Reddit reviews The Star Machine

Have you read any of Jeanine Basinger’s books on the “Golden Age of Hollywood”? She’s the legendary octogenarian director of film studies at Wesleyan University and is best known as the author of The Star Machine, which is the book on the studio system that built Hollywood as we know it, as well as Silent Stars, a must -read for any enthusiast of cinematic history or those interested in the birth of the concept of the movie star.

Anyways, she’s coming out this November with a massive 600+ page monograph on the entire canon of American musical film entitled The Movie Musical! that I’ve pre-ordered (which I don’t usually do but her works are always so amazing that this upcoming one is sure to be a classic). I can’t wait to download my copy, and I know that an aficionado of musicals like you is sure to enjoy the hell out of this book.

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Also, I highly recommend A Woman's View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women 1930-1960, which (convincingly) makes the argument that the movies of the ‘30s to the ‘50s were surprisingly more woman-focused and even proto-feminist than post-Sexual Revolution era films, despite the fact that they were made in such a patriarchal and misogynistic society and culture.