Faculty Fellow

Wyatt Phillips

Hollywood's Genres: The Illusion of Choice and the Mass Audience

Comedy and tragedy; melodrama and farce; westerns and horror films: ideas of genre have long been employed to provide structure for creativity and communication. As producers of cultural products at the beginning of the 20th Century struggled to produce a greater volume of goods for a recently nationalized, American market, genre was also found to provide structures that helped make both the production and distribution of those goods more efficient and cost effective. Nonetheless, Hollywood, like other cultural industries at the dawn of mass media, was threatened by the unpredictability of the new "mass" audience. My project considers early Hollywood's preference, in the face of a limited repertoire of genres, to project the illusion of choice as a means of placating the unknowable masses while simultaneously employing film genres to subdivide the mass audience into definable groups with predictable behaviors.

To learn more about Dr. Wyatt Phillips, please visit: Wyatt Phillips