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Q1 2019

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62 CINEMONTAGE / Q1 2019 Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity into Labor by Ronny Regev University of North Carolina Press, 2018 Paperback 273 pages $27.95 ISBN # 9781469636504 by Betsy A. McLane V irtually every working editor understands that the job is defined as labor as well as creation, craft and, sometimes, art. The Motion Picture Editors Guild ensures that this labor is recognized with credits, respected within the industry and compensated fairly, and ensures that members are not abused by employers nor left destitute in old age. This was not always the case, as is well known, and MPEG continues to find it necessary to fight for these rights today. Working in Hollywood: How the Studio System Turned Creativity in Labor explains not the rise of unionism in filmmaking, but rather the confluence of many factors that made unions necessary. Ronny Regev, an assistant professor in the history department at Hebrew University in Jerusalem, has written a meticulously researched book that draws on theories of industrial mass production as well as varied accounts of the film business and studies of movies and culture. She states: "Historians have paid much attention to the ways in which culture has become an industry and very little attention to how producers of culture have become modern workers." This distinction may seem to put too fine a point on the subject — as scholarly writing very often does — but for those in the business, Working in Hollywood offers a fascinating way to learn how artists and craftspeople came to be regarded as workers on an assembly line, and the ways that assembly line had to be different from those in an auto plant or textile mill. Working in Hollywood is a sincere and conscientious research achievement. A bibliography would be useful, but given that Regev footnotes hundreds of sources in each of the six main chapters, it would be almost overwhelming. In her introduction, the author says that the history of Hollywood "lies mostly in carbon paper sheets." These memos and notes are analogous to the way that today's history is written in tweets and e-mails. Fortunately for everyone, carbon copies last longer than similar rants delivered electronically, and Regev has scoured the best repositories of those papers. The reader is treated to the precise words of many Hollywood figures, thanks to the heroic preservation and cataloging efforts of institutions such as the Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion CUT / PRINT When the Film Industry Joined the Gig Economy

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