose Hollywood’s role in both domestic and international geopolitics. Indeed, the term “cultural embassy” is neither allegory nor exaggeration; it calls attention to the ideological dimensions of film exhibition, both in the products sold to moviegoers and in the behind-the-scenes machinations engaged in by political, economic, and social agents, including State Department officials. Arthur Loew, who headed Loew’s international division, had no problem saying the quiet part out loud in 1949, arguing that the company’s theaters abroad were “selling America and American democracy overseas” (17). As Melnick’s accounts of particularly fractious moments demonstrate, local resistance would recognize these movie theaters’ cultural, economic, and political significance, often creating battlegrounds over their physical presence or exhibition practices. For all of Hollywood’s mostly uncontested supremacy in global distribution, it was, ironically, exhibition that proved the most challenging and contentious.The publication of Hollywood’s Embassies follows the shuttering of theaters across the globe due to the COVID-19 pandemic as well as ever-increasing competition with media-streaming services. Yet Melnick’s book feels anything but dated. In fact, it serves as a reminder—and clear evidence—that this market has survived many crises, including world and civil wars, major legal decisions with national and international implications, and competition with other media. In the book’s final chapters, Melnick offers a glimpse of the current state of global exhibition and Hollywood’s position in it, revealing a shift in studios’ priorities. With streaming now a viable (albeit challenging) alternative to the fraught and risky business of foreign exhibition, Hollywood—or its once-major players, at least—has shown very little interest in returning to the strategies it adopted for nearly a century. Yet, this complex history of Hollywood’s insistent efforts to maintain its global reach suggests that, while the era of aggressive theatrical expansion may (or may not) be over, Hollywood’s “embassies” are still busy colonizing large and small screens across the world.