Movies under the Influence

"""In this fascinating history of the ‘intoxicated spectator,’ Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece wisely avoids an ethnography of stoners fondly, if hazily, remembering the first time they saw Eraserhead. Instead, she takes on the more ambitious and useful task of considering how the film industry attempted to understand, regulate, and occasionally exploit the various ‘substances’ circulating in the bloodstreams of their theaters. Deftly combining a cultural and industrial history of drugs, cinema, and theatrical exhibition, Szczepaniak-Gillece persuasively demonstrates that all cinematic spectators, be they sober or variously dosed with nicotine, caffeine, booze, dope, or psychedelics, present exhibitors with patrons who are at once uniquely embodied individuals and abstract targets for control."" —Jeffrey Sconce, Northwestern University   ""Eminently readable and brimming with amusing anecdotes, Movies under the Influence argues that drugs and cinema have been discursively and ideologically entwined since the early twentieth century. Through formidable archival research, Jocelyn Szczepaniak-Gillece shows how U.S. exhibitors and government agencies’ fearful fascination with inebriated spectatorship developed as part of larger attempts to mediate and control the American experience."" —Caetlin Benson-Allott, author of The Stuff of Spectatorship: Material Cultures of Film and Television  "