Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Movies We Can See

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Description

Questioning the assumptions that govern our culture, this book focuses on one medium -- the movies. In particular, it examines how movies are packaged, distributed, and promoted, exposing industry secrets such as how Miramax often buys distribution rights to movies it then fails to distribute, presumably to make sure its competitors don't get them. The book shows, for the first time, how the corporate ownership of movie theatres defies antitrust laws and precedents stretching back over 50 years. While the average American can usually find a book or record that has not been endorsed by the mainstream media, when it comes to movies, consumers are powerless against what Rosenbaum calls 'the media-industrial complex'.

Reviews

" Movie Wars is a cherry bomb in the lap of critical complacency and orthodoxy--and a bold challenge to the movie industry. . . . This brief text is packed with more ideas than any other film book you're likely to read this year." -- Premiere
"The work of a tough and principled critic whose insights into movies in the age of tie-ins and Disney are as rude and witty as they are sharp, Jonathan Rosenbaum's Movie Wars is a bracing job of cultural muckraking." --Tom Carson, the Washington Post
"Jonathan Rosenbaum is the best film critic in the United States--indeed, he's one of the best writers on film of any kind in the history of the medium." --James Naremore, author of Acting in the Cinema
"Rosenbaum's journalistic style makes this animated treatise accessible to film buffs who want to know more about how movies get made, while his sound arguments make it a good bet for academic readers as well." --Publishers Weekly
" Movie Wars is invigorating in the way it argues not only that movies of lasting value are being made all the time, but also that movies can actaully enlarge an audience's comprehensionof the world." --Vue Weekly
"Essential reading for anyone who cares about movies." --Martha P. Nochimson, Film Quarterly

Author Bio

Jonathan Rosenbaum is a film critic for the Chicago Reader and is the author of Moving Places, Placing Movies, Movies as Politics, and Dead Man. He is a frequent contributor to Film Comment and Cineaste. He lives in Chicago.