Browsing by Author "Wright, Ellen"

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    1939: Secrets of Hollywood's Golden Year
    (Zinc media/ Paramount Plus, 2023) Wright, Ellen
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    Betty Grable: An American Icon in Wartime Britain
    (Routledge, 2011-11-23) Wright, Ellen; Williams, Melanie
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    Burlesque and Feminism - public talk given to the Long Eaton WI
    (2016-05-03) Wright, Ellen
    A 40 minute presentation on the history of feminism in burlesque performance since the form's emergence, in the 1860s to the present day. Concluded with a demonstration/audience participation activity based on the 'art' of glove removal in burlesque.
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    Coming Attractions: Tijuana bibles and the pornographic re-imagining of Hollywood
    (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) Wright, Ellen; Smith, Phyll
    ‘Coming Attractions’: Tijuana Bibles and the Pornographic Re-imagining of Hollywood Historical understanding of early Hollywood stars by their audiences are rarely informed by the sorts of unofficial and uninhibited discourse that fan writing and slash fictions allow scholars of modern celebrity. ‘Tijuana bibles’–illegal, pocket-sized, pornographic comics of the 1920s-1940s–presented erotic narratives featuring recognisable film stars of that era and make historical (re)examinations of audience understandings of the gossip and scandals of Hollywood trade and fan press possible. Film fan magazines were key to the industry dissemination of carefully constructed star personae, mediating how little or much fans actually knew about their favourite stars, who were portrayed at turns as wholesome, virtuous, admirable and alluring, daring, exciting and glamorous. As stars were sex symbols, their fans craved further insights into, and confirmation of, star’s private lives and personas, beyond the studios’ official ‘line’. A semi-official gossip media of scandal and rumour emerged, with a culture of innuendo, veiled accusation and coded revelation. Tijuana bibles’ graphic sexual depictions work in symbiosis with the controlled revelations of these fan magazines and the uncontrolled enthusiasm of the fans. Highly illegal, little public record of these pornographic publications exist – the age, authors, and distributors remain essentially unknown – while their underground nature and the ageless value of pornographic imagery means these publications have been constantly reproduced, leaving an uncatalogued and uneven record of reprinted booklets, semi-legitimate books and incomplete collections and inevitable internet exploitation and interest – which both assist and confound the archivist and historian. This chapter examines how Tijuana bibles celebrate, denigrate and satirise their star subjects and their supposed/imagined peccadilloes; unhampered by the official studio ‘line’ or the threat of litigation or censorship, reflecting an unofficial discourse which could not have found its way into print or official record. It demonstrates a public understanding, outside of the coded rumours of fan magazines, which both subverted and recognised star-persona and industry-sanctioned gossip, illustrating the speculation of audiences beyond the boundaries of the Hay’s Office, decency or legality.
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    Context, content and form in 1940s British film star fan club publications.
    (Edinburgh University Press, 2023) Wright, Ellen; Smith, Phyll
    This paper comes out of ongoing research that considers valuable historic examples of visible and ‘invisible’ star and fan labour, in a socio-industrial context long before social media celebrity culture and the neo-liberal focus upon one’s self-improvement and building yourself as a brand. It will examine the concerted development of a coterie of popular British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines and bulletins for the official fan clubs of British actors and actresses such as Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Richard Attenborough. Recently digitised by De Montfort University, these rare, engaging, supremely collectible and yet academically overlooked resources, form a coherent body of fan media ideally suited for the detailed scrutiny of an online conference. These materials raise a number of surprisingly prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains a star’s unique brand, offering parasocial precedents and valuable insights into visible and invisible star and fan labour and film fandom more generally. But beyond this they provide fascinating insights into the post war British stars and the star system, and the lives and complex, differentiated culture of British post war film fan consumption, whilst also demonstrating how socio-cultural, industrial and economic factors shape form and convention.
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    Feminism and Burlesque
    (2015-07-16) Wright, Ellen
    a 40 minute public talk given to members of the Hull WI. Along with demonstration/audience participation of the 'art' of glove tease
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    Having her Cheesecake and Eating It: Performance, Professionalism and the Politics of the Gaze in the Pin-Up Self-Portraiture and Celebrity of Bunny Yeager
    (University of california press, 2016-10-01) Wright, Ellen
    Bunny Yeager was a pin-up model and photographer/instructor who appeared on TV and in exploitation films, whilst creating pin-ups and ‘art’ nudes for Playboy, coffee table books, and ‘how-to’ publications. She is currently experiencing a revival as part of a subcultural vogue for 1950s/60s Americana. In her images she was often subject and photographer and her self-reflexive pin-ups engage with issues of authorship, control and the sexualised gaze. This paper will examine Yeager’s portraiture, instructive writing, her representation in Bunny Yeager’s Nude Camera (1963) and the way she positioned herself when discussing her work, to demonstrate how she embodied a mode of professional and sexual agency that engaged with broader, progressive ideas pertaining to women’s labour and identity circulating in 1960s America as part of feminism’s second wave.
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    ‘How to Land Jobs in Hollywood’: Popular media, historical knowledge and the casting couch
    (2021-07) Wright, Ellen; Smith, Phyll
    This paper contrasts a series of speculative historical claims used in the wake of the #MeToo movement to justify cultures of abuse embedded within the US entertainment industry with historic documents which examine sexual harassment and assault. While most of the contemporary media discussions of the casting couch and abusive behaviours in Hollywood were necessarily euphemistic and vague, due to legal and taste boundaries, this paper contrasts a range of ephemeral, paratextual materials such as contemporaneous, newspaper and film fan magazines articles of the 30-50s, alongside concurrent illegal publications where explicit discussion of sexual matters was made – the more explicit the better. The use of Tijuana Bibles - once hugely popular but now little-discussed, illegal pornographic comic booklets which featured depictions of film stars and speculated the sexual scenarios behind the gossip and euphemism of the legitimate press - will allow us to test the notion that, in the recent past, sexual harassment was culturally acceptable or conversely was an unknown and secret practice. Using approaches to speculative texts drawn from Bourdieu and Relational Frame Theory in the analysis of metaphor and jokes and the understanding of cultural distinctions and references and implicit beliefs of producers and audiences in historic contexts, this work provides a methodology for such historical analysis. The cross examination of available historic audience understandings of and speculations on the casting couch not only provides historical context for a seemingly recent social and industrial issue, it reveals the levels of understanding and acceptance of the American film industry’s systematic use of sexual exploitation and ‘the lie-promise of the casting couch’ during these periods, exposing the fault lines where apparent acceptance and victim blaming in the press represent the limitations of censorship and contemporary mores, rather than popular opinion.
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    ‘The Most Famous Outlaw in the Whole USA’: Parody, Performance and the Nuancing of Jane Russell’s Persona in Her Early Western Promotion
    (intellect, 2023-09-18) Wright, Ellen
    This paper will examine the star figure, both literally and figuratively, of Jane Russell, a star who first rose to public prominence through a promotional censorship scandal surrounding Howard Hughes’ 1943 Billy the Kid narrative, The Outlaw. Whilst Russell starred in a raft of Hollywood westerns throughout the course of her film career, this paper will examine Russell’s representation, early in her career, in the films and the promotional materials for the 1948 Bob Hope comedy vehicle, The Paleface, it’s 1952 sequel; Son of Paleface, and her cameo appearance that same year, in Road to Bali. This paper will consider the way in which these roles provided ample means for Paramount to exploit Russell’s high profile, scandalous sexpot, pin up persona by deliberately and repeatedly referring back to her infamous film debut for Hughes, but will also consider how in these film’s narratives, her persona actually develops, admittedly starting with, but ultimately progressing beyond, her Outlaw notoriety, towards a more complex depiction of independent, active and assured womanhood.
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    A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s
    (2016-03-03) Jones, Matthew; Wright, Ellen; Chibnall, S.; Clarke, Alissa; Jordan, Kelly
    Using the findings and data of the AHRC-funded 'Cultural Memory and British Cinema-going of the 1960s' project, this immersive theatre performance recreated the experience of visiting a cinema during that decade. Bringing together 30 actors, 2 directors, 2 producers and 2 cinema venues, 'A Night at the Cinema in the 1960s' was performed twice, once at Phoenix in Leicester on 3 March 2016 and once at Picturehouse Central in London on 29 June 2016. As well as being an output of the AHRC project's research and a means of generating impact from that work, it also enabled the project's researchers to develop a new understanding of their materials.
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    The Singing Detective: Deanna Durbin in Lady on a Train
    (Powerhouse Films, 2023) Wright, Ellen
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    Spectacular Bodies: the Swimsuit, Sexuality and Hollywood
    (Taylor and Francis, 2015-08-19) Wright, Ellen
    This article explores the mutually beneficial relationship between the American swimsuit and film industries during the first three decades of the twentieth century. Three examples will be used: Fatty and the Bathing Beauties from 1913 (prior to regulated film content), Footlight Parade from 1933 (when limited self-regulation had been put in place, but was not yet rigorously enforced) and the Tarzan film franchise (which spans both the second period and a later, third period of actual implementation and subsequent negotiation). Using these examples, the paper will consider several of the popular associations attached to the swimmer and the swimsuit. It will discuss the ways in which Hollywood utilised the swimsuit, the swimmer and swimming in both its films and its promotional materials and will demonstrate how through the sporting associations of both the garment and sports stars, film producers negotiated the processes of censorship and self-regulation while allowing the continued use of semi-naked and eroticised bodies, to their own profit and to that of the increasingly fashionable swimwear industry.
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    Star Products, Star Capital, Fan Markets: Examining 1940s British Film Stardom Through Fan Club Publications
    (Taylor and Francis, 2019) Wright, Ellen; Smith, Phyll
    This paper is part on an ongoing project that examines the development of British film stars and their fan club culture during the mid to late 1940s, through studio-sanctioned but fan or star-produced magazines for the official fan clubs of British actresses Jean Kent, Anne Crawford, and Pat Roc, and the British fan club for American actress Deanna Durbin. These resources, accessed from the Bill Douglas Archive (Exeter), the Steve Chibnall Collection (De Montfort) and the authors’ own collections, are contextualised with broader contemporaneous articles in newspapers, novels, film magazines and British and US industry publications that discuss the British star system and film star fandom. Combined, these ancillary materials raise prescient issues around the uncredited but essential star labour that nurtures and maintains stars’ unique brands, star capital and fan-following, and around these particular stars as signifiers of Britishness, wealth, status and levity during a period of socio-cultural and industrial upheaval and austerity in Britain and its film industry. By considering the labour and ideologies at the heart of these particular British film star personae and film star fan culture, this paper broadens our understanding of the British film industry and its relationship with Hollywood, and offers valuable insights into star and fan labour and film fandom more generally, revealing a more complex, differentiated culture of British film fan consumption and authority, of British star construction and dissemination, of studio control, reflexivity and of economic function, than has been commonly assumed.
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    ‘A Swirl of Red, White and Blue Flags and Chesty Swimmers with Their Chins Up’: Esther Williams, Americanness, the Aquacade and Sex
    (Routledge, 2019) Wright, Ellen
    Aquacades and swimming spectaculars enjoyed huge popularity and financial success in America during the first half of the twentieth century. They capitalised upon a cultural preoccupation with physical fitness and youthfulness and the increasingly common notion of leisure time, of freedom and abundance, whilst evoking the glamorous, sexualised spectacle of beauty pageants, the chorus line and the showgirl and the then prevalent iconography of mechanisation and modernity. It is perhaps not surprising then that Hollywood, with its hunger for the modern, impressive and the titillating, its need to maintain its appeal with young audiences with leisure time and disposable income, and its subsequent need to present its stars as desirable yet respectable enough to placate censors and more conservative audiences, took this form and stars to its bosom, creating its own kaleidoscopic Berkeley-esque spectacles and swimming adventures starring pin-up and beefcake Olympian swimmers such as Esther Williams and Johnny Weissmuller. This chapter will focus upon all-American Williams, exploring discourse around MGM’s ‘Million Dollar Mermaid,’ and the promotional materials (posters, marquee displays, photographic pin-ups etc) for her and her films. This will be supplemented with a range of other contemporaneous materials that engaged with the American cultural phenomenon of the aquacade, such as pornographic comics, known as Tijuana bibles, satirical cartoons and promotional materials upon as well as archive footage of one of the most famous aquacades; Billy Rose’s Aquacade at the 1939 New York World’s Fair. The chapter will examine William’s star persona and its intrinsic ‘Americanness’ and explore common American understandings of the aquacade as a liminal space, and the swimmer as a desirable but ultimately disruptive figure. It will demonstrate how the iconography of the aquacade and the spectacular body of the swimmer were appropriated by the American film industry to evoke the aquacades’ sexualised connotations whilst ostensibly appearing to cinema censors and more conservative audiences, to be good clean fun.