Cinema & Media Studies (CAMS) Launches The Hollywood Conference

by Ryan Gilmour

Utilizing its location in Hollywood's backyard and its access to practitioners in the industry, the Cinema & Media Studies (CAMS) division launched The Hollywood Conference in July, inviting scholars from a variety of media disciplines to weigh in on Hollywood's past, present, and future over four days at USC. But what exactly do terms like "Hollywood" and "the industry" mean? Those are exactly the types of questions the Hollywood Conference set out to answer, in addition to discussions around everything from the "Hollywood-documentary divide" to independent and genre filmmaking, to franchising, streaming, and, of course, AI.

"The idea of the conference was to center Hollywood," said film historian Luci Marzola, CAMS' assistant chair of academic research and the lead organizer of the conference. "Media and film studies has expanded into so many important areas, which is fantastic, but at the conference we created a place for the study of Hollywood, which is our little piece of the world. There's no university that's more tied to the history of Hollywood than USC—in the AMPAS Courtyard, in the Mary Pickford Lobby. To gather these scholars in one place was something that felt natural."

Program from USC's AI student and alumni showcase during the 2024 Flux Festival

BEYOND PANELS AND PAPERS

The board of the Hollywood Conference made a point to expand the usual conference activities with events that utilized the city. In addition to three days of academic discussions, panels, and exhibitions, the Hollywood Conference also facilitated tours of Hollywood sites, visits to various archives, a panel featuring current union leaders, and a screening of Sunset Boulevard with restored sound presented by Iron Mountain.

"USC has all the resources to host something like this," said CAMS Professor J.D. Connor. "We're in the right spot. We have the archives that people want to come to. We have a track record in the field. Between the faculty and staff, we know just about everybody in the field. With so much of academia under conditions of austerity or worse, the fact that we could piggyback this on people's summers so they could come to Hollywood and do the research they needed to do was a win for everyone involved."

Marzola added: "The history of Hollywood can be found all through the country, but the bulk of it is here. Having the conference at USC brought in so many resources."

A CRITICAL TIME FOR SCHOLARSHIP IN HOLLYWOOD

Headlines about the changing nature of the entertainment industry never seem to go away. However, now more than ever, with fears about AI replacing human creativity and the ubiquity of misinformation and disinformation on the internet, it is an important time to assert the value of serious scholarship about cinema and its related industries. The Hollywood Conference sought to be a linchpin for encouraging thought leadership among young filmmakers, regardless of their areas of interest.

"We put together a bunch of roundtables, which aren't maybe typical of an academic conference," said Marzola. "It was great. What we did really opened up great insight, which I think was a huge accomplishment of the entire conference."

Some of the weekend’s events included:

Nobody’s Muse: Rethinking the Star/Auteur Dynamic
Writing the First Draft of Hollywood’s History: A Trade Journalist's Roundtable
The Romance of Genre Filmmaking
AI, IP, DSM: Diagnosing Contemporary Authorship
Franchising Hollywood: Managing Media Proliferation in the Franchise Era
Navigating Hollywood from the Margins
WHAAM! Comic Book Media in Expanded Field
Lights! Cameras! Blacktion!: Negotiating Blackness on Screens, Big and Small
Roundtable: Hollywood History for the Public
Unsung Hollywood Histories and the Dance Ecosystem
Old Styles, New Visions: Rethinking Hollywood’s Aesthetics

The next Hollywood Conference will be held at USC in July 2027.

For a full list of events and panelists, check out the 2025 schedule at thehollywoodconference.com.