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Oct 5, 2016 · While whitewashing remains a modern problem, it has a long history in American film: In the very first Hollywood movie, 1910’s In Old California, white actors played non-white roles.
Jul 24, 2013 · As superheroes, sequels, and international appeal influence Hollywood studios, films from the frontier are riding off into the sunset—just when America needs them most.
- A Suspenseful Real-Life Serial
- A Family Resemblance in Cinematic Attitudes
- A Poorly Choreographed Showdown
- A 2021 Interlude Between Episodes
- My Home Away from Home
- But with A Crack Appearing in The Hardened Concrete of My Opinions
- Professors Ride to The Rescue
- How Paternal Integrity Denied Me My Hollywood Childhood
At Republic Films, my father spent much of his time laboring in the benighted format called the “serial.” Broken up into weekly episodes, serials tracked a set of characters, often saturated with predictability and stereotype. Each episode ended in a cliffhanger. The good guys would be caught in a terrible pickle, with no hope in sight. In the next...
It seems impossible that human evolution would have had sufficient time to produce a genetic predisposition that causes a person to choose to watch movies, to choose not to watch movies, or to find it OK to watch movies and equally OK to sit around and talk, and maybe even to wash dishes instead. While this is no doubt a matter of conditioning rath...
After my book, The Legacy of Conquest came out, I spent a couple of decades roaming up and down Main Street, shouting out fighting words and trying to provoke the genre known as the Western into taking me on. Did I think I was taking up my father’s cause and following in his footsteps? The idea never occurred to me—at least not consciously. Instead...
Over the last year, spending time in my own company has been quite pleasant. Spending time in the company of my former self has been somewhat less agreeable. What has been particularly unsettling is the experience that is underway right at this moment; the out-of-body experience of encountering my former self in high gear, when she was using my nam...
My harangue about the injury done to history by Westerns went on and on, without variation in content. What varied was the venues and locales in which I was permitted to hold forth: they ranged from People magazine to the Today show, from The New York Times to forums and panel discussions beyond counting. Here’s one example. Dances with Wolves came...
In November of 2007, in a special issue of The New York Times Sunday Magazine, writer Deborah Solomon interviewed me for a profile entitled “Cowgirl Blues.” The occasion for the special issue of the Magazine was a recent resurgence of Westerns, and she and I spent a good share of our time traveling over a familiar trail. Solomon: As one of the so-c...
For decades, I had spoken comfortably about Westerns without a twinge of concern about my deficiencies of knowledge and understanding. That custom might have gone forever. But, at last, we reach the episode in this serial where the tide turns, and the moment of resolution finally arrives: two very smart CU film scholars perform an intervention and ...
When my father worked in Hollywood, he had an acquaintance with a notable entrepreneurial gift, who came up with a clever way to make money. This acquaintance created a book called The Truth about Hollywood, and he put out advertisements with order forms, laying out the terms of payment for the book and for postage. He got quite a few orders, and c...
By maintaining a relatively hands-off approach, the federal government allowed the unsettled American Frontier to naturally tame itself through the voluntary cooperation of settlers. Understanding Violence in the American West. The most infamous images of the American West always consist of scenes of extreme violence and vigilante justice.
In Hollywood's West, Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor, and the nation's leading film scholars analyze popular conceptions of the frontier as a fundamental element of American history and culture. This volume examines classic Western films and programs that span nearly a century, from Cimarron (1931) to Turner Network Television's recent made ...
This was a time when overall film production levels in Hollywood were dropping, such that westerns still made up about 15 percent of movies playing in American cinemas. Beginning in the late 1960s, however, after nearly thirty years of being one of Hollywood's most reliably popular products, the western experienced a precipitous decline.
May 27, 2021 · The days of the American frontier were still recent history when, from 1905 onwards, thousands of nickelodeons began springing up in storefronts across the United States. Just the previous decade, when Eadweard Muybridge was busy projecting his hand-painted animations at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, the wild west was in full bloom and ready to inspire the earliest cinematic ...
