Hollywood's Tennessee: The Williams Films and Postwar America

by R. Barton Palmer, William Robert Bray

Overview

No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance.

Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration—the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s—and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780292723047
Publisher:	University of Texas Press
Publication date:	04/01/2009
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	371
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.83(d)

About the Author

R. Barton Palmer is Calhoun Lemon Professor of Literature at Clemson University in South Carolina and is editor, with David Boyd, of After Hitchcock: Influence, Imitation, and Intertextuality.

William Robert Bray is Professor of English at Middle Tennessee State University in Murfreesboro and is the founding editor of The Tennessee Williams Annual Review.

Table of Contents

• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter 1. Williams, Broadway, and Hollywood
• Chapter 2. The Glass Menagerie: A Different Kind of Woman's Picture
• Chapter 3. Bending the Code I: A Streetcar Named Desire
• Chapter 4. Bending the Code II: The Rose Tattoo
• Chapter 5. Bending the Code III: Baby Doll
• Chapter 6. Tennessee Williams and '50s Family Melodrama
• Chapter 7. The Williams Films and the Southern Renaissance on Screen
• Chapter 8. Tennessee Williams and the End of an Era
• Appendix A. Filmography with Principal Cast Members
• Appendix B. Select Small-Screen and Television Productions, with Principal Cast Members
• Appendix C. Some Notes on Produced and Unproduced Works
• Appendix D. Key to Collections
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index

Editorial Reviews

In this rich, compelling, well-researched volume, Palmer and Bray show exactly how Hollywood dealt with Tennessee Williams and, in turn, how he often subverted the very authorities that sought (in vain) to keep him in check.

Choice

In this rich, compelling, well-researched volume, Palmer and Bray show exactly how Hollywood dealt with Tennessee Williams and, in turn, how he often subverted the very authorities that sought (in vain) to keep him in check.-- "Choice" (7/1/2009 12:00:00 AM)

From the Publisher

In this rich, compelling, well-researched volume, Palmer and Bray show exactly how Hollywood dealt with Tennessee Williams and, in turn, how he often subverted the very authorities that sought (in vain) to keep him in check.

Choice - G. A. Foster