Description
Book SynopsisAs one of popular culture’s most popular arenas, sports are often the subject of cinematic storytelling. But boxing films are special. There are more movies about boxing, by a healthy margin, than any other sport, and boxing accompanied and aided the medium’s late nineteenth-century emergence as a popular mass entertainment. Many of cinema’s most celebrated directors—from Oscar Micheaux to Martin Scorsese—made boxing films. And while the production of other types of sports movies generally corresponds with the current popularity of their subject, boxing films continue to be made regularly even after the sport has wilted from its once-prominent position in the sports hierarchy of the United States. From Edison’s
Leonard-Cushing Fight to
The Joe Louis Story,
Rocky, and beyond, this book explores why boxing has so consistently fascinated cinema and popular media culture by tracing how boxing movies inform the sport’s meanings and uses from the late nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century.
Trade Review“While focusing on African American representation and racial conflict, Travis Vogan offers a fluent and engaging survey of boxing’s transmedia history.” -- Leger Grindon * author of Knockout: the Boxer and Boxing in American Cinema *
"29 Best New Cinema Books To Read In 2021" * Book Authority *
"I have a soft spot for boxing movies. They are about the triumph of humanity and the specificity of training. This is another book that takes on an entire genre and breaks it down from memorable hits to forgotten titles." * No Film School *
Table of ContentsIntroduction: The Boxing Film Over Time and Across Media
1. The Boxing Film through the Golden Age of Sports Media
2. St. Joe Louis, Surrounded by Films
3. TV Fighting and Fighting TV in the 1950s
4. Muhammad Ali,
The Super Fight, and Closed-Circuit Exhibition
5. The 1970s,
Rocky, and the Shadow of Ali
6. HBO Sports: Docu-Branding Boxing
7. Protecting Boxing with the Boxing Film
Conclusion: Handling the Rules
Acknowledgements
Index
