Jonathan Stubbs

Jonathan Stubbs is a Professor in the Faculty of Communication at Cyprus International University. His research focusses on the representation of history in film, the economic and cultural relationship between Hollywood and the British film industry, and the history of media in Cyprus during the British colonial period. He is the author of Hollywood and the Invention of England: Projecting the English Past in American Cinema, 1930–2017 (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019) and Historical Film: A Critical Introduction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2013). His work has also appeared in various journals, including the Historical Journal of Film and Television, the Journal of Popular Culture, the Journal of British Cinema and Television and the Journal of Commonwealth and Imperial History.

Dramatising film history in the historical film

Nostalgic self-referentiality has become a well-established aspect of Hollywood’s textual practice, both on-screen and off. But an ongoing cycle of film and TV miniseries which dramatise the production histories of specific, real-world films adds a new dimension to this reflexive process. This chapter examines the screen representation of film production history, addressing how these histories are understood and represented within the American film industry and how they are circulated outside it. The chapter also addresses the relationship between the Hollywood production history film and academic histories of film production, particularly the different commercial imperatives and institutional standards which shape them.

The first section looks at representations of Hollywood film production within Hollywood itself, examining films such as RKO 281 (1999) and Hitchcock (2012) and miniseries such as Feud: Bette and Joan (2017). These dramas tend to portray Hollywood as an enclosed, largely self-contained industrial system, taking the heyday of the studio filmmaking as their primary point of reference. The figure of the director is typically given prominence: flawed but great, invariably male, executing his creative vision in tension with systems of industrial production. My second section looks at representations of American film production outside Hollywood, including “poverty row” b-films from the 1950s and Blaxploitation and pornographic films from the 1970s. The production histories dramatised in Ed Wood (1994), Baadasssss! (2003) and The Disaster Artist (2017), among others, reflect changes in film culture and contemporary film appreciation, introducing marginalised filmmaking practices into a Hollywood-centric film history. The films also tend to be staunchly auteurist, even when depicting ostensibly incompetent filmmaking. Finally, this chapter returns to Hollywood to examine Disney’s Saving Mr. Banks (2013), an account of Mary Poppins’ (1964) production history. A revealing depiction of film history as a form of intellectual property, this film provides the clearest example of how modern media conglomerates such as Disney have asserted control over the representation of their own corporate histories.