Kate Fortmueller is anĀ associate professor of film and media history at Georgia State University. She is the author of Below the Stars: How the Labor of Working Actors and Extras Shapes Media Production.
The value of Fortmueller's book is as a contemporary historical record of what's happened to the entertainment industry thus far [during the COVID-19 pandemic], and as a source of informed speculation on what might happen next...Despite its compact size, the book contains an impressive amount of information and analysis, all of it accessibly written and clearly explained. * PopMatters * Hollywood Shutdown is a slender but information packed analysis of the motion picture industry's response to a crisis that recalled any number of Hollywood disaster movies. * Shepherd Express * One of the first (if not the first) books about the impact of COVID-19 on film and television production. Hollywood Shutdown covers how and why the production, distribution, and exhibition of entertainment has shifted so dramatically. Fortmueller explains that because of the pandemic's ongoing nature, she 'did not have the kind of temporal and emotional distance from my subject that is usually part of the writing process.' But this perspective serves to make Shutdown even more vital as an in-the-moment chronicle of how Hollywood responded to COVID. * The Film Stage *