ABSTRACT
This chapter presents overview of key concepts covered in this book. The book explores the linkages between film and tourism in the American West. Through popular culture and media, places such as the West are collectively reimagined, with certain elements and features exaggerated and others ignored. These imagined places draw in tourists, attracted by a cultural heritage that is part fictional and mediatised. In turn, tourism operators and destination marketing organisations refashion what they present to fit these imagined images. Three inter-related developments are particularly important: First, the growing realisation that individual case studies have been overdone and that often their lessons are difficult to apply to other instances, second, conceptual shift has been from film tourism to media tourism, finally change is a dramatic swing from a supply to a demand focus. Much of the early work on film tourism was industry-based.
