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Winner, 2024 Culbert Family Book Prize, International Association for Media and History
Winner - 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association
Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way.
In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.
— Kevin Canfield
The political and cultural repercussions of this exhibition strategy for both Hollywood and the national film industries “invaded” by these foreign-owned movie theaters are explored in great detail by Ross Melnick in his new book, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power around the World.
— Bruno Guaraná
If there’s anyone who still holds the view that entertainment, art and politics are separate realms, Ross Melnick’s exhaustively researched book should set them straight.
— Tom Ryan
This volume is highly recommended for those interested in film studies, theater architecture, global affairs and American Studies and it may easily become a standard title on the reception of American films abroad.
— Dr. A. Ebert
Hollywood's Embassies offers a unique history of movie theaters “as cultural embassies.” The scale of research and insight here is staggering.
Melnick's book is a masterful achievement.
— Klaus Dodds
A work of vast scope and synoptic power, Ross Melnick’s Hollywood’s Embassies is required reading for anyone seeking to understand how American cinema came to dominate most of the planet’s screen space. With pinpoint global positioning, Melnick tracks how Hollywood planted its flag from Cairo to Rio and beyond, transmitting American values, colonizing consciousnesses, and raking in cash. It is a fascinating story, splendidly told.
— Thomas Doherty, author of Little Lindy Is Kidnapped: How the Media Covered the Crime of the Century
A brilliantly conceived and trailblazing work, this is a must-read history of Hollywood studios’ perennial and always complicated efforts to create a globalized presence via theaters that promoted American values around the world. Melnick’s impeccable research and lively writing style raises the curtain on this largely neglected aspect of theater history, providing vivid, fascinating accounts of specific endeavors as well as an incisive framework for understanding them. Hollywood’s Embassies confirms Melnick’s stature as the leading historian of American film exhibition of his generation.
— Matthew H. Bernstein, author of Walter Wanger, Hollywood Independent
Captivating and ambitious, Hollywood’s Embassies covers a fascinating breadth of global territory as it explores the way Hollywood displayed America to the world.
— Kathy Fuller-Seeley, author of Jack Benny and the Golden Age of American Radio Comedy
Melnick reveals a world-spanning exhibition strategy that major U.S. film companies continuously updated and coherently pursued for most of the twentieth century. All scholars of Hollywood will have perceived some aspect of this strategy, but none of us can possibly have appreciated its scope before now. A tour de force.
— Mark Garrett Cooper, author of Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood
A fascinating book.
An essential volume that provides significant access for readers to the histories that lurk behind the marquees and that uncovers the critical challenges that lie ahead as both empires navigate the waters of pandemics and trade wars.
A valuable entry in media studies as much as a thoughtful historization of business practices with a determined commitment to exploring multilingual archives, extracting and deciphering them for both experts and Hollywood enthusiasts alike.
The book is easily adaptable for teaching in a variety of classes both due to its geographically determined chapter structure and elegant and accessible prose. Hollywood’s Embassies is full of treasures and is a monumental addition to the field.
[An] absolute must-read.
— Peter Labuza
Skillfully woven together to offer a foundational industrial history of Hollywood’s majors and the many locales in which they operated shop window cinemas and nationwide or regional circuits.
Hollywood’s Embassies is not only a fantastic insight into the study of global cinematic exhibition and its
relationship to American imperialism, but is required reading for those interested in the classical Hollywood studio system and reception studies.
Though we may not know what will happen to theaters and exhibition in the future, Melnick’s work outlines the power that Hollywood studios had and still have, even as they navigate stormy seas.
Its unsurpassable global scope [makes] this book a major piece of international history and as such a marvelous addition to our understanding of Hollywood’s global impact.
A scholarly tour de force of impressive historical depth and global range.
Ross Melnick is professor of film and media studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He is the author of American Showman: Samuel “Roxy” Rothafel and the Birth of the Entertainment Industry, 1908–1935 (Columbia, 2012) and coeditor of Rediscovering U.S. Newsfilm: Cinema, Television, and the Archive (2018).
Acknowledgments
Introduction: “Shop Windows,” “Cultural Embassies,” and Hollywood’s Global Exhibition
Part I. Europe. When Expansion Was Paramount (1923–1993): “Shop Window” Cinemas and the European Expansion of U.S. Film Exhibitors
1. Hollywood’s British Invasion and the Battle of Birmingham, 1919–1929
2. Hollywood’s European Adventure, 1925–1941
3. A New Battleground: U.S. Exhibitors Under Nazi Occupation, 1941–1945
4. Postwar Europe and the Legacy of Hollywood Cinemas, 1945–1993
Part II. Australasia. Banking on Australasia (1930–1982): Global Banks and U.S. Cinema Ownership in Australia and New Zealand
5. Fox Chases Hoyts: U.S. Cinema Ownership in Australia, 1930–1936
6. The Fox Chase in New Zealand and Australia, 1936–1946
7. Hollywood and Australasian Cinemas, 1946–1982
Part III: Latin America and the Caribbean. Hollywood in Cinelandia (1927–1973): U.S. Cinemas and Local Politics in Latin America and the Caribbean
8. Cine Metros y Cine Paramounts, 1926–1941: MGM and Paramount’s Latin American Shop Window Cinemas
9. Prop(aganda) Window Cinemas, 1933–1945: Ufa, Hollywood, and the Battle for Hearts and Minds Through South American Cinemas During World War II
10. Hollywood Cinema Expansion in Postwar South America, 1945–1973
11. Caribbean Dreams, 1929–1973: Hollywood Cinemas in Cuba, Jamaica, Puerto Rico, and Trinidad
Part IV. Middle East. Hollywood’s Muddle East (1925–1982): Political Change in Egypt and Israel and the Consequences for Hollywood’s Middle Eastern Cinemas
12. Buildings, Ballyhoo, and Boycotts in Egypt, 1925–1947: Alternating Realities at Hollywood’s Egyptian Cinemas
13. No Meeting in the Middle, 1947–1956: Hollywood Cinemas, Egyptian Revolution, and Israeli Independence
14. After the Revolution, 1957–1982: Twentieth Century-Fox, Egypt, and Israel
Part V. Africa. An “Unhappy Image of the United States Before an African Population” (1932–1975): Race, Industry, and Rebellion at Hollywood’s African Cinemas
15. MGM and the “Uncrowned King of South Africa,” 1932–1937: Hollywood Shop Window Cinemas in a Bitterly Protected Market
16. Fox Hunting on the African Continent, 1937–1956: Twentieth Century-Fox and the Struggle for Control of African Cinemas
17. A “Royal” Mess: Racial Strife in Colonial Zimbabwe, the Struggle for Independence in Postcolonial Kenya, and the End of Hollywood’s Control of South African Cinemas, 1959–1975
Part VI. Asia. Eastern Promises (1927–2013): Hollywood’s Cinemas in China, India, Japan, and the Philippines
18. Benshi and Ballyhoo, 1927–1973: Hollywood’s Shop Window Cinemas in Japan and the Philippines
19. Joining the Global Metro Cub Club, 1936–1973: MGM and Fox’s Shop Window Cinemas in India
20. China as Hollywood’s Final Frontier, 1946–2013: Hollywood’s Chinese Cinemas and the End of Hollywood’s Exhibition Empires
Epilogue: Global Exhibition Flows in Reverse Before the Pandemic, 2013–2019
Notes
Index