Shot on Location

Renowned film scholar R. Barton Palmer explores the historical, ideological, economic, and technical developments that led Hollywood filmmakers of the late 1940s and 1950s to increasingly head outside the studio and capture footage of real places. Examining works ranging from Sunset Blvd. to The Searchers, Shot on Location discovers the massive influence that wartime newsreels had on the postwar Hollywood film, as the blurring of the formal boundaries between cinematic journalism and fiction lent a “reality effect” to otherwise implausible stories.