This story appeared in the Fall 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
When Eric Hoyt moved to Hollywood after college, the cinema-besotted Kansas native landed a job in the mailroom of a prominent talent agency. His plan was to work his way up to becoming a producer. Hoyt, now the Kahl Family Professor of Media Production and a professor of film, media and cultural studies in the Department of Communication Arts, found himself drawn to the industry trade papers that he passed out from his mail cart and pored over during his lunch hour.
Hoyt recognized that Variety, the Hollywood Reporter and others didn’t just provide straightforward news about movie deals; they also reflected important trends playing out in the culture at large. Often the papers would indulge in hyperbole, or they would serve, as he says, “as community gatekeepers, by determining who’s in and who’s out.” But invariably, they opened up interesting new questions about the film world and the impact of movies on society.
“Partly through being a critical thinker from college, and partly through the culture of the agency, I learned how to read the papers critically,” Hoyt says.
At UW-Madison, Hoyt has worked to build up the Media History Digital Library (MHDL), a remarkable cache of more than 2.5 million digitized pages of historic film books and magazines that are available online for free public access. With help from the MHDL’s founder, David Pierce, and other project supporters, Hoyt served as lead developer of Lantern, the MHDL’s search platform, and Arclight, a data analytics and visualization app that allows users to see when certain Hollywood stories and movie stars were written about most often in the trades (Bette Davis’s coverage peaked in 1940, per Arclight).
Since 2017, Hoyt has led the MHDL, which is now housed at UW-Madison and complements the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research, a world-renowned archive of movie, theater, and television materials, established by UW in 1960 and also directed by Hoyt.
Hoyt is delighted that UW-Madison has become such a rich digital research destination not only for film and media scholars but for anyone interested in the history of movies and television. He says people have used the MHDL to investigate how movies fit into people’s lives in England in the 1930s, and in Italy in the 1950s, as well as to explore how film magazines reflected trends in labor and media censorship and changing attitudes toward race, gender and beauty norms.
Rather than becoming a film producer, Hoyt is now a producer of digital resources that help us understand the history of movies and broadcasting. “I am incredibly fortunate to get to write about these media forms and, especially, to teach and work with students who bring their own passions and curiosity to [them],” he says.
