Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood

Introduction | Spotlight Hollywood: The Power of Place

In 1950, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker published Hollywood, the Dream Factory: An Anthropologist Looks at the Movie-Makers, the result of a one-year field study surveying the inner workings, power dynamics, and social system that fueled Hollywood’s film industry in the postwar period. In it, she observes, “Hollywood is a unique American phenomenon with a symbolism not limited to this country. It means many things to many people. . . . Rarely is it just a community where movies are made.”1 Around the same time as Powdermaker published her anthropological survey , the Hollywood Chamber of Commerce produced a tourist brochure claiming , “Hollywood is . . . an entity which cannot be contained by street boundaries ; for, in the fullest sense, Hollywood’s boundaries are the world.”2 Some forty years later, Michael Eisner, then chairman of Walt Disney Studios , commented on the allure of his corporation’s latest venture—a Hollywood theme park called Disney-mgm Studios. For Eisner, the theme park represented “the Hollywood that never was and always will be.”3 Anthropologist. Tourist guide. Industry heavyweight. All offer remarkably similar descriptions of Hollywood, yet none concretely define it. Instead, all of them capture what it is not—a neighborhood and industry hub—while hovering around Hollywood’s more symbolic and ineffable qualities. Hollywood is placeless, timeless, and emblematic, and if as Powdermaker suggests, “it means many things to many people,” then Hollywood is also multifarious, if not contested. • 1 • I N T R O D U C T I O N Spotlight Hollywood The Power of Place S T A R D U S T M O N U M E N T S • 2 • Given the disjunction between Hollywood the geographic site and Hollywood the symbol, it remains difficult to articulate what Hollywood really is and means. Clearly, Hollywood is synonymous with Los Angeles, the American film industry, and its products. As far back as the late 1910s and 1920s, the Hollywood film industry surpassed the output of other national industries and was recognized widely as a powerful and global force that, to this day, both spurs competition and inspires imitators. While films historically constituted the primary product of Hollywood’s industry, another kind of material presence simultaneously developed around the films — stars, and the Hollywood studios that produced them. Landmarks and tourist destinations, fan magazines and souvenirs, costumes and props, and box office figures and industry gossip also came to signify Hollywood and offered the opportunity for the public to see, consume, and memorialize the industry and its history. In addition to the films, then, these concrete material artifacts played (and continue to play) a key role in shaping what Hollywood is and what it means. Indeed, they transform Hollywood as industry and material into an idea or narrative that, while potent and pervasive, often elides specificity. Hollywood operates as a brand; it becomes a name that stands in for and connotes a range of other experiences and symbols, many of which are subjective and ever changing .4 Hollywood can embody the movies themselves, the experience of watching movies, the feelings tied up in the movies, the memories and nostalgia stirred by the movies, as well as the promise of success and personal fulfillment that can come from breaking into the movies. As historian Robert Sklar argues in Movie-Made America, the name “Hollywood ” historically described “a place, a people, and a state of mind.”5 Like Sklar, other writers have frequently discussed Hollywood’s role in fabricating and forging cultural myths and stories about not only America but also its power to unveil a more all-encompassing, though hard to pinpoint, idea, dream, and consciousness. If Hollywood embodies a state of mind, it might also be characterized as a “feeling”—one that not only generates and perpetuates a mythology but also reconstitutes the geographical site and industry as a powerful cultural monument. The movies themselves—and the experiences and feelings they elicit—therefore play a central role in creating and maintaining a Hollywood “state of mind.” These “feelings” operate by summoning both personal memories as well as prescribed and standardized associations: the gala premiere, the movie star, the “movie-struck girl,” the “discovery” at Schwab’s drugstore. Hollywood, in turn, comes to stand for glamour, celebrity, opportu- I N T R O D U C T I O N • 3 • nity, fame and fortune, fantasy, magic, spectacle, and a love of being “at the...