DISSERTATION:
My doctoral dissertation, ‘Hollywood’s Ballyhoo Boys and Girls,’ is a comprehensive archival study on studio marketing campaigns and publicity departments. It earned me a distinction from NYU’s Cinema Studies Dept. and the Jay Leyda award for academic excellence. I am currently developing the project into a compelling book that tells the story of Hollywood marketing.
OTHER WRITING:
“‘They’re Selling An Image:’ Movie Stars Playing ‘Hookers Cut to Look Like Movie Stars’ in L.A. Confidential,” Selling Sex on Screen. Ed. Catriona McAvoy and Karen Ritzenhoff. Rowman and Littlefield. Summer, 2015. (Proofs)
I discuss how industry anxieties pertaining to emerging digital technologies are projected onto the female body – specifically the narrative’s female sex workers who have received cosmetic surgery to resemble Hollywood movie starlets. The cosmetically altered body stands in for the digitally manipulated image.
No Women, Only Brothers: Warner Brothers and the Fighting 69th, Gender and Heroism. Ed. Karen Ritzenhoff and Jakub Kazecki. Palgrave Macmillian. Spring, 2014. (Proofs)
Using archival sources, I reveal and discuss Warners late decision to eliminate all of the female characters from the movie The Fighting 69th.
Review of Hollywood and Hitler by Thomas Doherty Film & History. Spring, 2014. Print.
Very occasionally I’m funny. McSweeney’s
HOW I CAME TO LOVE MOVIES
When I was little my parents smoked; Not like how some people have the occasional cigarette – my parents each had a 40-to-60 a-day habit. At nighttime I watched through itchy eyes as the smoke made its way up the staircase and into my bedroom. When I began having breathing issues my parents thankfully decided to give up smoking. They put the funds they would have spent on cigarettes into an old fashioned sweet jar and within two weeks of quitting had saved enough money to buy a video player. The first VHS we ever rented was BACK TO THE FUTURE, which is still – even after all these years of studying the critically acclaimed greats – my absolute favorite Hollywood movie. Its clever, tightly-woven cause-and-effect plot that revolves around a life-altering moment delivers pure fun and wish fulfillment. If you want to write Hollywood screenplays, I say, study this one! After watching the movie, I was hooked: I became a two-movie- a-night addict, and the course of my life was determined. So perhaps the above is how I could equate movies with oxygen, but – you know – let’s not push the metaphor.
MORE HOW I CAME TO LOVE MOVIES
Dad regularly took my little brother and I to the cinema. He would always make us sit to the very end of a movie while pointing out every vaguely Jewish looking name to appear in the credits. As he did so he would loudly claim each person as “one of us.” He was extremely proud of his Jewish heritage and saw Hollywood movies as a branch in which American Jewish immigrants had excelled; This was important to him because growing up in the forties in London’s East End he’d experienced extreme anti-Semitism. I remember that he loved AN AMERICAN TAIL so much that we went to see it twice. AN AMERICAN TAIL is an animated, adventure film about a Russian Jewish family of mice that attempt to escape persecution by immigrating to America. I probably love and study movies because my dad loved movies, and I treasure and miss our conversations about James Cagney (an honorary “one of us”), Steven Spielberg, and Hollywood.