FILM CONFERENCE AT THE JOHNS HOPKINS UNIVERSITY BALTIMORE, MARYLAND APRIL 28, 29, 30, 1995 THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIO AS AUTEUR The hypothesis of studio as auteur aims to provoke a reconsideration of Hollywood studio practice and product in order to reimagine the role of collective agency in twentieth-century cultural production. The approach aims to restore something like human agency to the increasingly hegemonic phenomenon dubbed "the classical Hollywood cinema": "something like human agency" because that agency is in fact corporate. The hypothesis of studio as auteur answers to the conviction that the chief obligation of contemporary film theory and scholarship is to investigate the nexus of corporate agency in Hollywood motion pictures: to map its diverse manifestations in the major and minor studios, to analyze the changing constitution of corporate agency as the studios responded to pressure from the market and the state, to assess how the exercise of corporate agency affected the self-understanding and practice of producers, performers, and consumers, and, finally, to describe how its effects showed on the screen. We invite proposals for 50 minute papers that investigate theoretically or historically the critical utility of studio as auteur. The featured speaker at the Conference "Studio as Auteur" will be Thomas Schatz, G. B. Dealey Professor of Communications at the University of Texas and author of *The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era*. The Conference will be limited to twelve participants who will each receive an honorarium to help defray expenses. Book publication of the proceedings is expected. Please send 500 word proposals for papers by September 30, 1994 to Jerome Christensen, Director of Film and Media Studies, English Department, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD 21218. Communications are invited also at FAX: (410) 516-4757.