Homemade Hollywood

This is a comprehensive book about fan films, covering the secret history of the burgeoning movement creating the cinema of tomorrow.Who would risk his life swinging six stories above the ground without a net, just for a homemade Spiderman movie? What would drive a young couple with a newborn baby to spend their life savings on a Star Wars film that has been seen by 4 million people - but from which they can never profit? And why would Steven Spielberg praise three nobodies for a home movie they made as teenagers in the Eighties? They're fan filmmakers, creating the cinema of tomorrow: quick, bitesized movies, starring world-famous characters from Superman to Captain Kirk to Lara Croft. The flicks are fun, free and totally illegal.Now, thanks to Internet sites like YouTube and file sharing technologies like Bit Torrent, this controversial filmmaking movement is starting to rise to the surface. Likewise, Hollywood is taking notice: However, there is no comprehensive book about fan films. There's no tome devoted to the controversies surrounding this unlawful brand of filmmaking and how they're already changing today's media.There's no guide that tells you which movies to search out - and which ones to leave hidden under their rocks. "Homemade Hollywood: The Fan Film Phenomenon" can be that book.

"HOMEMADE HOLLYWOOD: FANS BEHIND THE CAMERA traces an underground 'fan film' movement from the 1920s to YouTube modern times, covering everything from the indie filmmaking industry to how big media changes attitudes and content of movies themselves. Any movie fan interested on more than a general level will find this a lively fascinating coverage of alternative movie media." -James A. Cox, California Bookwatch--Sanford Lakoff, Normal 0 false false false MicrosoftInternetExplorer4 /* Style Definitions */ table.MsoNormalTable {mso-style-name: "Table Normal"; mso-tstyle-rowband-size:0; mso-tstyle-colband-size:0; mso-style-noshow: yes; mso-style-parent: ""; mso-padding-alt:0in 5.4pt 0in 5.4pt; mso-para-margin:0in; mso-para-margin-bottom: .0001pt; mso-pagination: widow-orphan; font-size:10.0pt; font-family: "Times New Roman"; mso-ansi-language: #0400; mso-fareast-language: #0400; mso-bidi-language: #0400;} "Clive Young's book does a great job putting together the unknown history of fan films...I never got to make a fan film, but after reading Homemade Hollywood, I wish I had."-RetroThing.com, "Author Clive Young brings the rigors of a scholar and the inside-baseball of a fan to this well-researched and-written survey of how doing it yourself has both helped drive our enduring love of motion pictures and to articulate the populist roots of that obsession." -Michael E. Ross, PopMatters.com, "Clive Youn manages to turn what could have been a lugubrious analysis into an interesting, chatty, and accessibly fun look at why fans do what we do." - JM Frey, hardcorenerdity.com, "Homemade Hollywood works because it properly historicizes the fan-movie experience, and deepens our historical understanding of the hold that cinema has on the popular imagination." -Michael E. Ross, PopMatters.com

Clive Young is an author and lecturer covering the crossroads between high technology and popular culture. He will appear in the upcoming documentary, Star Wars Fans, discussing the cultural consequences of fan productions, and has lectured on the topic at universities, libraries and conventions. More information on Young can be found at his website, www.cliveyoung.com.