Box Office Champs

Box Office Champs
Author: Eddie Dorman Kay
Publisher: Gramercy
Total Pages: 200
Release: 1990-09-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780517692127

"Throughout the book are more than 350 unforgettable film stills and posters, wonderful images in color and black and white, drawn from the files of the renowned Kobal Collection. Included are photographs of such luminaries as Tyrone Power as Jesse James; Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story (and Frank Sinatra and Grace Kelly in the musical remake, High Society); Ingrid Bergman and Gary Cooper in for Whom the Bell Tolls; John Wayne in Red River; James Dean and Elizabeth Taylor in Giant; Dustin Hoffman as The Graduate; Clint Eastwood as Dirty Harry; Sylvester Stallone as Rocky; Goldie Hawn as Private Benjamin; and Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future. This then is truly a book for fans of all ages, offering insights into movie history, the art of film-making, and the changing state of popular culture."--

Box Office

Box Office
Author:
Publisher:
Total Pages: 692
Release: 1960
Genre: Motion picture industry
ISBN:

Movies and the Reagan Presidency

Movies and the Reagan Presidency
Author: Chris Jordan
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 208
Release: 2003-06-30
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0313057486

The 1980s were unique in both American history and the history of American cinema. It was a time when a United States president—a former B-movie actor and Cold War industry activist—served as a catalyst for the coalescence of trends in Hollywood's political structure, mode of production, and film content. Ronald Reagan championed a success ethos that recognized economic and moral self-governance as the basis of a democratic society. His agenda of tax reform and industry deregulation simultaneously promoted the absorption of Hollywood's major studios into tightly diversified media conglomerates, and concentrations of ownership promoted the production and release of movies with maximum revenue potential. Indeed, the most commercially successful movies of the decade put forth the ideologies of WASP America, nuclear family self-sufficiency, and conspicuous consumption. Three genres in particular—the biracial buddy movie, the MTV music-video movie, and the yuppie movie—provide case studies of how Reagan-era cinema addressed issues of race, gender, and class in ways very much in tune with Reaganomics and the President's cultural policies. Author Chris Jordan provides a complete overview of both the influence of Reagan's presidency on the film industry and on the films themselves. Exploring 80s genres and movies with both a sociocultural and aesthetic eye, this book will be invaluable to historians, cinema scholars, and film buffs.

Hollywood and After

Hollywood and After
Author: Jerzy Toeplitz
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 250
Release: 2024-01-15
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1003834264

First published in English in 1974, Hollywood and After presents contemporary cinema in all its complexity, describing and analyzing the various factors which, in the sixties and seventies, brought so many changes both inside Hollywood and throughout the film industry of the USA. The film industry has been restructured. No longer independent, it now forms only a part, sometimes only a small and secondary part, of large diversified corporations. Formerly rivals, today cinema and television not only coexist, but are forced to cooperate closely in a world of technical developments such as videocassettes, cable TV, and satellite transmissions. The main part of this book is dedicated to artistic and creative questions. A new generation of film makers is making films for a new generation of film goers who are looking for fresh values on the screen. More and more the cinema mirrors the reality of American life: complicated, uneasy, shaken by violent outbursts, charged with a multitude of controversies and conflicts. The rose-tinted American dream, which Hollywood peddled, is a thing of the past. Today the US cinema offers a variety of artistic, political, and social approaches and a wide range of highly individual styles. In the world of social media, OTT platforms, and AI, this book is an important historical reference for scholars and researchers of film studies, film history, and media studies.

Disney's Most Notorious Film

Disney's Most Notorious Film
Author: Jason Sperb
Publisher: University of Texas Press
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2012-12-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0292749813

The Walt Disney Company offers a vast universe of movies, television shows, theme parks, and merchandise, all carefully crafted to present an image of wholesome family entertainment. Yet Disney also produced one of the most infamous Hollywood films, Song of the South. Using cartoon characters and live actors to retell the stories of Joel Chandler Harris, SotS portrays a kindly black Uncle Remus who tells tales of Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the “Tar Baby” to adoring white children. Audiences and critics alike found its depiction of African Americans condescending and outdated when the film opened in 1946, but it grew in popularity—and controversy—with subsequent releases. Although Disney has withheld the film from American audiences since the late 1980s, SotS has an enthusiastic fan following, and pieces of the film—such as the Oscar-winning “Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah”—remain throughout Disney’s media universe. Disney’s Most Notorious Film examines the racial and convergence histories of Song of the South to offer new insights into how audiences and Disney have negotiated the film’s controversies over the last seven decades. Jason Sperb skillfully traces the film’s reception history, showing how audience perceptions of SotS have reflected debates over race in the larger society. He also explores why and how Disney, while embargoing the film as a whole, has repurposed and repackaged elements of SotS so extensively that they linger throughout American culture, serving as everything from cultural metaphors to consumer products.

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection

The Year's Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection
Author: Gardner Dozois
Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin
Total Pages: 854
Release: 2018-07-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250164648

The multiple Locus Award-winning annual collection of the year's best science fiction stories. In the new millennium, what secrets lay beyond the far reaches of the universe? What mysteries belie the truths we once held to be self-evident? The world of science fiction has long been a porthole into the realities of tomorrow, blurring the line between life and art. Now, in The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Thirty-Fifth Annual Collection, the very best SF authors explore ideas of a new world. This venerable collection brings together award-winning authors and masters of the field. Featuring short stories from acclaimed authors such as Indrapramit Das, Nancy Kress, Alastair Reynolds, Eleanor Arnason, James S.A. Corey & Lavie Tidhar, an extensive recommended reading guide and a summation of the year in science fiction, this annual compilation has become the definitive must-read anthology for all science fiction fans and readers interested in breaking into the genre.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg
Author: Joseph McBride
Publisher: Univ. Press of Mississippi
Total Pages: 641
Release: 2011-01-04
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1604738375

Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been. This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work--including Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artifucial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter. Steven Spielberg: A Biography brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.

Pleading the Blood

Pleading the Blood
Author: Christopher Sieving
Publisher: Indiana University Press
Total Pages: 302
Release: 2022-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0253059186

The definitive look at one of the most important Black art films and original filmmakers of the 1970s. Bill Gunn's Ganja & Hess (1973) has across the decades attained a sizable cult following among African American cinema devotees, art house aficionados, and horror fans, thanks to its formal complexity and rich allegory. Pleading the Blood is the first full-length study of this cult classic. Ganja & Hess was withdrawn almost immediately after its New York premiere by its distributor because Gunn's poetic re-fashioning of the vampire genre allegedly failed to satisfy the firm's desire for a by-the-numbers "blaxploitation" horror flick for quick sell-off in the urban market. Its current status as one of the classic works of African American cinema has recently been confirmed by the Blu-ray release of its restored version, by its continued success in screenings at repertory houses, museums, and universities, and by an official remake, Da Sweet Blood of Jesus (2014), directed by Spike Lee, one of the original picture's longtime champions. Pleading the Blood draws on Gunn's archived papers, screenplay drafts, and storyboards, as well as interviews with the living major creative participants to offer a comprehensive, absorbing account of the influential movie and its highly original filmmaker.