Following the success of prominent feature films shot on location, including Tolkien’s wildly popular The Lord of the Rings, New Zealand boasts an impressive film tourism industry. This book examines the relationship between New Zealand’s cinematic representation—as both a vast expanse of natural beauty and a magical world of fantasy on screen—and its tourism imagery, including the ways in which savvy local tourism boards have in recent decades used the country’s film representations to sell New Zealand as a premiere travel destination. Focusing on the films that have had a strong impact on marketing strategies by local tourist boards, Touring the Screen will be of interest to all those working and studying in the fields of cinema, postcolonial history, and tourism studies.

In this innovative work of cultural history, Simon Sigley tells the story of film culture in New Zealand from the establishment of the Auckland Film Society in the 1920s to the present day.

Rather than focusing on the work of individual filmmakers, Sigley approaches cinema as a form of social practice. He examines the reception of international film theories and discourses and shows how these ideas helped to shape distinct cultural practices, including new forms of reviewing; new methods of teaching; and new institutions such as film societies, art house cinemas, and film festivals. He goes on to trace the emergence in New Zealand of the full range of activities and institutions associated with a sophisticated film culture—including independent distribution and exhibition networks, film archives, university courses, a local feature film industry, and liberalized film censorship. In doing so, Sigley makes a significant contribution to our understanding of the myriad ways film can shape our thinking, our icons, our institutions, and our conversations. A fascinating case history of how a culture can develop, Transnational Film Culture in New Zealand will be a welcome addition to the bookshelves of anyone interested in film culture and cultural history.

The Trustus Plays collects three full-length, award-winning performance texts by American playwright Jon Tuttle. Each play was a winner of the national Trustus Playwrights Festival contest and was then produced by the Trustus Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina. The Hammerstone is a comedy about two professors aging gracelessly, Drift is a dark comedy about marriage and divorce, and Holy Ghost is the story of German POWs held in the camps in the American south. Jon Tuttle provides an introduction to the plays, and Trustus founder and artistic director, Jim Thigpen, offers a preface describing Tuttle’s work within the context of the Trustus theatre’s dedication to experimental, edgy social drama.

Since the late 1990s, when broadcasters began adapting such television shows as Big Brother, Survivor, and Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? for markets around the world, the global television industry has been struggling to come to grips with the prevalence of program franchising across international borders. In TV Format Mogul, Albert Moran traces the history of this phenomenon through the lens of Australian producer Reg Grundy’s transnational career.

Program copycatting, Moran shows, began long before its most recent rise to prominence. Indeed, he reveals that the practice of cultural and commercial cloning from one place to another, and one time to another, has occurred since the early days of broadcasting. Beginning in the late 1950s, Grundy brought non-Australian shows to Australian audiences, becoming the first person to take local productions to an overseas market. By following Grundy’s career, Moran shows how adaptation and remaking became the billion-dollar business they are today. An exciting new contribution from Australia’s foremost scholar of television, TV Format Mogul will be a definitive history of program franchising.