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they says audio-visual cultures the podcast that delves into topics and issues around cultural production I’m the host and creator Paula Blair in this edition I’m excited to be joined by film scholar dr. Martha Shearer talking about her research on musicals women and new Hollywood and much more thanks to our members on patreon.com forward slash a V cultures for your continued and valued support if you’d like to help the podcast financially or by spreading the word listen to the end to find out hi when I do enjoy my chat with Martha amid the hustle and bustle of BFI Southbank in London I’m currently teaching studies at King’s College London where I worked for quite a while and I also did my PhD I’m teaching film history contemporary history but also a lot of kind of Hollywood cinema and also I’m currently editing two books gosh that’s a big undertaking I know originally I was sort of gonna be not at the same time and they sort of aren’t but there is a definitely a point where in my life in the future where they will be overlapping one of them is gonna be on women and new Hollywood and then the other one is called musicals at the margins which is looking at films and media texts of various kinds they exist on the margins and boundaries of the musical is a genre a historically now and especially now I think but also in a range of different kind of geographical on the geographical context you’ve worked a lot on New York yeah are you happy to tell us a bit about your research on the bag yes my first book the musical in New York City and so what it was looking at was being sort of everywhere isn’t here now and quite far the most common setting was interesting but also one of the primary things I was trying to do in that boat was think about the ways in which New York was undergoing quite substantial amounts of change during the period of which the music was at its peak so from like they’re coming of sound the late 1920s opportunity early 1960s really which it starts to tail off in the kind of mid fifties but this is when you’re getting the kind of growth of suburbia this is when you’re getting various kinds of modernist architecture you know the baby boom but they’re also various process of urban redevelopment another completely transforming the city and so I was interested in how that was sort of reshaping the musical and how those processes was registering the musical and so it was a sort of project that was very confined into one city but also because most of those musicals were still made in Los Angeles so they’re also almost always from the outside to some extent it’s trying to map on the relationship between the kind of industry and the process of production the actual kind of aesthetics of the films themselves and then their relationship to the history and geography of think about how all those things are woven together in trance moving each other throughout the very first musicals and go up until the 1970s I really consider anything contemporary my back it’s really fascinate an idea that idea that New York is rebuilt on a studio lot yeah an MGM in particular because they had a massive lot with not so standing set so they had I think three different New York streets ads which you can pick up recurring this is the brownstone Street or whatever else might be kind of readjustment so they have their own sort of approximation of the city and so it is to an extent it’s a different version of it I was trying to kind of grapple with what is the relationship to the real city when you are constructing your own kind of weird distorted version on another coast in order for it to make sense as New York as a setting it’s not intentional and so you can see the various ways these films
because it’s a musical you continually have this influx of people working on the Broadway so there is this kind of direct live experience but yeah the SATs are really interesting especially the historical there’s a whole cluster musicals especially 1940s that are set around turn to centuries and I have a whole chapter on and a lot of them are doing quite interesting things where they’re trying to present this vision of a city and the skyline natural buildings but doesn’t really exist anymore but it’s all been rebuilt other ways of which they’re visually attractive can maybe talk about some examples of specific films in a minute I’m just wondering about New York as a transient space because there’s so much emigration to America coming in especially if a lot of the funds for earlier in the 20th century yeah and then people moving it was the way the movies it’s not just singing it’s dance we’re talking about yeah I mean I think musicals are really product about people coming to the city but not necessarily as migrants so there is a kind of standard musical merit it’s like a girl someone she wants to be a star Broadway and she ends up living in a boarding house having lots of fun with her boardinghouse friends but actually there’s relatively little on contemporary in migration whether that’s from the south which like there was kind of a second break migration that happened around World War two all actual immigration which is strange I mean there are a couple of historical musicals that have Irish yeah but that is the kind of especially like nineteen forties musicals they will have weird Gene Kelly doing a jig bit like that’s okay there’s a film called up in Central Park which has been exempt rice playing boss tweed controlling Tammany Hall it’s about his downfall in this very very fictionalized version but it’s all about this father and daughter Irish immigrants like literally fresh off the boats get picked up by this guy working the time it’s like oh you have to go in to vote twenty three times okay because we can’t read so we don’t understand the Constitution then they learn how to read no like oh no what’s interesting I think is there the musicals are much less interested in that sense of transience than in the sense of quick cities they’re really preoccupied with these very dense neighborhoods where you know everyone knows each other and actually they might be quiet Italians they’re people from Eastern Europe but all living together in there all have their own customs whatever but it’s really interested in this fixed that it’s idea of a neighborhood and so a lot of the films in the 1940s because there are all these plans to redevelop them to build new public housing or to move people out the city because they want to build like an art center or whatever there’s a real sense of anxiety to those kinds of films and so what about those musicals end up being about is this sense of community that’s really rooted in place so it’s actually much less about embracing that sense of transience and change people moving in and out are they’re really worried about the ways that these neighborhoods in the city as a whole might change it’s quite defensive and actually I think the kind of historical musicals are doing something similar because they’re setting up this idea of continuity with the past and quite often even though they’re displaying the ways in which the skyline wanted changed they’re quite often built around places that still exist so you have sat around Central Park there’s a whole scandal in that film about lost weeds wearing the animals in the Central Park Zoo for him to eat o or Washington Square Park but stuff that still exists so it’s about a sense of continuity that’s threatened and they’re quite disdainful of any kind of modernism as well especially what you get in the 1950s and you get proper kind of international style story because these don’t go down very well they’re not interest like a lot of these films I ended up because I was doing this database when I had this mad spreadsheet where I was going through AFI catalog listing any film listed as a musical or film with songs which is like a different category it starts to get a bit unstable but also going through all these kind of coffee-table book on produced in the seventies and just going through every single film they listed so that I had this master list of anything that might be considered a musical that was being produced from like the 30s please it’s vast but the numbers are absolutely fast and so I was going through and trying to be like okay what proportion of these films are setting what trends can I pick out it took months obviously months just doing that but it threw up some interesting things that I think get missed because the musical is on that people are very familiar with the same sort of like 15 to 20 films about constantly get screened constantly but there are you know 800 other films and some of them are doing similar things to those films in some ways those forms are kind of exceptional and that’s why they’re interesting but actually there are these broad themes that get really lost if you’re just going to the films that you know that is one of the things I really wanted to do if you John rest studies really is to try and bringing some of the things that actually were tapping into quite significant trends in the genre but I’ve got lost because the process of colonization so sometimes I’ll be talking about thumbs and people like I know that film like you absolutely don’t my god I found it in this list and then like the only way I could see it was because it’s child star was selling a copy on her like weird personal website yeah that was an amazing find it did come like the DVD came and it was just some like dvd-r and it didn’t even have the title of the film on it just like her name had a big picture of her I
was very grateful to that because you know that was really wasn’t available anywhere else they never will be probably I mean this was called there’s a girl in my heart and that was another turn-of-the-century musical about a kind of neighborhoods where they all clubbed together and put on a show or whatever and there’s various kinds of rollerskating people and it’s about a block that was threatened with redevelopment so it’s quite interesting for my parents is because it’s really keying and it’s not a very good film it’s very cheaply made it’s like a poverty road musical when there are various poverty Road Studios that wanted to go a bit more middlebrow and so started making musicals to do that which are a bit more expensive they would normally be doing I mean it’s really chunky they’re a bit so I’m watching and I’m like I feel like that bit status so it’s not like I’m providing this Melek everyone please check out this amazing piece of cinema Arts that you have missed but it is for thinking about the relationship between the musical and new your grand between Hollywood cinema in New York it is quite an interesting example to get directly talking about the redevelopment like build a sports arena I think in that case it’s quite interesting that those films that are completely very very cheap they were but no one was really paying particular attention to you know but are actually kind of engaging with these films really directly just because it might be objectively not well made that does not mean that can take just a name which I’m showing yeah yeah and I think actually some of those films you don’t have to be I’m not really ever particularly interested in web of the films and goods yeah it doesn’t matter yeah well as I think other sorts of projects that’s maybe part of your argument in that I don’t know well but you’re saying that this film has been engaging with or making of interesting into venture and I’m doing this I was totally uninterested in that sort of yeah yeah it’s different kind of value yeah I suppose it’s up maybe it’s a question yeah this is for the kind of stuff I’m working on at the moment so I’m I’m editing this book music was at the margins with gene LeBell so right and this is sort of a starting point really in there I think there is a sense that it’s really obvious what a musical is but I can have this with students every year when I try to teach us whatever they like well a musical it has to be one like people of breaking into song and any film where there are only stage performances that can’t be a musical any film where people are just dancing and not saying that’s my musical and like let me give you like a list of films and a list of contacts and which people have definite considered that musicals and it actually is much more unstable than initially especially if you move beyond the Canon and especially actually if you’re talking about a more contemporary context because there does come a point around the late seventies early eighties where this genre does start to shift and develop into dance motorcycles what we’ve wanted to complete aside stand for those boundary policing issues because what it’s doing is it’s a way of managing that instability rather than actually acknowledging it and addressing it and so what we’re trying to do with this musicals at the margins project is directly look at the unstable edges and look at those films there might be boundary cases or that have been marginalized so there are examples of films where no one will read the screen departmen musicals but they haven’t been discussed as such for various kinds of reasons or perhaps because they’re dealing with marginalized groups or they’re in a marginal cinema or they’re doing something slightly different or they’re not film or like a short film to put those kind of questions back to the center I think with the book my approach was really I’m not going to impose a definition yeah I’m gonna be really led by and actually some of the films that I wrote about their generic status was contested at the time the example always have is this film young man with horns which is about Kirk Douglas it’s great but that is a film is really interesting because when I looked at the memos in the archive you get all these people writing about it being like just to because they’re everyone this is not a musical this is a serious drama about gas it’s not a musical just music but they also cast Doris Day as a singer in it and it’s very early in her film career but she was a singer ideally but when it gets released there are various reviews that come out they’re just like oh yes there’s new musical the road just in this offhand way and so the studio can’t really other like people working on the film I can’t actually control how other people understand it that film now doesn’t really get discussed very often it has a musical it gets discussed quite a lot and it’s been written about extensively as a jazz but there’s some sort of resistance towards understanding it as a jazz musical these things are never really settled and I think even with the studio era where it seems like it ought to be much more quick cuts what a musical is there are various kinds of films where some people will categorize them as a musical others would be like now this is a drama that just has a few bits of singing in it just how the occasional musical number it’s not I mean it’s never really clear actually a matter in itself it does make it a bit more difficult and it puts the ways in which the genre has been theorized under some pressure because you know there are various examples of Briggs written in the 80s where they have a list of criteria that a musical has to meet you get some quite strange exclusion so there’s a passage in like record spoke of the musical where one of his key arguments is that musical is always built around the formation of a heterosexual couple is necessarily structured by it and so he gets to a point where he’s like oh you know there are various films that don’t meet that like The Wizard of Oz which you would obviously consider to be a musical and so he does this with sort of like dance around musical but it’s also something different it’s like a children’s film so he sort of includes it in his list of musicals but then he’s like this doesn’t fit my definition so I’m gonna say it’s something else and like children’s musicals are like a different thing this is really weird yeah it’s strange because actually a lot of the ways in which he’s writing on their theory enough but are really interesting already useful and are quite flexible and quite open and then takes the strange turn which is always quite fun to teach but it does throw out the ways in which any sort of definition yet for me if you have run into trouble because there will always means boundary cases throat problems and do like a troubling border yeah I mean I think in my first book I did what a lot of people do which is just like I’m not really gonna deal with this time just gonna have quite an eye opener pragmatic which I think was the right thing with that book because it wasn’t really about definition but it was something that stayed with me and so I think that’s one of the reasons why I’ve ended up doing this project where it’s really I mean sure the film is always musical in the sense that the roots and hide scores behind it yeah a lot of time a lot of yeah well this is the thing when it starts becoming all encompassing and various of our contributors are just getting the chapters in now yeah because you can look at what is the genre how people understood it and how is that different at different times how is it being contested how might that have changed so that more sort of cultural approach and then other people are thinking things I feel like that these films don’t get to it’s about as musicals have got to wait in relation to musicals but actually aesthetically they’re doing similar things to fairly canonical examples then you could also take that much broader approach something like this is on a continuum with the ways in which music is incorporated in film and the ways in which that might be spectacular is I think one of the interesting things is that you can look at the musical it gets used as a kind of analogy and other kinds of genres that you say Linda Williams for example at length compares hardcore pornography to the musical as saying Lisa kind of numbers and climate or people who are compared action or in the 80s when you start getting all these kind of synergistic films re built around the soundtracks GLaDOS doing something similar to a musical except it’s all from diegetic music well not the time so once you start thinking in that way it starts becoming something really broad and really jhana studies so often siloed so then you have people working on this little in ways that don’t really speak as much as they might so you get people writing but comedy oh yeah those are also musicals but you’re not crossing each other you’re just speaking these strange little lanes and so yeah it starts really be a lot more open so loading your publications just to give me a few problems I thought this year yes UK romance of staying this transatlantic quite interesting that came out of their conference a few years back it’s looking like it’s going to be quite an interesting project because some of the politics I’ve been doing a few projects recently are gentrification this is gonna be part of a bigger project get also at some point on real estate anyway so this project is less about that and more directly about gentrification television so I’m looking at two TV shows looking in your the worst that both include US UK romances in gentrifying cities and stratifying areas of this how those cloths issues get played on as well no use for such characters as bearers of class identity write in quite interesting ways I’m looking I think is a really interesting example because Andrew Hague and Russell Tovey oh yeah but what is really interesting about it is so there is a way in which that show because it has a British people involved creatively it gets it I think there’s this really interesting running the thing where jonathan groff scared cuz i can’t read his Britishness he’s talking about where he grew up in Essex and I’m like well this is exactly it same kind of familiar with IRA see with what he’s talking about you with love when I’m showing that I don’t know whereas it’s sort of interesting like what who that joke is cause I think there’s something interesting with the way in which those programs will connect this idea of Britishness with a class system and Cosette and then this gentrification that cities undergoing is this class transformation of their cities and how those sorts of things are used to speak to each other and I think looking does that on actually a fairly interesting way the other TV show in fact which I have not seen the last two seasons of because it’s quite difficult to watch in this country there were various little bits of it they got shown on channel 5 at one point I think is actually a bit more troubling and it has this idea of some sort of international creative class which allows you to escape your past background actually fairly pernicious I think where it has this very unconvincing British character who is supposed to have grown up in the rough part of Manchester as the active comes from Cambridge and he’s really posh accent what’s happening here yeah so there’s this whole thing where his working-class abusive father who he hates and the show respects you die yeah sends him a football shirt the team that the dad supports and the son has never been interested in which is Manchester football team all right you know Manchester’s going what’s going on so it’s sort of tone-deaf in that way but also it has this weird international hipster class transcendence idea was a lot of ways kind of quite displace to be handled I suppose for anybody who might who’s for major to be a reference point is it better or worse GNA soozluecke Indian accent well he doesn’t even try doing like a posh southern it’s religious and then his whole supposedly monk Union family visit and they all have different regional accents it’s very confused the episode was a stressful watch I think there are things about this show that I really like but this is like upsetting but yeah I’ve been trying to branch out from New York those shows one of them is set in LA and one of them something just go so I’ve gone from like doing this long emotion in New York’s history now I’m talking about writing about various other different cities which requires me to try and figure out because you’re not just researching the cultural products it’s the geography do politics culture of these pieces they’re making my cousins yeah yeah it does make my part and I think this is the stress and anxiety of interdisciplinarity where you’re trying to keep on top of multiple objects yeah she’s you know the city and the actual taxes but also at the same time trying to vaguely keep on top of different disciplines and it’s a lot of work I think it’s really hard to do it well I don’t necessarily feel like I do well all the time I think it’s something they can only do what they can do and I think I think it’s useful to sort of be aware of that also because I feel like I go to a lot of film and X yeah well yours get calm studies people being like I’m so sorry I am a media scholar I don’t know anything I just apologize before I get my paper and then the number of times I’ve been at those conferences where people from other disciplines just anyone who feels completely comfortable talking about film that’s the thing it’s like we know we’re tiny better good yeah I mean know a bit about other bits of it but its massive it’s one massive thing cuz it’s everything it’s there used to be a point where I would be like really annoyed by that you’re like why haven’t you read this book like it is really difficult to get a handle on yeah what other disciplines are doing I mean that’s not to say we shouldn’t do it though I think it’s really productive and I think it’s far as a really interesting work that it is hard to do sort to try and get those multiple disciplines to speak to each other and to get to corral those different things into one project so yeah it’s the thing I’m constantly like am i doing this properly have I missed some big debates but I’m not aware of and I’m stepping on someone to tell you somewhere it’s just part of the impostor syndrome yes like the people who really need to have impostor syndrome we’re the ones who don’t but know if you’re questioning yourself those are good questions because they’ll keep the day on the straight and narrow because I mean our inquiry into it sounds like curry on charted territories in terms of trying to eat so I when are the boundaries a person doesn’t have to be yeah people don’t really like a lot of people like closed boxes holes for things and vehicles for penguins we’re in a world that the minute were in many ways for challenge anatra challenge and that the gender with sexuality with geopolitics you know all the time so it feels like it’s a moment where there’s anxiety and someone come some things need to be border at all yes I need to know what my identity is yes and I want have a very fixed and to defend that and that’s why you know there’s a resistance to three so no I completely appreciate that than this mayo new studies have been about the fault lines between what kind of mediate is completely sympathize for any questions they’re getting at you it must be useful because yeah and you can really make sure you’re not doing things I mean it’s always useful to pay attention for sure giving you important information yeah and in the way proper even when you don’t want her binder is you need to sort of in a way at your own boundaries because you drive yourself mad it’s the RAC I know this is when everything starts becoming will be there’s been like Don DeLillo’s Libre it’s a historian character who is just never finishing project surrounded by people
it’s not just hot summer stopping pool yeah no it is a lot of the times the stoppage point is just the tyranny of the word count you need something – really isn’t it exciting that there’s potential that other people take on the baton other people in a few years time might go actually Martha identified this topic in terms of
I sort of wrote the book and then I was like especially also casting out the fires having this massive musical seasons music I mean I’m working the chapter further musicals edited book I’m writing about the Magic Mike films so that’s coming at it from a slightly different angle yeah it’s mainly contemporary secondary and then I have another project I’m working on for another collection on the musical that’s going to be on Saturday yeah I’m right 10,000 words about sanity I think the thing is that once you do something then people start asking you to do stuff along those lines yeah which is nice and some other time you’re like yes actually there is the kind of thing I would have still want to do and then at some point you have to be like I have to stop and I have to move on to the next project or I’m gonna go mad so yeah I think I’m gonna try and find Stan it’s not working we also don’t to be typecast as the musical person there are people who’ve gone through that anymore like the whole identity as a scholar is like the musical and that’s great but I think there are some people who want to basically be working on the same thing so it’s not their entire career than I really expected proportionately and I think I got to a point where I was like I’m done with this I think I still have these questions lingering that I want to push in this direction or I think definitely the work I’ve done recently that’s not directly on the musical it has been a product if the concerns to open working on about the relationship between cities but pushing it in a slightly different direction because I really wanted to have that sense of some kind of great I think especially when you’ve written a book placing your PhD but yeah you do need that distance because I suppose that’s like having a really cool family you know I love you but I need a break from you for my son okay I can do this amount of time and then just one more question because so he works on something to do with Suspiria yes yeah which actually is a kind of a total break so this is actually because I’m doing this women in New Hollywood book I mean I’ve worked on New Hollywood in the kind of musicals portraits oh I see yeah I’m co-editing it with bits I asked whether I’d be interested in submitting a proposal for this a data collection I’ve been teaching Suspiria because I love this area I think it’s a great teachable film doing interesting things formally but also has this fairytale quality my project on that is about Daria Nickelodeon as its screenwriter firstly looking at the ways in which she sort of been marginalized in a lot of the writing about it wasn’t that’s scholarship because it’s seen overwhelmingly as no gender yeah yeah but also just looking at and thinking about what happens when we understand this film as having a female and I think doing that throws up some quite interesting things about it in the ways that it’s actually quite interested in questions of authorship it’s setting up all these deaths which are irrational and unexplainable that is a question of authorship like created it and how do I mean there’s almost no there’s – I think very peripheral mail carrier and that vomits and it’s also like got a very feminine aesthetic yeah it’s very engulf times much pretty and it’s about which is a faller I think there was a way of reading it as engaging with certain kinds of questions of female authorship that aspect of the text gets really you can’t see that they’re purely seeing it as a Dario Argento yeah there was a really nice view that project – it also allowed me to go back to some of the stuff I was really interested in undergrad feminist film theory and kind of really it was a really nice rape it was also one of these things no good I’m working on this like cult film that all these horror nerds oh I gotta find these holes and it’s really nice because it’s a film that has I did realize it was basically of all the horror films I could have chosen the one that’s most like a musical without being one great way of looking at this is what I realized eventually I was like notice I’m pretty different from research that I’ve been doing one of the coolest cinematic experiences I’ve ever had was at the Belfast Film Festival one year goblin came over and then alive I was very awesome I know this being a friend who’s Italian and works in Italian cinema I think it was us and a bunch of dudes you mostly thank you very days oh my god you’re in metal t-shirt stuff therefore Goblin I’m like oh wow yeah there is some quite interesting work on Suspiria as a film that has like a disproportionately high oh yeah you know fandom as compared to like other magenta films or other Italian horror films or whatever it’s quite interesting following film it was really amazing this is here with score I can’t really watch it again do you want to talk a bit about their women in new Hollywood yeah again it’s charted territories because we anybody knows anything about new Hollywood it’s a very meal yes exactly the scholarship is still really attached to that Oh tourist mail it’s great romantic artists it’s also like look at me bucking the system which yeah is really tedious but also there are various women who direct on this period there’s actually a really interesting book that’s come out recently called liberating Hollywood’s by myosin clear which is about each of the women who directed films in the Hollywood period including people that are relatively well known I can make me so other people who are but I think one of the things we really wanted to do with this project is not just look at directors because I think one of the real problems is that that period has been understood in such a no terrorist way that has obscured paying attention to the women that we’re working on the kinds of rolls so whether that’s screenwriters its production designers editors especially or as operators so we have a really interesting mix people working on directors like Barbara Rosen and me brackets or Marshall Lucas we’ve also tried to organize it in a way that we have sections that are there’s a section that’s primarily dealing with looking at the industry and historiography and looking at that side of things it’s more focused on how that creatively but shaped texts women’s contributions to those and also a section looking at theory that doesn’t tend to be that contact a lot of the time between them thinking about their him thinking about the industry but hopefully there’ll be some interesting work that was thinking about the generational theory in the period in relation to those Wars but also thinking is storia graphically about the emergence of feminist theory or about the kinds of filters that are going on at the time but also about how we might think very simply about women’s authorship in that period in the various different capacities and they it’s really exciting but it’s also at that early stage like we’ve got proposal and we’re now just getting contributors and I think it’s gonna be really exciting Jesus I like that it’s a collections man I just I mean it’s really kind of what I’m gonna contribute to different times around like oh it’s time so I’m really sorry to be late with my chapter and then you’re like that’s fine but it’s also like you’re trying to manage lots of other different people’s various commitments and then trying to get everything on schedule castle but it’s how you get see my foot and then should bring together a lot of new voices on the topic I think we’ve got quite an interesting range and I do think it really is there have been a lot of kind of books of Commerce on new Hollywood recently and I knew this is making a sort of necessary intervention in the field which it’s really in need of some a scholarship forward their hard work but it’s something I do really enjoy reading other people’s work and getting people to ask those questions and I’m really delighted to be part of this I think it’s doing something necessary I think it’s really important that edited collections cuz there are so many of them it’s just continually creating any collections that there actually have some fun actual projects and aren’t just collections of stuff really vital projects of employees yeah there’s an important agenda find it there’s a network nioh this kind of thing and when you’re calling the shots project yeah I mean it’s a really hot area you know in a lot of ways we’ve been slow get to this point there are so many really interesting projects like all the your projects it’s all the glads you’ve had these lovely feel for a while but actually that’s not valued whether it’s because it just wasn’t very good or it didn’t get a lot of funding or people just deliberately kept saying so the fish straight um people out of work or just didn’t acknowledge yeah you know almost like archaeology and then there’s this digging ice of what actually yeah I think but it’s interesting because you get there’s long been this cliche being like oh you know new only ready so critical construction but it becomes so clear how it’s a critical construction that’s constructed around white masculinity yeah unlike whether it’s acknowledged a lot that is one of the attractions and I think the films are more interesting than that the borders of that category are constructed in such a way as to exclude I mean and then also you do need to talk about it slightly differently when you’re talking about women because a lot of those women that didn’t want to work in Hollywood because of what it was you know entirely reasonably or they wanted to in their pathways were just blocked it’s never got to make those jobs in a way that
it’s both the kind of excavation and the reframing why am i working on so many different things the same time I know it’s so exhausting this summer is because I really sat down at one point a few weeks ago and I was like I am trying to think about five different things at the same time and sometimes I’ll be reading a book and I’d be like oh this is really useful for this but wait I was reading this with this project until now and like I just have to kind of this is what I’ve done to myself I mean it’s all self-inflicted
do you want to direct anybody to your websites to find out more about any of these projects yeah so my book is out and is incredibly expensive you know I’m sure parts of it on Google Books is very especially interesting I think my most recent publication was in the Oxford Handbook of musical theater screen adaptations which is an enormous Oxford Handbook so always absolutely things I got to write about some stuff that was in my PhD that didn’t make it into the book sort of a last dregs that kind of firm so that was like you calling it probably I mean I wrote it out on the town a bit in the book but I had to cut it down because I’d written so much about it and my PhD that exploded you railed one of my businesses so much to say about it so I cut a lot of it out and then put it in this chapter and I was like yeah finally I have a place for this and then another film but I obviously love called bells are ringing which doesn’t get talked about so much but it’s wonderful with judy holliday isn’t so well known because she died very young and died in the 60s before she got to talk herself up in the 70s from all the other funny what starts with doing that talk to a [ __ ] she’s best well-known but she’s amazing and it’s absolutely not be film about she works answer phone operator it’s a hard plot to explain but basically the chapter is about how those two films which are both adaptations of war brain musicals but also the ways in which they’re adapting new york and the ways in which new york is itself changing and that requires an adaptation of representational strategies it was really nice to be able to write about those two films I’d had some for structural reasons not talked about so much in the book and just expands that and kind of really delve into it I don’t really have a personal website jalisa academia.edu yeah I have a page on there Kings website yeah yeah the somatic setting because you do and I do everything it’s in the time oh yeah this is where I you’ve been listening to audio visual cultures with me Paula Blair and my very special guest Martha Shearer this episode was recorded and edited by Paula Blair and the music is common grind by air tone licensed under creative commons attribution 3.0 and available for download from ccmixter org if you liked the show and find its contents useful and interesting please help cover production and distribution costs by donating to paypal taught me for research pei Blair or libera PACOM forward slash Pei Blair episodes are released every other Wednesday please read share and subscribe on your chosen listening platform as this helps others find the show for more information visit audio-visual culture at wordpress.com and follow AV cultures on Twitter and Facebook thanks so much for listening and catch you next time you
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