Book Review

Early in Hollywood v. Hard Core, Jon Lewis promises a book "structured less like an academic history than a novel." What this seems to mean is free range over a very wide swath of film history, as far back as the formation of the Motion Picture Patents Company in 1908 and as recent as ratings battles for two films released in 1999. Through all this, it is difficult to discern a coherent argument beyond the repeated claim that Hollywood executives operate, often in collusive fashion, chiefly to make money for their corporations, or, as Lewis puts it, a battle in which "the art of cinema is institutionally subsumed by and/or rendered secondary to commerce," an insight not likely to surprise even people who restrict their historical reading to Entertainment Weekly. And although Lewis promises a point "as in any good novel, at which the various narratives meet . . . [a] payoff [that] is well worth the wait," the book ends abruptly with a series of ratings case histories and no conclusion.

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The lack of a strong central argument, or, perhaps more accurately, the presence of a series of seemingly unrelated arguments, likely stems from the heavy debt this book owes to the research and insights of other scholars. In his acknowledgment, Lewis thanks "four colleagues" who "generously provided unpublished manuscripts and research materials that saved me a whole lot of time and trouble." At a minimum, Lewis seems to regard secondary sources as labor-saving devices. One of the most repeated phrases throughout his endnotes is a variation on "My discussion of x is based in large part on y." This is intended as sufficient explanation for taking over much of the material of the original writing, rewriting it to heighten a sense of drama, and citing quotations exactly as they appear in the original (with the same ellipses, bracketed inserts, and mistakes) but attributing them only to their primary sources in the endnotes.

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