Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s

Teenagers and Teenpics tells the story of two signature developments in the 1950s: the decline of the classical Hollywood cinema and the emergence of that strange new creature, the American teenager. Hollywood's discovery of the teenage moviegoer initiated a progressive "juvenilization" of film content that is today the operative reality of the American motion picture industry.

The juvenilization of the American movies is best revealed in the development of the 1950s "teenpic," a picture tar...