This book provides a detailed and engaging account of how Hollywood cinema has represented and 'remembered' the Sixties. From late 1970s hippie musicals such as Hair and The Rose through to recent civil rights portrayals The Help and Lee Daniels' The Butler , Oliver Gruner explores the ways in which films have engaged with broad debates on America's recent past. Drawing on extensive archival research, he traces production history and script development, showing how a group of politically engaged filmmakers sought to offer resonant contributions to public memory. Situating Hollywood within a wider series of debates taking place in the US public sphere, Screening the Sixties offers a rigorous and innovative study of cinema's engagement with this most contested of epochs.
"The book volume can definitely serve as a useful example for those who work around representation, public memory, and politics, whether on the Sixties in particular or not. ... Screening the Sixties is an impressively elaborate exploration of 'the Sixties as a commemorative palimpsest upon which divergent narratives have been written and rewritten throughout the 1970s, 1980s, 1990s and 2000s' ... ." (J. Van Belle, Communications, Vol. 43 (01), 2018)