Abstract
In May 1943, Life carried an advertisement by General Electric that promoted War Bonds while also stoking demand for their own prod- ucts. A young couple sits on a bench, the man in uniform and sketching a house in the dirt with a stick. The accompanying text spells out the couple’s daydream:
Jim’s going away tomorrow … and there will be long lonely days before he comes back.
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Notes
From Life, May 10, 1943, 19. This advertisement is also reproduced in John Archer, Architecture and Suburbia: From English Villa to American Dream House, 1690–2000 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 271.
This campaign is discussed in John Bush Jones, All-Out for Victory! Magazine Advertising and the World War II Home Front (Lebanon: University Press of New England, 2009), 286.
Reproduced in Cynthia Lee Henthorn, From Submarines to Suburbs: Selling a Better America, 1939–1959 (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2006), 133.
Donald C. Shoup, The High Cost of Free Parking (Chicago and Washington: Planners Press, 2005), 674.
Clayton R. Koppes and Gregory D. Black, Hollywood Goes to War: How Politics, Profits, and Propaganda Shaped World War II Movies (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1987).
MacK innon, Holly wood’s Small Towns, 9; Emanuel Levy, Small-Town America in Film: The Decline and Fall of Community (New York: Continuum, 1990), 66–67.
Charles J. Maland, Frank Capra (Boston: Twayne, 1980), 131
The film’s afterlife and ongoing appeal as a seasonal classic is discussed in Danny Peary, Cult Movies: The Classics, the Sleepers, the Weird, and the Wonderful (New York: Delta, 1981), 162–163.
Richard Francaviglia, Main Street Revisited: Time, Space, and Image Building in Small-Town America (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 130.
The history of these backlots has long been documented by a community of amateur film history buffs sharing information on the Internet. However, recent years have seen a number of books starting to appear that document history of various lots. See Steven Bingen, Stephen X. Sylvester, and Michael Troyan, MGM: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot (Solana Beach: Santa Monica Press, 2011)
Steven Bingen, Warner Bros.: Hollywood’s Ultimate Backlot (Lanham: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2014)
Robert S. Birchard, Early Universal City (Charleston: Arcadia, 2009)
Julie Lugo Cerra and Marc Wanamaker, Movie Studios of Culver City (Charleston: Arcadia, 2011)
E. J. Stephens and Marc Wanamaker, Early Warner Bros. Studios (Charleston: Arcadia, 2010)
E. J. Stephens, Michael Christaldi, and Marc Wanamaker, Early Paramount Studios (Charleston: Arcadia Publishing, 2013).
For the location, see Gerald Kaufman, Meet Me in St. Louis (London: British Film Institute, 1994), 18
Michael Willian, The Essential It’s a Wonderful Life: A Scene-by-Scene Guide to the Classic Film, 2nd ed. (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2006), 6
Tony Reeves, The Worldwide Guide to Movie Locations, 3rd rev. ed. (London: Titan Books, 2006), 347–348
Robert D. Putnam, Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2001), 54
Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism: A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 87.
Robert Beuka, SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 51.
Gene D. Phillips, Alfred Hitchcock (Boston: Twayne, 1984), 104
Donald Spoto, The Art of Alfred Hitchcock: Fifty Years of His Motion Pictures, 2nd ed. (New York: Anchor/Doubleday, 1992)
Colin McArthur, “Chinese Boxes and Russian Dolls: Tracking the Elusive Cinematic City,” in The Cinematic City, ed. David B. Clarke (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 27.
Robin Wood notes this explosion of noir in the “’Til Two” scene in his famous essay on Shadow of a Doubt and It’s a Wonderful Life: Robin Wood, “Ideology, Genre, Auteur,” Film Comment 13, no. 1 (1977): 50.
Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930–1980 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 202
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© 2015 Stephen Rowley
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Rowley, S. (2015). Movie Towns. In: Movie Towns and Sitcom Suburbs. Screening Spaces. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137493286_2
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