American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing

Rating:
Summary: Audiences speak back to the screen
Review: This book explores the meaning and effect of movies on American audiences since 1948. Author Tom Stempel, film historian and cinema professor, researched the book by personal observations of audiences, by studying Box Office results and with a questionnaire on what audiences think and feel.

His moviegoers describe their earliest and most memorable experiences. Just as Hollywood often holds up a mirror to our society, Tom Stempel allows the audience to hold up a mirror to Hollywood.

After Psycho, no one felt comfortable in the shower. After Jaws, many people were afraid to swim in the ocean. The Exorcist scared everyone. In their own words people tell how Hollywood films helped them form and transform their personal concepts of reality and examine the meaning of their lives:

"Easy Rider was a statement of our generation. Getting on motorcycles and just riding around the country with long hair flowing in the wind was what I and so many others wanted to do."Ira Katz

"My father took me and my sisters to see The Apple Dumpling Gang. I had never seen my father happier" Angela West

"It was like some kind of religious ritual initiation...as if she were bringing me into a new secret world where special knowledge and power would be passed on from her to me." Peggy Dillery, seeing Cleopatra with her Grandmother

"The Ten Commandments had a pretty big influence on the shaping of my religious view," T. Taylor

"It was in a movie theatre that I kissed my first girl, felt my first breast, and had my first mutual touching below the waist..." Brad Long

American Audiences on movies and MovieGoing shows how movies change audiences'lives and how New Lifestyles change the movies. It reminds us how Hollywood sees itself as the heart of America.

This easy to read, well researched, entertaining book will appeal to professional moviemakers as well as the average moviegoer

Maryanne Raphael, Writers World

Rating:
Summary: Audiences speak back to the screen
Review: This book explores the meaning and effect of movies on American audiences since 1948. Author Tom Stempel, film historian and cinema professor, researched the book by personal observations of audiences, by studying Box Office results and with a questionnaire on what audiences think and feel.

His moviegoers describe their earliest and most memorable experiences. Just as Hollywood often holds up a mirror to our society, Tom Stempel allows the audience to hold up a mirror to Hollywood.

After Psycho, no one felt comfortable in the shower. After Jaws, many people were afraid to swim in the ocean. The Exorcist scared everyone. In their own words people tell how Hollywood films helped them form and transform their personal concepts of reality and examine the meaning of their lives:

"Easy Rider was a statement of our generation. Getting on motorcycles and just riding around the country with long hair flowing in the wind was what I and so many others wanted to do."Ira Katz

"My father took me and my sisters to see The Apple Dumpling Gang. I had never seen my father happier" Angela West

"It was like some kind of religious ritual initiation...as if she were bringing me into a new secret world where special knowledge and power would be passed on from her to me." Peggy Dillery, seeing Cleopatra with her Grandmother

"The Ten Commandments had a pretty big influence on the shaping of my religious view," T. Taylor

"It was in a movie theatre that I kissed my first girl, felt my first breast, and had my first mutual touching below the waist..." Brad Long

American Audiences on movies and MovieGoing shows how movies change audiences'lives and how New Lifestyles change the movies. It reminds us how Hollywood sees itself as the heart of America.

This easy to read, well researched, entertaining book will appeal to professional moviemakers as well as the average moviegoer

Maryanne Raphael, Writers World

Rating:
Summary: About the human side of "going to the movies"
Review: Tom Stempel is professor of Cinema at Los Angeles City College and draws upon his considerable expertise to examine the complex relationship between the audience and the movies. In addition to examining box office statistics, Stempel surveyed more than 150 moviegoers about the human side of "going to the movies", and the public side of movies as distinct and separate from critics or directors perceptions on the film industry. Stempel notes the viewers' varied responses and personal recollections to some of the great classics of film as he looks at each of the great eras of movie making from the glory days of studio dominance in the 1940s through the bleak years studio system collapse in competition with the advent of television, to the rise and diversity of the independent and contemporary film makers of today. American Audiences On Movies And Moviegoing is very highly recommended and unique reading for students of film history and American popular culture.