Hollyworld

Hollywood is currently one of the largest and most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy. In just a few decades, it has transformed itself from a dying company town into a merchandising emporium of movies, games, and licensed characters. It is quickly moving even further into cyberspace, virtual reality, and digital imaging. Aida Hozic writes of these enormous changes in the film industry from a novel perspective: by tracing shifts in spatial organization of film production from the enclosed worlds of old Hollywood studios through globally dispersed location shooting to digital production and distribution. Hozic's fascinating tale of latter-day capitalism suggests that the physical reorganization of production—across the American economy, but in Hollywood in particular—alters material and conceptual boundaries between work and leisure, public and private, reality and fantasy. Particular economic regimes and forms of spatial organization have specific moral implications, and so the story of Hollywood's cultural production is partly a story of censorship and moral surveillance. Hozic's account of industrial change in Hollywood, and of its attempts at moral control over the production of fantasy, is an illuminating confrontation with the peculiar nature of Hollywood's political authority and of its complex power.

Fusing world-system theory and Gramscian interpretations of ideological hegemony, Hozic offers a perceptive and engaging analysis of the global reach of the Hollywood studios in the contemporary era of mass media conglomerates.... Hozic offers a well-argued and erudite book exposing Hollywood as a transnational franchise, a branded global conglomerate that converts swords into ploughshares in a post-Cold War world through the marriage of ideology and entertainment., 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.... In recent years... 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.... In this light, Aida Hozic's Hollyworld takes a valuable first step to explore a new frontier.... Hollyworld's fine account of filmmaking's industrial history has much to offer several distinct audiences, and it will spark vigorous debate in a few areas.... Hollyworld is a fascinating book that deserves a audience among political economists and cultural theorists., [Aida Hozic] offers in this book a stimulating treatment of a very significant development of out time: the rise of an unprecedented global media system and its impact on our society., This ambitious study of the political economy of Hollywood, past and present, utilizes recent theories of cultural geography to offer the reader an often fresh understanding of the film industry's historical development., What Hozic studies is Hollywood's latest mode, its blockbuster domination, advance reservations at the box office, and heaping of television advertising.... However, Hozic's economic and political points deal with the blurring spaces, Hollywood and global homogeneity, truth as projected by 'merchants,' film's ability to be perceived as reality.... Though definition of terms is a problem, they are clarified in a stirring conclusion.

Aida Hozic is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Florida.