ABSTRACT
In 1945, the first modern alcoholism film, The Lost Weekend, was released. It was based on Charles Jackson's novel of the same name, which was an immediate national best seller when it appeared in 1944. Prior to this film (1932–1945) Hollywood had focused its attention primarily on the entertainment industry, and the production of alcoholism films focused on problems of alcoholic stars within the Hollywood System. Alcoholism films are simultaneously visual records of, and a part of, everyday life. Alcoholism films express particular versions of the social imagination, including the understandings in the 1940s and 1950s that alcoholism was a treatable disease. Alcoholism films do not faithfully reproduce reality. A film "screens" and frames reality to fit particular ideological or distorted images of "real" social relationships. In representing multiple, contradictory versions of reality, an alcoholism film manage to reflect the very reality it distorts.
