Eric Hoyt

Hollywood and the Law

Since the earliest days of cinema the law has influenced the conditions in which Hollywood films are made, sold, circulated or presented – from the talent contracts that enable a film to go into production, to the copyright laws that govern its distribution and the censorship laws that may block exhibition. Equally, Hollywood has left its own impression on the American legal system by lobbying to expand the duration of copyright, providing a highly visible stage for contract disputes and representing the legal system on screen.

Thieves of Bombay: United Artists, Colonial Copyright, and Film Piracy in the 1920s

This article examines Hollywood’s attempts to curtail print duplication piracy in Bombay during the 1920s. The Thief of Bagdad, starring Douglas Fairbanks, was a massive international success for the Hollywood studio United Artists and their newly established Asian distribution network. Perhaps the most famous Hollywood release in India, Thief catapulted its star, Douglas Fairbanks, into the pantheon of Indian screen legends. In the late 1920s, United Artists discovered that Thief was being illegally distributed and exhibited in India and filed a series of legal actions in the Bombay courts. This article examines the extensive legal record of these cases—alongside letters, memos, and other studio correspondence—in order to reveal the topography of international distribution and its legal and non-legal circuits. We argue that Hollywood’s problems in curtailing the so-called “Bombay piracies” demonstrate the contradictions of international intellectual property enforcement at a critical early juncture in media globalization.

Scaled Entity Search: A method for media historiography and response to critiques of big humanities data research

Search has been unfairly maligned within digital humanities big data research. While many digital tools lack a wide audience due to the uncertainty of researchers regarding their operation and/or skepticism towards their utility, search offers functions already familiar and potentially transparent to a range of users. To adapt search to the scale of Big Data, we offer Scaled Entity Search (SES). Designed as an interpretive method to accompany an under-construction application that allows users to search hundreds or thousands of entities across a corpus simultaneously, SES balances critical reflection on the entities, corpus, and digital with an appreciation of how all of these factors interact to shape both our results and our future questions. Using examples from film and broadcasting history, we demonstrate the process and value of SES as performed over a corpus of 1.3 million pages of media industry documents.

DISTRIBUTION'S RETURN TRIP

The commercial distribution of films has always been premised on a round trip: movies go out, money comes back. Most scholarly attention to distribution—itself a neglected area of study compared to production and exhibition—has tended to ignore the return trip of revenue back to the studio. This article examines the distribution operations of two Hollywood studios, United Artists and Warner Bros., in Japan during the 1920s and 1930s. The author discusses numerous challenges the studios faced in collecting and transferring revenue from Japanese exhibitors back to the United States and considers the significance of the studios’ decisions in the context of imperial Japan and the lead-up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor.

Inventing Film Studies (review)

Co-op, as being prearchival institutions that “collected” noncommercial-oriented, nonnarrative media before the much later mandates by the American archival community. As stipulated, such activity in an increasingly paranoid Cold War–era context garnered concern by Baillie, who communicated that there was “so much suspicion of underground film” that the threat of “being shut down by the local authorities” was constant and palpable. Among the developing microcinema movement, Canyon provided much-needed access to news and information about the local community. The fledging organization relied on volunteerism in its early days, and one could argue that all subsequent employees worked, depending on the economic climate, at one point or another as partial volunteers trading off salary limitations for a vital film-arts training ground and network. Although MacDonald chronicles this important aspect of the organization’s survival over the years, one cannot underestimate the valuable contributions and dedication of those who believed in the cause of the independent film and media movement. Although shout-outs go to Baillie, Strand, Callenbach, Diane Kitchen, Edith Kramer, Dominic Angerame, and those who stayed for longer and even career-spanning stints as key staff, numerous volunteers (one should include here those part-timers who worked more hours than they were paid for and full-time staff who worked without pay during leaner times) shaped the Canyon “narrative.” In our current leaner times, the same old story of “sacrificing the arts” remains. It is hoped MacDonald’s tome will serve not only as a testimony to community over commodity but also as a “love letter” to American avant-garde artists and devoted lovers of cinema. Inventing Film Studies Edited by Lee Grieveson and Haidee Wasson Duke University Press, 2008