Hollywood Shutdown

With Hollywood Shutdown, Kate Fortmuller has provided an impressive overview of many of the key ways that COVID has impacted film, television, and digital media during an intense year. It promises to be a productive jumping-off point for conversation and analysis both by industry professionals and industry scholars, and likewise will be beneficial to students trying to understand a rapidly changing media business.

— Alisa Perren, author of Indie, Inc.: Miramax and the Transformation of Hollywood in the 1990s

The value of Fortmueller’s book is as a contemporary historical record of what’s happened to the entertainment industry thus far [during the COVID-19 pandemic], and as a source of informed speculation on what might happen next...Despite its compact size, the book contains an impressive amount of information and analysis, all of it accessibly written and clearly explained.

— PopMatters

Hollywood Shutdown is a slender but information packed analysis of the motion picture industry’s response to a crisis that recalled any number of Hollywood disaster movies.

— Shepherd Express

One of the first (if not the first) books about the impact of COVID-19 on film and television production. Hollywood Shutdown covers how and why the production, distribution, and exhibition of entertainment has shifted so dramatically. Fortmueller explains that because of the pandemic’s ongoing nature, she 'did not have the kind of temporal and emotional distance from my subject that is usually part of the writing process.' But this perspective serves to make Shutdown even more vital as an in-the-moment chronicle of how Hollywood responded to COVID.

— The Film Stage