Dear Classical Hollywood SIG members,
We wanted to write with some updates and notices ahead of the SCMS conference in Seattle this March 2019.
SIG Meeting & Co-chair Election
First off, our SIG meeting is scheduled for Sunday, March 17 at 1:30-3:30pm in the Ballard Room. We realize this time may not be ideal for all members to attend but alas this was what was available. A brief agenda for the meeting includes
- New Co-Chair election
- Any ideas for a serious event at SCMS 2020 depending on locale and partnering with other SIGs
- Work on starting a graduate student writing prize
- Starting a Mentorship program
- Any news on Classical HW related conferences for the next year.
- Classical HW SIG SCMS seminar for the 2020 conference
With regard to the Co-Chair election, Emily’s term is up this year, and we would like to put out the call now for self-nominations. It needs to be an independent scholar or assistant/above faculty member, as we already have Peter as a graduate student co-chair in place. We will report back about how to proceed with the election – Peter and Monica are considering online election options, especially given our meeting time slot this year on Sunday afternoon at SCMS. Please email nominations at carman@chapman.edu, labuza@usc.edu, and monica.roxanne.sandler@gmail.com, ideally before SCMS begins on March 12, 2019.
SCMS 2019 Happy Hour
Details are forthcoming very soon about our 2019 social event, a happy hour with three other SIGs: the Libraries and Archives, War and Media, and Sound and Music SIGs. The date is tentatively slotted for Thursday, March 14 from 6-8pm.
Finally, we would like to formally announce the Classical HW SIG sponsored panels for this year’s conference. We had many compelling panels from which to select, and we thank all that submitted panels for sponsorship consideration. We invite members to bring to our attention additional and/or their own panels they feel are of interest to our members in addition to the officially sponsored.
Classical Hollywood SIG Sponsored Panels
E5 Hollywood in Transition: The Historiography of Industrial Change
Chair: Eric Smoodin, University of California, Davis
- Eric Smoodin, University of California, Davis, “‘Speak to us in French!’ The Transition to Sound, International Markets, and Fox Folies at the Moulin-Rouge”
- Catherine Jurca, Caltech, “Live Entertainment and the Movies in Philadelphia, 1935-1936”
- Jon Lewis, Oregon State University, “Antonioni’s America: the American Counterculture and Hollywood in Transition”
- Anna Everett, University of California, Santa Barbara, “Race and the Science Fiction/Superhero Genre Reboot: Hollywood’s Afrofuturist Imaginary”
F13 More than “Molasses”: Fan Magazines as Sites of Debate
Chair: Tamar Jeffers McDonald, University of Kent
- Michael Slowik, Wesleyan University, “’That’s a Very Pretty Speech’: The Equation of Sound Films with Truth in the Late 1920s”
- Tamar Jeffers McDonald, University of Kent, “‘Do you know your color harmony in make-up as all Hollywood stars do?’ Movie magazines, stardom and Technicolor”
- Heather Addison, University of Nevada Las Vegas, “‘Newest Ideas about Brain Power’: Hair Color and Jean Harlow, Hollywood’s Platinum Blonde”
- Mark Lynn Anderson, University of Pittsburgh, “Respect the Matron: The Sadomasochism of Mrs. Wallace Reid, 1923-1935”
G17 Noir (In)Visibilities in Postwar Hollywood: Acting, Stardom, and Fan Culture
Chair: Will Scheibel, Syracuse University
Co-Chair: Julie Grossman, Le Moyne College
- Julie Grossman, Le Moyne College, “Lauren Bacall and ‘The Lean’: Performance Style and 1940s Film Noir”
- Charlene Regester, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, “Dark Desires, White Obsessions, and Black Signifiers: An Examination of Race in Double Indemnity”
- Will Scheibel, Syracuse University, “A Blue Shade of Noir: Star Suffering and Postwar Female Trauma in Whirlpool”
- Shelley Stamp, University of California, Santa Cruz, “Noir’s Tough Guys and their Female Fans”
J17 Production Cultures of the Past: Worker Identity and Professionalization at the Periphery of Film History
Chair: Erin Hill, Occidental College
- Aaron Rich, University of Southern California, “Public Libraries and Studio Research: A Reciprocal Relationship of Visual Knowledge”
- Luci Marzola, Chaffey College, “The Illustrated Cameraman: Labor, Industry, and Technological Change in the Cartoons of Glenn Kershner, A.S.C.”
- Dawn Fratini, Chapman University, “Running in Place: 3D, Sodium Ray, 16mm, and Research Engineering at Universal at the End of the Classical Hollywood Era”
- Erin Hill, Occidental College, “The ‘D-Girl’ in New Hollywood: The Female Development Executive and Downstream Effects of Feminized Origins”
L5 Death, Lawyers, and Taxes: New Approaches to U.S. Film History
Chair: Leah Steuer, University of Wisconsin-Madison
- Brenton Malin, University of Pittsburgh, “Ordinary and Necessary: The Tax Deduction for Advertising, 1900-1919”
- Julie Lavelle, Indiana University, “Legal Jurisdiction and the Movies: Partnerships, Parties, and Havana’s Teatro Campoamor”
- Paul Monticone, The University of Texas at Austin, “‘Like A Dog in the Manger’: The MPPDA, David O. Selznick, and Intellectual Property Self-Regulation”
- Peter Labuza, University of Southern California, “Martin Gang V. Hollywood: Litigating The Studio System in the 1940s”
Q18 Hollywood Before the Watershed: New Histories of the American Film Industry in the Early 1960s
Chair: Joshua Gleich, University of Arizona
Respondent: Matthew Bernstein, Emory University
- Joshua Gleich, University of Arizona, “‘Sick Tales of A Healthy Land’: Hollywood’s Downbeat Wave of the Early 1960s”
- Emily Carman, Chapman University, “‘The Ultimate Motion Picture’ of Late Hollywood: The Misfits as a Transitional Moment in mid-Century American Cinema”
- Ross Melnick, University of California, Santa Barbara, “A Continental Shift: 20th Century-Fox, the MPEA, and African Film Exhibition in the 1960s”
Q6 Off the Page: An Archival Approach to Production Design
Chair: Natalie Snoyman, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences
- Taylor Morales, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “Out of the Background: Production Design Sketches of the Hollywood Studio Era”
- Natalie Snoyman, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, “‘The Color Director Situation’: Vyvyan Donner’s Fashion Forecast and the Color Control Department”
- Rasmus Thjellesen, Norwegian Film School, “Max Rée – Examining the Work of a Danish Pioneer in Hollywood”
U16 Historicizing Global Hollywood
Chair: Daniel Gómez Steinhart University of Oregon
- Katharina Loew, University of Massachusetts Boston, “‘German camera angles’ and 1920s Hollywood”
- Paola Bonifazio, University of Texas at Austin, “Italy Meets Hollywood: The Case of Stazione Termini (1953)”
- Daniel Gómez Steinhart, University of Oregon, “Cross-border Hollywood: The Geopolitics of 1950s Runaway Productions in Mexico”
- Kaveh Askari, Michigan State University, “Collage Scores: Found Hollywood Sound as Industrial Practice in Midcentury Iran”
Additional Panels/Papers of interest to members
C2 Negotiating Prestige and Spectacle: Historical Studies on Film Exhibition, Venues, and Spatiality
Chair: Elizabeth C. Lunden, Stockholm University
Co-Chair: Kim Khavar Fahlstedt, Uppsala University
Respondent: Kathy Fuller-Seeley, The University of Texas at Austin
- Annie Fee, University of Oslo, “Art Cinema as Elite Cinema: Ciné-Clubs, Repertory Cinemas and the Interwar Emergence of a Social Divide”
- Kim Kavar Fahlstedt, Uppsala University, “Prologue to Hollywood: Tracing Sid Grauman’s Exhibition Practices”
- Elizabeth C. Lunden, Stockholm University, “Hollywood In and Out: A Look into the Academy Awards Ceremony’s Transition from Private Banquet to Public Spectacle”
G13 Hispanic, Indigenous, Oriental, White: The Transnational Star Discourses of Dolores del Río and Lupe Vélez
Chair: Diana Norton, The University of Texas at Austin
Respondent: Nicolas Poppe, Middlebury College
- Mary Kate Donovan, Skidmore College, “Chinese Spitfire: Lupe Vélez in East is West and Oriente es occidente”
- Monica Garcia Blizzard, Emory College, “Lupe Vélez’s ‘Whiteness’ in Mexico: La Zandunga (1937)”
- Diana Norton, The University of Texas at Austin, “Marian Imagery as Hispanicizing Project in the Transnational Star Discourse of Dolores del Río”
I9 Early Hollywood: Promotional Discourse, Visual Culture, and Industrial Identity
Chair: Doron Galili, Stockholm University
Co-Chair: Denise McKenna, Palomar College
- Shawn Shimpach, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, “‘The one greatest national publicity medium’– Magazines and Remediation in the Pre-Hollywood Motion Picture Industry”
- Hilary Hallett, Columbia University, “Telling the ‘Truth about Hollywood’: Origin Stories, Flappers, and Elinor Glyn”
- Denise McKenna, Palomar College and Charlie Keil, University of Toronto, “Hollywood on Parade: Charity as Public Engagement and Civic Spectacle”
- Doron Galili, Stockholm University, “Early Hollywood, Cultural Legitimacy, and Photoplay Magazine’s Resident Psychoanalytic Theorist”
Stay tuned for more updates and the finalized details for our Happy hour event.
We look forward to seeing you soon at the conference.
Best,
Emily, Peter, and Monica
SCMS Classical Hollywood SIG 