The Hollywood Biopic of the Twentieth Century

Abstract

This chapter restricts itself to films and, for the sake of coherence and given the sheer number of biopics, to, largely, biographical films made in Hollywood or recognized by the Hollywood academy in the twentieth century. The promotion of the films is a way to identify what are perceived by film companies to be a biopic's unique selling points and how these have evolved over the twentieth century, adapting to changing audiences. From the beginning of sound era to the late twentieth century biopics evolve from being producers’ pictures, overwhelmingly driven by commercial interests through the exploitation of the star performance, to something more nuanced. Sampling biopic posters from the 1930s to the end of the twentieth century reveals how biopics and their audiences have changed and is one way of identifying evolving generic features.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 30 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.