Biography

B.A. University of Toronto

M.A. Concordia University (Montreal)

Ph.D. University of Texas at Austin

Dr. Paul Monticone is an Assistant Professor in the Radio, Television & Film Department. He is a film and media historian whose research primarily centers on the trade, labor, and cultural institutions of the Hollywood film industry. He is currently working on a book manuscript entitled For the Maintenance of the System: Hollywood’s Trade Association from the Code to the Waldorf Statement. In it, he explores the complex media industry institution that is a the trade association, a site of corporate cooperation and collusion that is continuously pressured by its members competitiveness and mutual distrust and changes in market and political economic contexts. These issues are heightened where the industry represented is highly visible operates according to its own idiosyncratic rules. This book examines these issues through an investigation of how the Hollywood studio’s association, the Motion Picture Association of America, adapted during the decade-long period that its business model was challenged by Federal antitrust laws and the Department of Justice which culminated in the historic Paramount Decision. Dr. Monticone’s broader research interests include genre and aesthetics, nontheatrical cinema (industrial, educational, advertising), and film historiography. His work appesrs in Media Industries, Cinema Journal, the Quarterly Review of Film and Video, The Velvet Light Trap, Nineteenth Century Theater and Film, and several edited collections.

Office Hours

See schedule and book through RSN

Courses

The Media Industries, Film History to 1940, Research Methods, American Film Directors, The Hollywood Studio System

Research Interests

Media industries, film history and historiography, media labor and crafts, media pedagogy, exhibition studies, film genres and analysis

Selected Publications

Monticone, Paul. “Beyond the Code: Hollywood’s Trade Association and Wartime Public Relations,” forthcoming in Media Industries 12, no. 1 (2025).

Monticone, Paul. “Post-Production: Working Behind the Scenes and At the Forefront of IATSE.” In Hollywood Unions, edited by Kate Fortmueller and Luci Marzola, 114-135. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2024.

Monticone, Paul. “One Film, Five Posts: Scaffolded Learning in the Intermediate Media History Course.” JCMS Teaching Dossier. The Journal of Cinema and Media Studies 61, no. 8 (2022).

Monticone, Paul. “Institutions of the Mode of Production and The Classical Hollywood Cinema in Contemporary Media Studies.” In Resetting the Scene: Classical Hollywood Revisited, edited by Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring, 287–99. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2021.

Monticone, Paul. “Classical Hollywood (1928-1946),” in Editing and Special/Visual Effects, edited by Charlie Keil and Kristen Whissel, 51-68. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016. (Vol. 8 in a book series on Hollywood filmmaking, Behind the Silver Screen; Jon Lewis, editor)

Monticone, Paul. “’Useful cinema,’ of limited use?: Assessing the role of motion pictures in the largest public relations campaign of the 1920s,” Cinema Journal 54, 4 (Summer 2015): 74-99.

Monticone, Paul. “The Noir Western: Genre Theory and the Problem of the Anomalous Hybrid,” in The Quarterly Review of Film and Video 31, 4 (March 2014): 336-349.