Film dictionaries have become a genre unto themselves lately, and bookstore shelves are bulging with hefty tomes that cover seemingly every corner of cinema interest. The formidable Anthony Slide's update of his 1986 entry on the subject is a little different from Katz, Konigsberg, Maltin, et al. The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry is, typical of Scarecrow, overpriced and underpaged, but nonetheless an important addition to the cinephile's shelf. They're all here, along with a wealth of other tantalizing entries that form a mosaic of how the movies spawned businesses working at every level and in every possible realm. He details the history of breakthroughs like Technicolor and Cinemascope, along with amusingly cumbersome contraptions like the Kinetophone.
Some entries contain useful bibliographic citations for readers wishing to do further research.
There are a few problems worth noting. For example, readers might prefer to look up blacklisting under that term, or even under HUAC, rather than the technically correct but less known Dies Committee Investigation that appears here. And occasionally an error creeps in, as when Targets , from 1968, is called a New World Picture in the same entry that says New World was formed in 1970. Still, these are petty grievances given the amount of information here. Even casual readers will find fascinating tidbits.