The Hard Sell of Paradise

Hawai'i, Hollywood, Tourism

Jason Sperb

• Verlag: SUNY Press
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781438487755
• Thema: Medien & darstellende Kunst
• Thema: Filmgeschichte & Filmkritik

The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of "Hawai'i" for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure, but also through its complex engagement with larger cultural and historical questions, such as colonialism, world war, and statehood. Drawing on rare archival research, The Hard Sell of Paradise also explores the valuable role that tourism partners such as United Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, and the Hawaii Tourist Bureau played in directly and indirectly influencing such films and television shows as Waikiki Wedding, Diamond Head, Blue Hawaii, The Endless Summer, and Hawaii Five-O.

Inhaltsverzeichnis

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Touristic Visions and Virtual Tourists
• 1 Save That Gag for the Tourists: The Hawaii Tourist Bureau and Post-tourism Narratives of 1930s Hollywood
• 2 Twilight of the Past, Island of Utopia: December 7th and the Contradictions of War Nostalgia
• 3 You’re Still Talking about Class? Adapting for Statehood in Diamond Head (1963)
• 4 Founded on Truth but Not on Fact: Pastiche Narratives of Modernity in Adaptations of James Michener’s Hawaii (1959)
• 5 Business or Pleasure: The Touristic Contradictions of the Elvis/Hawai‘i Experience from Blue Hawaii (1961) to Aloha from Hawaii (1973)
• 6 Shoot All Winter, Show All Summer: Frontier Mythologies and the Hipster Tourism of Surf Documentaries
• 7 If You Can’t Find It, Don’t Write It: Genre and Competing Notions of Realism in Hawaii Five-O (1968)
• Conclusion: Hawai‘i Bound
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover