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Playwrights have been depicting Hollywood as a cultural desert and an industry of profit-driven philistines ever since the early days of the movies. This collection of original essays covers the period from the 1920s to the present but concentrates on such contempory playwrights as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, Arthur Kopit, and Adrienne Kennedy. A substantial proportion of the volume is devoted to a discussion of the way in which these authors deconstruct Hollywood myths to reveal painful social and psychological issues in American life, providing a deeper and darker picture than the simple satires of movie-making in the 1920s and 1930s or Odets's comparison of the commercially debased Hollywood with the higher, purer art of the theatre. To complete and further complicate the picture, the volume concludes with essays on the African American experience, gay writers, and feminist writing as seen through the lens of Marlane Myer's ETTA JENKS. It is obvious that the legitimate stage remains a watchdog and constant critic of what is possibly the world's most powerful cultural phenomenon This book will be eargerly read by all students of film, theatre, and 20th century literature.
Sommario
Introduction, Kimball King; Part HOLLYWOOD ON STAGE; Chapter 1 ?€?Engaged in the Art of Photodrama?€?: Merton of the Movies, William Hutchings; Chapter 2 What Makes Sammy Run?: S. N. Behrman and the Fugitive Kind, Robert F. Gross; Chapter 3 Hollywood as Moral Landscape: Clifford Odets?€? The Big Knife, Albert Wertheim; Chapter 4 Hollywood on the Contemporary Stage: Image, Phallic ?€?Players,?€? and the Culture Industry, Stephen Watt; Chapter 5 Staging Hollywood, Selling Out, Marcia Blumberg; Chapter 6 Sanctity, Seduction or Settling Scores Against the Swine in Speed-the-Plow?, Leslie Kane; Chapter 7 So Dis Is Hollywood: Mamet in Hell, Toby Silverman Zinman; Chapter 8 The Myth of Narcissus: Shepard's True West and Mamet's Speed-the-Plow, Katherine H. Burkman; Chapter 9 Alienation Effects and Exteriorized Subjectivity in Angel City and The Bostonians, RJ LaVelle; Chapter 10 ?€?It's Symbolic!?€??€”Arthur Kopit's Revised Road to Nirvana and Its Portrayal of Hollywood and Society, Todd M. Lidh; Chapter 11 ?€?The Devil Answers?€?: Drury Pifer's Strindberg in Hollywood, William Kerwin; Chapter 12 The Last Tycoon: Elia Kazan's and Harold Pinter's Unsentimental Hollywood Romance, Christopher C. Hudgins; Chapter 13 Hollywood as Text in the Plays of Christopher Hampton, with Reference to David Rabe and Others, Kimball King; Chapter 14 The Clash of Verbal and Visual (Con)Texts: Adrienne Kennedy's (Re)Construction of Racial Polarities in An Evening with Dead Essex and A Movie Star Has to Star in Black and White, E. Barnsley Brown; Chapter 15 Hollywood as Inspiration for the Stage: The Gay Playwrights' Perspective, Robert Gross, Kimball King; Chapter 16 The Matter of Bodies: Women, Pornography, and Hollywood in Marlane Meyer's Etta Jenks, Leslie Frost; Index;
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Kimball King
Riassunto
A collection of original essays 16 analyzing plays about the movie industry from the 1920s to the present. They concentrate however on such contemporary playwrights as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, and Adrienne Kennedy, highlighting their deconstruction of Hollywood myths to reveal painful
