Author: Edward Dmytryk
Publisher: Crown
ISBN:
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description
Memoir of film director Edward Dmytryk's 54 years in Hollywood.

Author: Charles Affron
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813548454
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
Americans flocked to the movies in 1945 and 1946ùthe center point of the three-decade heyday of the studio system's sound era. Why? Best Years is a panoramic study, shining light on this critical juncture in American historyand the history of American cinemaùthe end of World War II (1945) and a year of unprecedented success in Hollywood's "Golden Age" (1946). This unique time, the last year of war and the first full year of peace, provides a rich blend of cinema genres and typesùfrom the battlefront to the home front, the peace film to the woman's film, psychological drama, and the period's provocative new style, film noir. Best Years focuses on films that were famous, infamous, forgotten, and unforgettable. Big budget A-films, road shows, and familiar series share the spotlight. From Bergman and Grant in Notorious to Abbott and Costello in Lost in a Harem, Charles Affron and Mirella Jona Affron examine why the bond between screen and viewer was perhaps never tighter. Paying special attention to the movie-going public in key cities--Atlanta, New York, Boston, Honolulu, and Chicago--this ambitious work takes us on a cinematic journey to recapture a magical time.

Author: Bob Herzberg
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786457694
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
In examining the careers of communist and liberal actors, screenwriters, playwrights, and directors in Hollywood from the late 1920s to the present, this book uses studio and PCA correspondence, FBI files, film and theater reviews, and other sources to reveal how all of these artists were concerned with and active in the cinema of social protest. It covers the works of those liberal stars and directors who collaborated with communist artists in New York and Hollywood, including John Garfield, Canada Lee, Frances Farmer, Paul Robeson, James Edwards, and Paul Muni; liberal filmmakers like Philip Dunne; and ex-communists (and HUAC-friendly witnesses) like Elia Kazan, Edward Dmytryk, and Robert Rossen. It also looks at the activities of the Communist Party in Hollywood and the far-reaching influence of the Soviet Union.

Author: Erin Hill
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813574897
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 299

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Book Description
Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized. Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry—from the employees’ wives who hand-colored the Edison Company’s films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM’s backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid “women’s work,” or “feminized labor,” Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity. Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood, Never Done reveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid. For more information: http://erinhill.squarespace.com

Author: Larry Ceplair
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813146828
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 716

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Book Description
James Dalton Trumbo (1905--1976) is widely recognized for his work as a screenwriter, playwright, and author, but he is also remembered as one of the Hollywood Ten who opposed the House Un-American Activities Committee. Refusing to answer questions about his prior involvement with the Communist Party, Trumbo sacrificed a successful career in Hollywood to stand up for his rights and defend political freedom. In Dalton Trumbo, authors Larry Ceplair and Christopher Trumbo present their extensive research on the famed writer, detailing his work, his membership in the Communist Party, his long campaign against censorship during the domestic cold war, his ten-month prison sentence for contempt of Congress, and his thirteen-year struggle to break the blacklist. The blacklist ended for Trumbo in 1960, when he received screen credits for Exodus and Spartacus. Just before his death, he received a long-delayed Academy Award for The Brave One, and in 1993, he was posthumously given an Academy Award for Roman Holiday (1953). This comprehensive biography provides insights into the many notable people with whom Trumbo worked, including Stanley Kubrick, Otto Preminger, and Kirk Douglas, and offers a fascinating look at the life of one of Hollywood's most prominent screenwriters and his battle against persecution.

Author: Yann Girard
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781539112709
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 144

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Book Description
Over the past seven years I've lived in more places than I can remember. I lived and worked in Shanghai, New York, Berlin, Bangkok, Munich and a few more places, not including the dozens of places I've stayed at for just a few days or weeks.While writing these lines I'm in a small town in Malaysia.I've basically lived out of a backpack for the past seven years. And the longer I'm doing this, the less stuff I need. Right now I carry less than 10 items around with me in a carry on backpack that weighs less than 10kg. I go wherever I want to go. I currently spend less than $800 a month. Including everything. My most precious possession is a $300 Acer laptop.I've started a clothing company in China, for the Chinese market, which failed miserably. I've launched more than 10 websites, some of them made some money, some of them didn't. I shut down all of them. I've written seven books (this is my eighth). None of them was a bestseller. I write a blog where I published more than 500 articles so far. I've more than 100,000 monthly readers spread across multiple platforms.I'm by no means successful. Or rich. But I have more than enough, by all means. I have access to everything I need. And I can buy and afford everything I need.I'm not a minimalist. Or a digital nomad. Or an entrepreneur. Or a blogger. Or an author.I'm mostly trying to just be myself. I'm trying to be myself in a world where it gets harder and harder every single day to just be yourself.It's not always been easy. As a matter of fact it's probably been hard more often than it's been easy. But every day of struggle and doubt has been worth it. Being yourself and creating your own life instead of just living a life is always worth the struggle.This right here is my story. This is what I've learned about life, myself and the world around me.I'm everywhere and nowhere. And I own nothing and everything...

Author: Gene D. Phillips
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813160014
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 341

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Book Description
“[An] exhaustively researched survey of Raymond Chandler’s thorny relationship with Hollywood during the classic period of film noir.” —Alain Silver, film producer and author Raymond Chandler’s seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something of a frontier town, rife with corruption and lawlessness. In addition to novels, Chandler wrote short stories and penned the screenplays for several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951). His work with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock on these projects was fraught with the difficulties of collaboration between established directors and an author who disliked having to edit his writing on demand. Creatures of Darkness is the first major biocritical study of Chandler in twenty years. Gene Phillips explores Chandler’s unpublished script for Lady in the Lake, examines the process of adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train, discusses the merits of the unproduced screenplay for Playback, and compares Howard Hawks’s director’s cut of The Big Sleep with the version shown in theaters. Through interviews he conducted with Wilder, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Edward Dmytryk over the past several decades, Phillips provides deeper insight into Chandler’s sometimes difficult personality. Chandler’s wisecracking private eye, Philip Marlowe, has spawned a thousand imitations. Creatures of Darkness lucidly explains the author’s dramatic impact on both the literary and cinematic worlds, demonstrating the immeasurable debt that both detective fiction and the neo-noir films of today owe to Chandler’s stark vision.

Author: Jeffrey Richards
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1786730642
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
There's a folk memory of China in which numberless yellow hordes pour out of the 'mysterious East' to overwhelm the vulnerable West, accompanied by a stereotype of the Chinese as cruel, cunning and depraved. Hollywood films played their part in perpetuating these myths and stereotypes that constituted 'The Yellow Peril'. Jeffrey Richards examines in detail how and why they did it. He shows how the negative image was embodied in recurrent cinematic depictions of opium dens, tong wars, sadistic dragon ladies and corrupt warlords and how, in the 1930s and 1940s, a countervailing positive image involved the heroic peasants of The Good Earth and Dragon Seed fighting against Japanese invasion in wartime tributes to the West's ally, Nationalist China. The cinema's split level response is also traced through the images of the ultimate Oriental villain, the sinister Dr. Fu Manchu and the timeless Chinese hero, the intelligent and benevolent detective Charlie Chan.Filling a longstanding gap in Cinema and Cultural History, the book is founded in fresh research into Hollywood's shifting representations of China and its people.

Author: David Cesarani
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1136631712
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 303

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Book Description
For the last decade scholars have been questioning the idea that the Holocaust was not talked about in any way until well into the 1970s. After the Holocaust: Challenging the Myth of Silence is the first collection of authoritative, original scholarship to expose a serious misreading of the past on which, controversially, the claims for a ‘Holocaust industry’ rest. Taking an international approach this bold new book exposes the myth and opens the way for a sweeping reassessment of Jewish life in the postwar era, a life lived in the pervasive, shared awareness that Jews had narrowly survived a catastrophe that had engulfed humanity as a whole but claimed two-thirds of their number. The chapters include: an overview of the efforts by survivor historians and memoir writers to inform the world of the catastrophe that had befallen the Jews of Europe an evaluation of the work of survivor-historians and memoir writers new light on the Jewish historical commissions and the Jewish documentation centres studies of David Boder, a Russian born psychologist who recorded searing interviews with survivors, and the work of philosophers, social thinkers and theologians theatrical productions by survivors and the first films on the theme made in Hollywood how the Holocaust had an impact on the everyday life of Jews in the USA and a discussion of the different types, and meanings, of ‘silence’. A breakthrough volume in the debate about the ‘Myth of Silence’, this is a must for all students of Holocaust and genocide.

Author: Eric A. Goldman
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 0292754698
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Like the haggadah, the traditional “telling” of the story of the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt that is read at the Passover seder, cinema offers a valuable text from which to gain an understanding of the social, political, and cultural realities of Jews in America. In an industry strongly influenced by Jewish filmmakers who made and continue to make the decisions as to which films are produced, the complex and evolving nature of the American Jewish condition has had considerable impact on American cinema and, in particular, on how Jews are reflected on the screen. This groundbreaking study analyzes select mainstream films from the beginning of the sound era to today to provide an understanding of the American Jewish experience over the last century. In the first half of the twentieth century, Hollywood’s movie moguls, most of whom were Jewish, shied away from asserting a Jewish image on the screen for fear that they might be too closely identified with that representation. Over the next two decades, Jewish moviemakers became more comfortable with the concept of a Jewish hero and with an overpowered, yet heroic, Israel. In time, the Holocaust assumed center stage as the single event with the greatest effect on American Jewish identity. Recently, as American Jewish screenwriters, directors, and producers have become increasingly comfortable with their heritage, we are seeing an unprecedented number of movies that spotlight Jewish protagonists, experiences, and challenges.