Here is the synopsis of our sample research paper on Robert Sklar: Movie-Made America
. Have the paper e-mailed to you 24/7/365.
Essay / Research Paper Abstract
This 3 page paper discusses Sklar's book Movie-Made America. Bibliography lists 2 sources.
Page Count:
3 pages (~225 words per page)
File: D0_HVRSklar.rtf
Buy This Term Paper »
Unformatted sample text from the term paper:
this art form. That is, he believes that movies, originally intended as entertainment for the wealthy, instead became the favorite amusement of the working class, and that when they
adopted this new art form, they refused to allow the middle class to dictate what was and was not acceptable. He says, "The urban workers, the immigrants and the
poor had discovered a new medium of entertainment without the aid, and indeed beneath the notice, of the custodians and arbiters of middle-class culture" (Sklar, 1994, p. 4). This
paper examines Sklars thesis and some of his ideas. Discussion Sklars arguments are somewhat difficult to follow and critics have pointed out that his thesis is actually two-fold:
first, as noted, that the early movie audiences were largely working-class; and second, that the people who ran the industry in the early days were largely Jewish, thus coming from
"outside" the culture of the people who went to see the films they made. These two separate ideas, taken together, are the core of Sklars argument. He writes
that "Adolph Zukors aim ... had been to kill the slum tradition in the movies. In this he succeeded, but not quite in the way he had expected or the
middle-class cultural spokesmen before him had hoped. The movies expanded into the middle classes without leaving their storefront audiences behind" (Sklar, 1994, p. 46). This statement is odd, as
it seems to imply that movies are an either/or proposition: either they can be enjoyed by the middle class or by the working class, but not by both. This
seems to further imply that people of different classes must of necessity have widely differing tastes and that if a working class audience likes a particular film, a middle class
...