Stardust Monuments: The Saving and Selling of Hollywood by Alison Trope (review)

What do the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), La Cinémathèque française, Planet Hollywood, Turner Movie Classics (TMC), the Criterion Collection, and an online guide to the Walk of Fame have in common? Plenty, as Alison Trope demonstrates in her new book Stardust Monuments: The Selling and Saving of Hollywood, an intriguing and comprehensive study of a wide array of institutions—non-profit museums, commercial theme parks, retail stores, specialized cable channels, restaurant chains—and websites, and their roles in the historicization and memorialization of Hollywood. Like many other nonprofit and for-profit bodies and individuals, these institutions and corporations have more or less successfully written histories of America’s ‘dream factory’, and used them to push their own cultural, artistic, educational, and economic agendas.

Trope’s thorough historical investigation of the multifaceted institutionalizations of Hollywood‘s history is motivated by two sets of questions: first, what is Hollywood and what does it mean to us? And second, why and how do individuals, groups, and corporations aspire to establish diverse ‘monuments’ that construct, narrate and visualize the history of Hollywood? In light of the ubiquitous presence of Hollywood histories in high culture and commerce, Trope argues that Hollywood is less a specific geographical location or singular industrial and artistic entity than an elusive and dynamic brand and state of mind. In turn, the above-mentioned institutions use Hollywood’s symbolic power and iconic status for their own purposes, be they artistic or commercial.

Structured in two parts and five chapters, Trope’s book explores historiographical efforts to remember and promote Hollywood with examples of both physical and virtual spaces. Her investigation sheds light on the differences and commonalities of cultural and commercial curatorial philosophies, moving from the first film museums and archives founded in the 1930s to contemporary historiographical online applications and databases. The first part discusses in two chapters the museumization of Hollywood in national and international institutions. Chapter One is dedicated to the curatorial policies and practices of MoMA’s Film Library and La Cinémathèque française, two institutions that early on established collection and exhibition frameworks presenting and recognizing film as art. As Trope outlines, these frameworks are still used as templates by other film archives and museums in the United States and abroad. The second chapter then precisely outlines the unsuccessful local attempts to establish a major museum in Los Angeles in the 1950s and 1960s. Conceptually situating Hollywood in a broader context of communication technologies and interconnected media, the realization of the Hollywood Museum fell prey to frictions between the cultural and commercial parties involved in the project, which resulted in the foundation only of minor museums and archives in Los Angeles and beyond.

The second part focuses on the more commercial embrace of the film industry’s past, which led to the merging of cultural, public, and corporate exhibition spheres. As Trope explains, in the 1980s and 1990s a nostalgia industry emerged that sold Hollywood’s past with strategies surprisingly parallel to the museological exhibition practices discussed in part one. Chapter Three examines how the conceptualization and realization of Hollywood-themed environments that popped up in the course of media syndication in the 1980s and 1990s exploited Hollywood memorabilia for marketing purposes. As Chapter Four then illustrates, this development was further elaborated with the branding of Hollywood history by the home entertainment market in the 1990s and 2000s, when specialized cable channels and lavishly designed DVDs domesticated film exhibition, collecting, and archiving. Trope’s discussion of the conflict between user-generated and industry-controlled representation on the Internet in Chapter Four adds an interesting answer to the question of what Hollywood is and means, and when and where Hollywood can be experienced with increasing mobile and immediate media technologies.

As diverse as the attempts to historicize Hollywood have been, Trope suggests that all of the case studies presented are inextricably linked by one common theme: the tension between art and commerce. Whether it is...