The Film Crew of Hollywood

The Film Crew of Hollywood
Author: James C. Udel
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2013-10-28
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786464844

These in-depth profiles illuminate the careers of ten motion picture crew members who worked during Hollywood's Independent Age of film and television production--basically from 1945 to 1980. A celebratory insiders' look at the Tinseltown machine, the book utilizes individual interviews and rare crew photographs to provide the back story of production challenges and solutions for some of the world's most recognized movies, including such classics as The Searchers, Chinatown, The Hustler, and Bullitt among many others. It provides not only an educational treatment of the jobs and techniques of filmmaking but also a dose of humorous and memorable experiences from the trenches.

Experts in Action

Experts in Action
Author: Lauren Steimer
Publisher: Duke University Press
Total Pages: 161
Release: 2021-01-11
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1478021268

Action movie stars ranging from Jackie Chan to lesser-known stunt women and men like Zoƫ Bell and Chad Stahelski stun their audiences with virtuosic martial arts displays, physical prowess, and complex fight sequences. Their performance styles originate from action movies that emerged in the industrial environment of 1980s Hong Kong. In Experts in Action Lauren Steimer examines how Hong Kong--influenced cinema aesthetics and stunt techniques have been taken up, imitated, and reinvented in other locations and production contexts in Hollywood, New Zealand, and Thailand. Foregrounding the transnational circulation of Hong Kong--influenced films, television shows, stars, choreographers, and stunt workers, she shows how stunt workers like Chan, Bell, and others combine techniques from martial arts, dance, Peking opera, and the history of movie and television stunting practices to create embodied performances that are both spectacular and, sometimes, rendered invisible. By describing the training, skills, and labor involved in stunt work as well as the location-dependent material conditions and regulations that impact it, Steimer illuminates the expertise of the workers whose labor is indispensable to some of the world's most popular movies.

Movie Stunts & Special Effects

Movie Stunts & Special Effects
Author: Andrew Lane
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 297
Release: 2014-11-20
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1623563666

Throughout film history, one of the fundamental fantasies portrayed on screen has been the kind of physical action few of us could ever experience in real life. The image of an 'every man' engaged in hand-to-hand, mortal combat, defending his family or even the world population against an overwhelming and malevolent force, speaks to our most primal instincts and thus became a mainstay of movie entertainment. In order to translate these deep-seated fantasies to the screen, filmmakers have been developing special skills and crafts for over 100 years. It is these skills that make 'movie magic' and have allowed audiences to take part in the primal hopes and fears we all possess. Movie Stunts & Special Effects: A Comprehensive Guide to Planning and Execution is designed to inform filmmakers on how to plan for and utilize these crafts by engaging and empowering filmmakers to better communicate with stunts and effects practitioners, and thereby enabling them to more fully realize their vision. Director/Producer Andrew Lane surveys fights, use of weapons, cars and vehicles, falls, the use of pyrotechnics, atmospheric effects, bullet hits, wounds and blood, among many other categories. Factors such as cost, time to implement, safety accommodations, and assessing the competence of those employed to plan and execute stunts and special effects are numerous and very specific. Each topic in Movie Stunts & Special Effects is examined using narrative explanations, extensive interviews with world-renowned experts. Various stunts and special effects will be explored in the context of how they are best captured by a camera and then editorially constituted in the final product.

Hollywood Stunt Performers, 1910s-1970s

Hollywood Stunt Performers, 1910s-1970s
Author: Gene Scott Freese
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 355
Release: 2014-04-24
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0786476435

This biographical dictionary shines the spotlight on several hundred unheralded stunt performers who created some of the cinema's greatest action scenes without credit or recognition. The time period covered encompasses the silent comedy days of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, the early westerns of Tom Mix and John Wayne, the swashbucklers of Douglas Fairbanks, Errol Flynn, and Burt Lancaster, the costume epics of Charlton Heston and Kirk Douglas, and the action films of Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood, and Charles Bronson. Without stuntmen and women working behind the scenes the films of these action superstars would not have been as successful. Now fantastic athletes and leading stunt creators such as Yakima Canutt, Richard Talmadge, Harvey Parry, Allen Pomeroy, Dave Sharpe, Jock Mahoney, Chuck Roberson, Polly Burson, Bob Morgan, Loren Janes, Dean Smith, Hal Needham, Martha Crawford, Ronnie Rondell, Terry Leonard, and Bob Minor are given their proper due. Each entry covers the performer's athletic background, military service, actors doubled, noteworthy stunts, and a rundown of his or her best known screen credits.

The Screen Combat Handbook

The Screen Combat Handbook
Author: Kevin Inouye
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 379
Release: 2020-04-02
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1351027409

The Screen Combat Handbook is an essential guide to navigating the unique challenges of putting combat on screen. Explore the process from the early stages of preproduction planning all the way through to editing and sound design, and everything in-between. This book uses practical instruction, examples, interviews, and illustrations to show how to plan, shoot, and assemble safe and effective fight sequences. It includes sections on thoughtful and practical design choices in set, wardrobe, props, and effects, preproduction planning, on-set protocol, fight choreography and coordination, shot planning and technical tricks, acting choices, effective cinematography, and impactful editing and sound design. It provides an invaluable resource for all those involved including directors, fight coordinators, actors and stunt players, and any filmmaker attempting to shoot an exciting action scene safely. Whether working on a no-budget indie production or on a professional set, this is your ultimate guide to screen combat and fight choreography.

Author:
Publisher: Marvel Entertainment
Total Pages: 213
Release:
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1302507559

Stunt Planes

Stunt Planes
Author: Jeff Savage
Publisher: Capstone
Total Pages: 36
Release: 2003
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 9780736815192

Describes the sport of stunt flying, including its history, the most popular stunt planes, basic stunts, and stunt flying contests. Also includes information on the U.S. Navy's Blue Angels.

Stuntman!

Stuntman!
Author: Hal Needham
Publisher: Little, Brown
Total Pages: 266
Release: 2011-02-09
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0316122858

The classic no-holds-barred memoir from Hollywood's most legendary stuntman -- an inspiration for Brad Pitt's character Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood -- is "full of incredible stories as told by a real man of action" (Arnold Schwarzenegger). Yep that's me, Hal Needham, on the cover doing a fire stunt. When you're on fire you don't dare breathe because if you do, you'll suck those flames right down your throat. I was Hollywood's highest paid stuntman so I should know. I wrecked hundreds of cars, fell from tall buildings, got blown up, was dragged by horses, and along the way broke 56 bones, my back twice, punctured a lung and knocked out a few teeth...I hung upside down by my ankles under a bi-plane in The Spirit of St. Louis, jumped between galloping horses in Little Big Man, set a world record for a boat stunt on Gator, jumped a rocket powered pick-up truck across a canal for a GM commercial, was the first human to test the car airbag-and taught John Wayne how to really throw a movie punch. Life also got exciting outside of the movie business. I had my Ferrari stolen right from under my nose, flew in a twin-engine Cessna with a passed out pilot, rescued the cast and crew from a Russian invasion in Czechoslovakia, and once took six flight attendants on a date. I owned the Skoal-Bandit NASCAR race team, the sound-barrier breaking Budweiser Rocket Car and drove a souped-up, fake ambulance in a "little" cross-country race called The Cannonball Run, which became the movie I directed by the same name. Oh yeah, I also directed Smokey and the Bandit, Hooper and several other action/comedy movies that I liked a bunch. I was a sharecropper's son from the hills of Arkansas who became a Hollywood stuntman. That journey was a tough row to hoe. I continually risked my life but that was the career I chose. I was never late to the set and did whatever I had to do to get the job done. Hollywood's not all sunglasses and autographs. Let me tell you a few stories...

The Anthropocene Unconscious

The Anthropocene Unconscious
Author: Mark Bould
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2021-11-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1839760478

From Ducks, Newburyport to zombie movies and the Fast and Furious franchise, how climate anxiety permeates our culture The art and literature of our time is pregnant with catastrophe, with weather and water, wildness and weirdness. The Anthropocene - the term given to this geological epoch in which humans, anthropos, are wreaking havoc on the earth - is to be found bubbling away everywhere in contemporary cultural production. Typically, discussions of how culture registers, figures and mediates climate change focus on 'climate fiction' or 'cli-fi', but The Anthropocene Unconscious is more interested in how the Anthropocene and especially anthropogenic climate destabilisation manifests in texts that are not overtly about climate change - that is, unconsciously. The Anthropocene, Mark Bould argues, constitutes the unconscious of 'the art and literature of our time'. Tracing the outlines of the Anthropocene unconscious in a range of film, television and literature - across a range of genres and with utter disregard for high-low culture distinctions - this playful and riveting book draws out some of the things that are repressed and obscured by the term 'the Anthropocene', including capital, class, imperialism, inequality, alienation, violence, commodification, patriarchy and racial formations. The Anthropocene Unconscious is about a kind of rewriting. It asks: what happens when we stop assuming that the text is not about the anthropogenic biosphere crises engulfing us? What if all the stories we tell are stories about the Anthropocene? About climate change?