Tom Schatz is a leading scholar whose work delves into the history and historiography of American cinema. His writing centers on pivotal aspects of the Hollywood film industry, exploring studio systems, genres, and the forces that have shaped American filmmaking from its inception to the present day. Schatz examines how film narratives and production practices evolved within industrial frameworks and how these structures influenced artistic output. His publications offer incisive analyses of the creative processes and business strategies that defined Hollywood's golden age and its subsequent transformations. Schatz's scholarship is valued for its academic rigor and its ability to illuminate complex cinematic histories for a broad audience.
In this survey of Hollywood's film studios during their most glorious period, Schatz, in contrast with the directorial theories of Andrew Sarris and other film historians, describes the creative give-and-take, the symbiotic accord between creators and front offices.
Traces the movie industry through the momentous decade of the 1940s. This title discusses changes in the structure of the studio system - including the shift to independent production - and the dominant stars, genres, and production trends through the period.
The central thesis of this book is that a genre approach provides the most effective means for understanding, analyzing and appreciating the Hollywood cinema. Taking into account not only the formal and aesthetic aspects of feature filmmaking, but various other cultural aspects as well, the genre approach treats movie production as a dynamic process of exchange between the film industry and its audience. This process, embodied by the Hollywood studio system, has been sustained primarily through genres, those popular narrative formulas like the Western, musical and gangster film, which have dominated the screen arts throughout this century.