American Film Tales

American Film Tales
Author: Robert Cettl
Publisher: Robert Cettl
Total Pages: 57
Release: 2014-09-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0987456237

The Golden Age of American Cinema Up Close and Personal. The famous director who roughed up a death row inmate during a prison interview to get the emotional reaction he wanted | the Disney movie into which was inserted an image from Playboy magazine forcing a VHS recall | the model for a company whose logo was “99 & 44/100% Pure” who made a fortune as a porn star. These and dozens of other choice movie-making anecdotes comprise American Film Tales, a genre by genre tour through the secret history of Hollywood back-story folklore. Famous directors, actors, movies and critics feature in this compendium of movie stories, making American Film Tales the ideal book companion for home theatre buffs in the digital age and faced with an array of viewing choices. Comprehensively researched and organized into easy to access genre-themed chapters, Hollywood history has never been as accessible and as infotaining as it is here and now.

America

America
Author: Fred Setterberg
Publisher: Travelers' Tales
Total Pages: 560
Release: 1999
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9781885211286

A portrait of the nation through tales of travelers who have traversed the breadth and depth of America the beautiful.

Sleepless in Hollywood

Sleepless in Hollywood
Author: Lynda Obst
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-06-11
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1476727740

Explores how the DVD market's collapse has triggered a refocus on special effects and 3D over expensive actors and writers, drawing on insights from industry experts to consider if an increasingly eccentric movie business is salvageable.

The Black Cat

The Black Cat
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: SAMPI Books
Total Pages: 20
Release: 2024-01-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 658593413X

Edgar Allan Poe's "The Black Cat" is a short story that explores themes of guilt and perversity. The narrator, haunted by cruelty to his black cat and acts of domestic violence, is consumed by paranoia and madness. His attempt to conceal a crime leads to his own disgrace.

The Handmaid's Tale

The Handmaid's Tale
Author: Margaret Atwood
Publisher: McClelland & Stewart
Total Pages: 370
Release: 2011-09-06
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0771008791

An instant classic and eerily prescient cultural phenomenon, from “the patron saint of feminist dystopian fiction” (New York Times). Now an award-winning Hulu series starring Elizabeth Moss. In this multi-award-winning, bestselling novel, Margaret Atwood has created a stunning Orwellian vision of the near future. This is the story of Offred, one of the unfortunate “Handmaids” under the new social order who have only one purpose: to breed. In Gilead, where women are prohibited from holding jobs, reading, and forming friendships, Offred’s persistent memories of life in the “time before” and her will to survive are acts of rebellion. Provocative, startling, prophetic, and with Margaret Atwood’s devastating irony, wit, and acute perceptive powers in full force, The Handmaid’s Tale is at once a mordant satire and a dire warning.

The Stardom Film

The Stardom Film
Author: Karen McNally
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 79
Release: 2020-12-08
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0231851146

Since the earliest days of the movie industry, Hollywood has mythologized itself through stories of stardom. A female protagonist escapes the confines of rural America in search of freedom in a western dream factory; an ambitious, conceited movie idol falls from grace and discovers what it means to embody true stardom; or a fading star confronts Hollywood’s obsession with youth by embarking on a determined mission to reclaim her lost fame. In its various forms, the stardom film is crucial to understanding how Hollywood has shaped its own identity, as well as its claim on America’s collective imagination. In the first book to focus exclusively on these modern fairy tales, Karen McNally traces the history of this genre from silent cinema to contemporary film and television to show its significance to both Hollywood and broader American culture. Drawing on extensive archival research, she provides close readings of a wide range of films, from Souls for Sale (1923) to A Star is Born (1937 and 1954) and Judy (2019), moving between fictional narratives, biopics, and those that occupy a space in between. McNally considers the genre’s core set of tropes, its construction of stardom around idealized white femininity, and its reflections on the blurred boundaries between myth, image, and reality. The Stardom Film offers an original understanding of one of Hollywood’s most enduring genres and why the allure of fame continues to fascinate us.

The Genius of the System

The Genius of the System
Author: Thomas Schatz
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company
Total Pages: 530
Release: 2015-06-02
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1627796452

At a time when the studio is making a stunning comeback, film historian Thomas Schatz provides an indispensable account of Hollywood's tradional blend of business and art. This book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and reveals instead the genius of a system of collaboration and conflict. Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making-and unmaking-of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel. Richly illustrated and highly readable, The Genius of the System gives the definitive view of the workings of the Old Hollywood and the foundations of the New.

American Gothic Tales

American Gothic Tales
Author: Various
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 561
Release: 1996-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0452274893

This remarkable anthology of gothic fiction, spanning two centuries of American writing, gives us an intriguing and entertaining look at how the gothic imagination makes for great literature in the works of forty-six exceptional writers. Joyce Carol Oates has a special perspective on the “gothic” in American short fiction, at least partially because her own horror yarns rank on the spine-tingling chart with the masters. She is able to see the unbroken link of the macabre that ties Edgar Allan Poe to Anne Rice and to recognize the dark psychological bonds between Henry James and Stephen King. In showing us the gothic vision—a world askew where mankind’s forbidden impulses are set free from the repressions of the psyche, and nature turns malevolent and lawless—Joyce Carol Oates includes Henry James’s “The Romance of Certain Old Clothes,” Herman Melville’s horrific tale of factory women, “The Tartarus of Maids,” and Edith Wharton’s “Afterward,” which are rarely collected and appear together here for the first time. Added to these stories of the past are new ones that explore the wounded worlds of Stephen King, Anne Rice, Peter Straub, Raymond Carver, and more than twenty other wonderful contemporary writers. This impressive collection reveals the astonishing scope of the gothic writer’s subject matter, style, and incomparable genius for manipulating our emotions and penetrating our dreams. With Joyce Carol Oates’s superb introduction, American Gothic Tales is destined to become the standard one-volume edition of the genre that American writers, if they didn’t create it outright, have brought to its chilling zenith.

Martin Dressler

Martin Dressler
Author: Steven Millhauser
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0307763862

PULITZER PRIZE WINNER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • The author of Voices in the Night reveals the mesmerizing journey of an American dreamer as he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry. “This wonderful, wonder-full book is a fable and phantasmagoria of the sources of our century.” —The New York Times Book Review Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.

An Empire of Their Own

An Empire of Their Own
Author: Neal Gabler
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 537
Release: 2010-11-17
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 030777371X

A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost in the process is the exhilarating story of An Empire of Their Own.