In the mid-1960s US cities went through a period of urban disturbances and economic stagnation; in the 1970s cities began to regenerate. Similarly, in the 1970s the American film industry recovered from the decline of the studio system in the 1960s to achieve a Hollywood renaissance. Seeing parallels in the postindustrial transformations of US cities and cinema, Andersson (urban geography, King's College London, UK) and Webb (film studies, Univ. of Sussex, UK) assembled 12 incisive essays that build on the scholarship of Pamela Robertson Wojcik (The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, CH, May'11, 48-4983), Mark Shiel (Hollywood Cinema and the Real Los Angeles, CH, Mar'13, 50-3756), Webb (The Cinema of Urban Crisis: Seventies Film and the Reinvention of the City, CH, Mar'16, 53-3001), and others. The essays are divided into three sections-cities as centers of film production and entrepreneurship; cities as sources for a cinematic imaginary; and cities as representations of gentrification in film. Not surprisingly, New York and Los Angeles receive much attention, but the book also explores the urban environments of Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Detroit, Oakland, etc.
