Table of Contents

Part I: The Rise of Movie Culture
1. The Birth of a Mass Medium
2. Nickel Madness
3. Edison's Trust and How It Got Busted
4. D.W. Griffith and the Forging of Motion-Picture Art

Part II: The Movies in the Age of Mass Culture
5. Hollywood and the Dawning of the Aquarian Age
6. The Silent Film and the Passionate Life
7. Chaos, Magic, Physical Genius and the Art of Silent Comedy
8. Movie-Made Children
9. The House That Adolph Zukor Built

Part III: Mass Culture in the Age of Movies
10. The Moguls at Bay and the Censors' Triumph
11. The Golden Age of Turbulence and the Golden Age of Order
12. The Making of Cultural Myths: Walt Disney and Frank Capra
13. Selling Movies Overseas
14. The Hollywood Gold Rush

Part IV: The Decline of Movie Culture
15. Hollywood at War for America and at War with Itself
16. The Disappearing Audience and the Television Crisis
17. Hollywood's Collapse
18. The Promise of Personal Film

Part V: The Enduring Medium
19. Nadir and Revival
20. Hollywood and the Age of Reagan
21. From Myth to Memory
22. Independent Images

About the Author

Robert Sklar was born in 1936 and was educated in the public schools of Long Beach, California, and at Princeton University. After working as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times, he received his Ph.D. in the history of American civilization from Harvard University of 1965. He was a professor of cinema at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts for more than thirty years, served on the selection committee of the New York Film Festival, and was a member of the National Film Preservation Board. Mr. Sklar's other books include Film: An International History of the Medium and City Boys: Cagney, Bogart, Garfield. He died in 2011.

Reviews

"THE history of the American movie, combining social history, economics, and a precise and effective sense of film criticism."--Frank Friedel, Harvard University

"One of the best popular works we have in the field of media ecology....There is hardly a single question regarding the transforming power of movies that [Sklar] leaves untouched."--Neil Postman