Hollywood Pressbooks and the Vectors of Publicity
From the 1910s through the 1980s, Hollywood studios promoted their productions through the creation and dissemination of pressbooks—bound pamphlets containing publicity materials, advertising layouts, accessories for sale, and ballyhoo ideas. The pressbooks were sent to exhibitors and press outlets, making them vital nodes within the wider networks of film circulation and culture. The Media History Digital Library (MHDL), housed within the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research (WCFTR), has scanned over 2,000 pressbooks, allowing for the broad access to these historic records. In this Friday Lunch talk, WCFTR and MHDL Director Eric Hoyt will share his team’s work in digitizing the pressbooks and utilizing computational methods, including plagiarism detection algorithms, to assess the extent that publicity text and promotional images from the pressbooks reached their intended destinations—US newspapers and magazines.
Please note: A catered lunch will be provided at this Friday Lunch event. Seats are limited and available on a first-come basis. To register, please send an email to rsvp@humanities.wisc.edu with your name, title, or affiliation.
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Eric Hoyt is the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production in the Department of Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the intersections between media history and the digital humanities. He is the Director of the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research and Media History Digital Library, which has digitized over 3 million pages of historic books and magazines for open access. He is the author of Hollywood Vault: Film Libraries before Home Video (2014) and Ink-Stained Hollywood: The Triumph of American Cinema’s Trade Press (2022), as well as co-editor of Hollywood and the Law (2015), The Arclight Guidebook to Media History and the Digital Humanities (2016), and Saving New Sounds: Podcast Preservation and Historiography (2021). His work has been supported with over $1.4 million in extramural grants from the NEH, ACLS, NHPRC, and IMLS.