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Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs

Building Hollywood’s Ideal Communities

Stephen Rowley author

Format:Hardback

Publisher:Palgrave Macmillan

Published:22nd Oct '15

Currently unavailable, and unfortunately no date known when it will be back

Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs cover

Media depictions of community are enormously influential on wider popular opinion about how people would like to live. In this study, Rowley examines depictions of ideal communities in Hollywood films and television and explores the implications of attempts to build real-world counterparts to such imagined places.

“This densely argued, scholarly text focuses on the way television and cinema in this period both presented images of idealised communities and also responded to growing criticisms of such movements as New Urbanism in the USA. … This is a remarkable book and a work of extraordinary scholarship.” (David Mercer, Australian Geographer, February, 2016)

"Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs should be required reading for anyone who wants to explore the relationship between visual culture and urban theory in a rigorous manner. Rowley's analysis of Disney's envisioning of the ideal community - from animated entertainment to theme parks to planned communities - is distinguished by meticulous close readings and his theoretical sophistication. He moves so deftly across media because he constructs such elegant paradigms for comparative analysis. This is simply a benchmark work." - Jim Collins, Professor, Film and Television, University of Notre Dame, USA

ISBN: 9781137501615

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: 4581g

272 pages

1st ed. 2015