Tag : rust belt

New book!

For the last few years, I’ve been working on a new book. It’s called Tinsel and Rust: How Hollywood Manufactures the Rust Belt. At its core, it is a book about two things I love dearly: the movies and the Rust Belt. In writing it, I’ve come to understand just how inextricably the two are linked. During the 1970s and 1980s, Hollywood helped to articulate and popularize the concept of the declining “industrial heartland” through films like The Deer Hunter (1978), Blue Collar (1978), and All the Right Moves (1983), among many others. More recently, Rust Belt cities have attempted to rehabilitate their public images via courting film production in efforts to produce new “post-industrial” narratives while also generating economic activity–Cleveland played host to The Avengers, Pittsburgh became Gotham in Batman, and Detroit saw a mini-boom in horror films like …

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