We are delighted to announce that Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World, by Ross Melnick, has won the Culbert Family Book Prize for 2024!
The prize committee commended:
Ross Melnick’s Hollywood’s Embassies presents a groundbreaking study on the global influence of Hollywood’s film exhibition industry, offering a comprehensive examination of how American film screenings have shaped audiences worldwide. Melnick adopts an ambitious, comparative, and longitudinal approach that is rare in contemporary scholarship, making a significant contribution to film history, global history and media studies. He explores the political, cultural, and industrial history of Hollywood, emphasizing the of exhibition venues, architectural styles, programming strategies, and glamorous premieres as cultural and geopolitical agents rather than mere sites of consumption.
Building on his earlier work (Hollywood Showmen, 2012), Melnick’s monograph traces Hollywood’s global footprint through its theaters and distribution strategies, providing a nuanced analysis of the interaction between Hollywood-style screenings and local audiences. Drawing from extensive archival research and press documentation, Melnick offers a theoretically rigorous yet accessible narrative, critically examining the power dynamics and geopolitical complexities of Hollywood’s global reach. He addresses the tensions and contradictions inherent in this history and reflects on the industry’s transformations pre-pandemic in the epilogue.
Hollywood’s Embassies convincingly argues that cinema architecture and film exhibition practices were key in promoting an American way of life globally. Cinemas acted as showcases for US popular culture, explicitly aimed at ‘selling America and American democracy overseas’. Melnick’s research spans a broad international scale, revealing the intricate link between US foreign policy and cinematic distribution and exhibition practices. This work highlights Hollywood’s foreign ownership and operation of cinemas, demonstrating how they projected American power worldwide and influenced global audiences. Melnick’s book sets a new standard in the study of Hollywood’s international influence, making it a vital contribution to the field.
Publication details:
Ross Melnick, Hollywood’s Embassies: How Movie Theaters Projected American Power Around the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2022), ISBN: 9780231201513, paperback: $35. https://cup.columbia.edu/book/hollywoods-embassies/9780231201513
The Culbert Family Book Prize
The prize is awarded on behalf of the Culbert family for outstanding works looking at the history of ways in which media, public opinion, politics and diplomacy interact. In the years before the regular bi-annual IAMHIST conferences take place, monographs and anthologies that were published within the last four years. The $2,000 prize is awarded every other year at the IAMHIST conference. The prize has been established by an endowment from Lubna Culbert. Further details can be found here: https://iamhist.net/culbert-family-book-prize/.
