Film Studies

World Film Locations: Los Angeles
Volume 2
World Film Locations: Los Angeles Volume 2 is an engaging and highly visual city-wide tour of both well known and slightly lesser known films shot on location in one of the birthplaces of cinema and the ‘screen spectacle’. It pairs 50 synopses of carefully chosen film scenes with evocative full-colour film stills.
When the World Film Locations series was launched in 2011 with volumes on Los Angeles New York Paris and Tokyo the world was a different place. Although interest in film locations has grown steadily for years as people seek to walk in the footsteps of their cinematic idols by visiting sites from their favorite movies – the recent global lockdown seems to have only increased an appetite for cinetourism; prompting us to consider a second volume for one of the world’s most evocative and enduring locations. The city of Los Angeles with its meandering sun-baked sweep and beautifully fractured topography continues to lure filmmakers into its clutches – affording an endless panoply of locations to prop up both character and story. Since 2011 thousands of new productions have made the most of what the city has to offer; using reusing and discovering places that will surely become sites of pilgrimage in years to come - and while this volume includes just 50 of them our modest selection is carefully curated to compliment volume 1 and further reveal both the well-known and more hidden parts of a Los Angeles in constant flux.
The heart of Hollywood’s star-studded film industry for more than a century Los Angeles and its abundant and ever-changing locales – from the Santa Monica Pier to the infamous and now-defunct Ambassador Hotel – have set the scene for a wide variety of cinematic treasures from Chinatown to Forrest Gump Falling Down to the coming-of-age classic Boyz n The Hood.
This second volume marks an engaging citywide tour of the many films shot on location in this birthplace of cinema and the screen spectacle. World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 pairs fifty incisive synopses of carefully chosen film scenes – both famous and lesser-known – with an accompanying array of evocative full-colour film stills demonstrating how motion pictures have contributed to the multifarious role of the city in our collective consciousness as well as how key cinematic moments reveal aspects of its life and culture that are otherwise largely hidden from view.
Insightful essays and interviews throughout turn the spotlight on the important directors iconic locations thematic elements and historical periods that provide insight into Los Angeles and its vibrant cinematic culture. Rounding out this information are city maps with information on how to locate key features as well as photographs showing featured locations as they appear now.
A guided tour of the City of Angels conducted by the likes of John Cassavetes Robert Altman Nicholas Ray Michael Mann and Roman Polanski World Film Locations: Los Angeles Vol 2 is a concise and user-friendly guide to how Los Angeles has captured the imaginations of both filmmakers and those of us sitting transfixed in theatres worldwide.

<img src="UF00-002.jpg"/> The Happiest Place on Earth <img src="UF00-005.jpg"/>
Disneyland is not a film location but a carefully planned venue laid out according to the tenets of narrative placemaking an urban design philosophy that connects architecture and space through storytelling.

<img src="UF00-002.jpg"/> Kerb Crawlers <img src="UF00-007.jpg"/>
Everyone knows you need a car to get around L.A. It is after all a so-called “driving city.” But some L.A.-based films yank their protagonists from their cars and push them into the great unknown. Severed from an infrastructure's theoretical efficiency these characters are isolated unstable unsure. They don't know where they're going both literally and figuratively. Walking in a city of drivers becomes a means for them to begin their journeys toward something resembling clarity if not peace.

<img src="UF00-002.jpg"/> (DIS)Tasteful Appearances <img src="UF00-006.jpg"/>
Robert Benton's elegiacal neo-noir showcases both his stellar cast of aging movie stars Paul Newman Gene Hackman Susan Sarandon and James Garner as well as the modernist architecture they inhabit in order to highlight Benson's vision of a decaying ruthless Hollywood wrapped up in facades of elegance and grace.

Infrastructure in Dystopian and Post-apocalyptic Film, 1968-2021
Dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies from 1968 to 2021 usually conclude with optimism with a window into what is possible in the face of social dysfunction - and worse. The infrastructure that peeks through at the edges of the frame surfaces some of the concrete ways in which dystopian and post-apocalyptic survivors have made do with their damaged and destroyed worlds.
If the happy endings so common to mass-audience films do not provide an all-encompassing vision of a better world the presence of infrastructure whether old or retrofitted or new offers a starting point for the continued work of building toward the future.
Film imaginings energy transportation water waste and their combination in the food system reveal what might be essential infrastructure on which to build the new post-dystopian and post-apocalyptic communities. We can look to dystopian and post-apocalyptic movies for a sense of where we might begin.

Sex Sounds: On Aural Explicitness in Call Me by Your Name
On its reception Call Me by Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017) remained insufficiently explicit for some critics who lamented instances such as the pan shot that takes us away from Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) in bed together: ‘Once the two lovers begin having sex for the first time however the camera coyly drifts over to an open window their early coital moans gentle in the background – the kind of tasteful dodge that practically nods to Code-era Hollywood’. This response is certainly understandable and recalls a similar rallying cry from Rose Troche's 1994 film Go Fish: ‘What would you rather our collective lesbian image be? Hot passionate say-yes-to-sex-dykes or touchy-feely soft-focus sisters of the woodlands?’ Guadagnino in making a mainstream high-profile adaptation has in the eyes of some critics opted for the ‘touchy-feely soft-focus’ route. However I would like to suggest that the film locates its explicitness in its sound design. This clever strategy is used to clearly convey actions which are not shown directly on screen. The film is filled with the sound of clothing slipping on and off of bodies and with the sound of bodies in contact. In the scenes in which Oliver fellates Elio there is audible sound design that articulates the action taking place. Drawing on work that discusses the importance of sound audio design and affect I would like to counter the suggestion that Call Me by Your Name is overtly coy in its display of sex. By attending to the details of the film's sound design we can see that it deliberately evokes the affect of pornography in order to amplify the film's explicitness.

Rethinking screenwriting credits and the unproduced screenplay: Innovative approaches to accreditation using the script reading as an output
This article explores the definition of what constitutes a ‘produced’ screenplay and how it relates to the screenwriter and their accreditation for their work by industry standard definitions. The article challenges the industry-accepted norm that a screenwriter’s work is recognized after the script has been translated to the screen and argues instead that in line with other media and craft forms the screenplay and the author can achieve recognition through other forms of showcase. Through comparisons with industry examples we assert that the script reading is in and of itself a valid production and can serve as a means of allowing writers to achieve accreditation for their work as writers without relying on union conventions that privilege the screen work over other forms to allow writers to receive accreditation for their writing. To explore this the article uses two case studies The Script Department a virtual screenwriting studio that uses podcasting to produce script reading dramatizations and one of their most successful productions The Clearing written by Belinda Lees. The Script Department’s success in attracting mainstream industry interest as well as the success of Lees’s screenwriting on the platform demonstrates that a reliance on a single mode of production (i.e. film or television) as a means of evaluating a writer’s credentials is no longer definitive and that the script reading as a performative exercise can be both a form of showcase and of benefit to the writer looking to improve their craft.

Adaptation screenplays as performance texts: Axiological linguistic acts in a case of Basque writing
Rather than being a ‘blueprint’ statement of instruction and following propositions made by Thomas Leitch adaptation screenplays are ‘recipes’ that both record a ‘doing’ and serve as a performance space of engagement with production teams. This is explicable in terms of how they propose a new enargeia by way of clear narrative idea that they frame through quasi-recursive recontextualization of both the literary field and the specifics of originary texts and then express via an integrated set of linguistic acts by way of axiological statement of intentionality for a film of a particular sort. The progression of this logic is explained through exploration of a seminal instance of Basque literature-to-film adaptation of Bernard Atxaga’s book Obabakoak written as a screenplay for the film Obaba by Montxo Armendáriz.

Stand-up comedy to the screen: A satirical autoethnographic approach
Disrupting conventional screenwriting practice several Australian stand-up comedians have used their stand-up comedy personas and material within a satirical autoethnographic approach to develop their narrative television comedy series. Stand-up comedians use autoethnographic tools of personal experience and a critique of cultural beliefs with a satirical comedic style to develop onstage material. Their unique ‘point of view’ that may challenge societal norms together with their cultural identity contributes to their onstage persona. Stand-up comedy has democratized the Australian screen by giving diverse creators a platform to prove their talent and provide proof that there is an audience for their projects. This study examines how Australian stand-up comics Josh Thomas and Kitty Flanagan use a satirical autoethnographic approach to critique cultural beliefs such as those relating to gender sexuality and age within their stand-up comedy and further develop their stage personas and material to create their respective narrative television comedy series Please Like Me (2013–16) and Fisk (2021–22). The author will discuss how she similarly used satirical autoethnography to develop her Melbourne International Comedy Festival show The MILF Next Door subverting cultural expectations relating to mature divorced mothers. Finally the author will discuss how aspects of her show may be developed for narrative television comedy using satirical autoethnographic approaches.

Call Me by Your Name
Perspectives on the Film
Adapted by James Ivory from André Aciman’s novel and directed by Luca Guadagnino the film Call Me by Your Name has been passionately received among audiences and critics ever since its 2017 release.
A love story between seventeen-year-old Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and graduate student Oliver (Armie Hammer) and set in 1983 ‘Somewhere in northern Italy’ Call Me by Your Name presents a gay relationship in a romantic idyll seemingly untroubled by outside pressures prejudices or tragedy. While this means it offers audiences welcome opportunities to swoon in front of an LGBTQ+ romance that equals classic heterosexual romances onscreen its relevance or political significance today may not be immediately apparent. And yet the film is abundantly infused with narrative thematic and stylistic elements that can be interpreted as speaking powerfully to contemporary audiences on questions of sexual identity.
This edited collection addresses how the film helps inform our understanding of contemporary sexual identity and romance. How does this love story explore wider tensions that exist between the specific and the general between the open and the hidden and between the past and the present? The contributors to the collection explore these questions in stimulating and contemplative manners.

The Sexiest Risk-Taker? Armie Hammer, White Masculinity and Call Me by Your Name
On their shared appearance on The Ellen DeGeneres Show back in 2017 actors Armie Hammer and Timothée Chalamet sat down with DeGeneres to discuss their performances as Oliver (Hammer) and Elio (Chalamet) in Call Me By Your Name (Luca Guadagnino 2017). In the interview both Hammer and Chalamet talk candidly with DeGeneres about their preparation and execution of the roles and the multiple “make out” scenes they had directed by Luca Guadagnino. DeGeneres an openly lesbian host of her self-titled talk show respected Hammer and Chalamet for presenting gay characters and a queer romance in a genuine and sensitive light even though both are heterosexual males in real-life. However at the end of the interview DeGeneres cheekily embarrasses Hammer in front of Chalamet and her studio audience with a feature story in People with the magazine's claim of Hammer being the “Sexiest Man Alive.” While this is not an uncommon labeling of celebrity in US popular culture broadly put Hammer's co-star Chalamet's response to the photograph and feature story in People was: “I knew he was sexy and took risks but I didn't know if he was the sexiest risk-taker.” As such repositioning the meaning of Hammer's performance as Oliver in terms of risk aids in a more balanced understanding of Hammer's star power in Call Me By Your Name as both reference and refracting point.

Introduction: Somewhere in Northern Italy
This introduction considers what is so appealing and acclaimed about Call Me by Your Name as well as the primary angles this book will present. It introduces the film as a romance between Elio (Timothée Chalamet) and Oliver (Armie Hammer) as an LGBTQ+ text and as an Italian production. It emphasises the fluidity of these terms with regard to the film and how that fluidity can be helpful to understanding of the film's openness and freshness. The introduction also explains how the collection is structured with brief introductions for each of the three parts – Style Themes and Reception – and each of the chapters. In doing so it introduces the range and diversity of voices that will carry through the book to provide multiple perspectives on Call Me by Your Name.