Customer Reviews

History of the American Cinema: A New Pot of Gold: Hollywood Under the Electric Rainbow, 1980-1989

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All 10 volumes of this magnificent Series, founded and edited by Charles Harpole, are now (Oct. 2003) published by Scribner/Thomson/Gale and the University of California Press. The latter does the paperback versions at vastly lower prices. Movie scholars and buffs should own the whole series in hardback and will the books to their children, because this is very likely the only multi-volume series on American movies ever to be done... given publishing business these days. And, no library of any size should be without the whole Series.

Stephen Prince's A New Pot Of Gold details the crisis of the 1980s in American film when Hollywood faced challenges from rising costs and stagnant ticket sales. Both are excellent histories of different eras in American filmmaking.

This was one of the volumes in the History of the American Cinema series that I was most looking forward to, and while a good book it fails to measure up to the best in the series. Prince never seems to be able to offer the insight of Cook (in vol. 9) or the mastery of Koszarski (in vol. 3). I had hoped for more about an era that looms as large in the public imagination as that decade does, yet Prince is unable to meet the challenge.