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Episode 59: How Entertainment Lawyers Changed the Hollywood Studio System – Featuring Peter Labuza

Episode 59: How Entertainment Lawyers Changed the Hollywood Studio System – Featuring Peter Labuza

On this week episode, Online Editor, Patrick Hao, talks to film critic, podcaster and Ph.D. candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California, Peter Labuza. They discuss Hollywood legal history and the role entertainment lawyers had, through contracts, shifted the way Hollywood Film Studios produced movies and affected the art.

Peter Labuza is a Ph.D. Candidate in Cinema and Media Studies at the University of Southern California and a John E. Rovensky Fellow in US Business and Economic History. His research interests include Hollywood and media industry historiography, legal history, political economy, art cinema, and cinephilia. His dissertation explores the rise of the legal profession in Hollywood and its contribution to the organizational business reforms and cultural discourse of art within the industry after World War II. He has published in The Velvet Light TrapFilm QuarterlyMediascapeSight & Sound, and The Los Angeles Review of Books, and he currently serves as Assistant Book Review Editor for the Journal of Cinema and Media Studies (formerly Cinema Journal). He has also published as a film critic for VarietyThe Village Voice, and Filmmaker Magazine among others, and hosts The Cinephiliacs podcast. Previously, Labuza earned both his BA and MA in Film Studies from Columbia University.

Sources Mentioned:

Peter Labuza, Putting Penn to Paper: Warner Bros.’s Contract Governance and the Transition to New Hollywood, 80 The Velvet Light Trap 4 (2017).  
Janet Staiger, “Tame” Authors and the Corporate Laboratory: Stories, Writers, and Scenarios in Hollywood, 8:4 Q. Rev. of Film Stud. 33 (1983).
Mark Garrett Cooper, Universal Women: Filmmaking and Institutional Change in Early Hollywood (Champaign: Univ. of Illinois Press, 2010).
Karen Ward Mahar, Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood (Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 2006).
Emily Carman, Independent Stardom: Freelance Women in the Hollywood Studio System (Univ. of Texas Press 2016).
Eric Hoyt, Hollywood and the Income Tax, 1929—1955, 22 Film Hist. 5 (2010).
Vanessa Schwartz, It’s So French!: Hollywood, Paris, and the Making of Cosmopolitan Film Culture (Univ. of Chicago Press 2007).
Catherine L. Fisk, Working Knowledge: Employee Innovation and the Rise of Corporate Intellectual Property, 1800-1930 (Univ. of North Carolina Press 2009).
Catherine L. Fisk, Writing for Hire: Unions, Hollywood, and Madison Avenue (Harvard Univ. Press 2016).
Favorite Piece of IP of the Week: Something Good-Negro Kiss (Short Film)

Our theme song is Roller Blades by Otis McDonald.

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Patrick Hao

Patrick Hao is a third-year J.D. Candidate at Fordham University School of Law and Online Editor of Volume XXIX of the Fordham Intellectual Property, Media & Entertainment Law Journal.