✍ Scribed by Jason Sperb
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Hard Sell of Paradise examines how mid-twentieth-century Hollywood, negotiating the rhetoric of the tourism industry, offered a complex and contradictory vision of Hawai'i for its audiences. From the classic studio system and elite tourism of the 1930s to a postwar era of mass travel, TV, and new leisure markets, the book explores how an eclectic group of populist media reflected the language of tourism not only through its narratives of leisure, but also through its complex engagement with larger cultural and historical questions, such as colonialism, world war, and statehood. Drawing on rare archival research, The Hard Sell of Paradise also explores the valuable role that tourism partners such as United Airlines, Matson Cruise Lines, and the Hawaii Tourist Bureau played in directly and indirectly influencing such films and television shows as Waikiki Wedding, Diamond Head, Blue Hawaii, The Endless Summer, and Hawaii Five-O.
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Touristic Visions and Virtual Tourists
“They Have Learned the Wisdom of Investing in Intangibles That Cannot Be Taken from Them”
Selling Hawaiian Tourism
“One of Those Great Twentieth-Century Paradoxes: The Leisure Industries”
Aloha Multiculturalism
The History of Labor as Leisure
Hawai‘i Onscreen
1 Save That Gag for the Tourists: The Hawaii Tourist Bureau and Post-tourism Narratives of 1930s Hollywood
Hollywood’s “Current Hawaiian Vogue”
The Massie Affair
“A Paradise Streamlined”
“I Was Promised Three Romantic Weeks in Hawai‘i …”
Paradise under Attack
2 Twilight of the Past, Island of Utopia: December 7th and the Contradictions of War Nostalgia
Nostalgia for War
December 7th
From Here to Eternity
The Revolt of Mamie Stover
Hell’s Half Acre
In Harm’s Way
Tora! Tora! Tora!
“A New and More Naïve Public”
Early Television as Time Travel
3 You’re Still Talking about Class? Adapting for Statehood in Diamond Head (1963)
Selling Statehood on the Big Screen
Diamond Head and the Racial Melodrama
Post-racial Whiteness
Such Sweet Thunder
4 Founded on Truth but Not on Fact: Pastiche Narratives of Modernity in Adaptations of James Michener’s Hawaii (1959)
Postwar Hawaiian “Histouricism”
“Perceived in One Loving Glance”
Destroying a “True Paradise”
The Hawaiians
Coming Storms
5 Business or Pleasure: The Touristic Contradictions of the Elvis/Hawai‘i Experience from Blue Hawaii (1961) to Aloha from Hawaii (1973)
Synergistic Opportunities
Blue Hawaii
Girls! Girls! Girls!
Isle of Paradise
Paradise Hawaiian Style
“At Last—A REAL Elvis Film”
6 Shoot All Winter, Show All Summer: Frontier Mythologies and the Hipster Tourism of Surf Documentaries
“Go Native in a Limited Way”
“I’m Sure I Had Some Disparaging Remarks”
“A Splendid Combination of Facts, Imagination and Outstanding Photography”
Nontheatrical Cinema
The More Innocent Time
7 If You Can’t Find It, Don’t Write It: Genre and Competing Notions of Realism in Hawaii Five-O (1968)
“Why Would Anyone Watch This Thing?”
“Hawaii Is the State That United Built”
Danger in the Touristic Back Regions
“The Importance of Hawaii Five-O”
Conclusion: Hawai‘i Bound
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Index
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