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Hollywood Outsiders
The Adaptation of
the Film Industry
by Anne Morey
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BOOK REVIEW
Hollywood Outsiders: The Adaptation of the Film Industry 1913-1934
by Anne Morey
University of Minnesota Press : Minneapolis, Minnesota : 2003
Hardcover Edition : ISBN 978-0816637326 : 328 pages
$68.95
Trade Paperback Edition : ISBN 978-0816637334 : 242 pages
$22.95 (raised to $26.00)
Reviewed by Carl Bennett
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To be fair, Anne Morey’s treatise on Hollywood outsiders — the wide-eyed youths, the wannabees, and the moral watchdogs — covers a handful of select Hollywood subcultures and tangential businesses. With the number of books written over the years that cover the same historical ground, it is unusual to encounter a book that addresses the picayune but nonetheless active nether regions of the motion picture industry.
To be unfair, like the outsiders she writes about, Morey’s book will never mean much to the multitude of readers interested in Hollywood production history, due to its intentionally obtuse subject matter that was likely concocted solely for Morey’s doctorial dissertation, upon which the work at hand is based.
Morey also examines juvenile novels that utilized the motion picture industry as a backdrop, the mail-order instructional series hawked by the Palmer Photoplay Company.
The author predictably falls prey to the ongoing professiorial malaise of stodgy analysis and incestuous references to the works of other academics, but that is forgiven here since no one but overthinking library rats will read this book anyway. Life is short. Most people will be unwilling to waste theirs on this particular volume.
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