About the Book:

Hollywood in the Neighborhood presents a vivid new picture of how movies entered the American heartland — the thousands of smaller cities, towns, and villages far from the East and West Coast film centers.

Using a broad range of research sources, essays from scholars including Richard Abel, Robert Allen, Kathryn Fuller-Seeley, Terry Lindvall, and Greg Waller examine in detail the social and cultural changes this new form of entertainment brought to towns from Gastonia, North Carolina to Placerville, California, and from Norfolk, Virginia to rural Ontario and beyond. Emphasizing the roles of local exhibitors, neighborhood audiences, regional cultures, and the growing national mass media, their essays chart how motion pictures so quickly and successfully moved into old opera houses and glittering new picture palaces on Main Streets across America.

What people say:

"The research methods employed are as diverse as the subject areas.... This is a valuable contribution to current debates, both about film exhibition itself and about how and why the 'new' film history contributes to the larger picture of film history as a whole." — Screening the Past

"By contributing to a history of American cinema that is not centrally about films, this excellent collection challenges both the dominant paradigm of film historiography and the national social histories that have yet to take entertainment seriously." — Journal of American History

"Virtually every essay is empirical, detailed, and fully documented.... This volume is a rarity — fully, sometimes stolidly, fact based: film theory with its feet planted firmly on the ground." — Choice

About the Author:

Kathryn Fuller-Seeley is Associate Professor and Associate Chair in the Communication Department at Georgia State University. She is author of Hollywood in the Neighborhood among other books.