You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story

You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story
Author: Richard Schickel
Publisher: Running Press
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2008-09-09
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780762434183

From Rin Tin Tin to Casablanca to Harry Potter, the Warner Bros. story is the history of Hollywood. Eighty-five years of screen icons, legendary films, and history-making achievements are detailed in this comprehensive, photo-filled treasure trove, fully authorized by the studio. No production company has had more legendary films, stars, or influence on the course of Hollywood than Warner Bros. Among the superstars who worked for the studio are Bette Davis, Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Joan Crawford, Marlon Brando, James Dean, and John Wayne. Filmmakers like Martin Scorsese and Stanley Kubrick made history for the studio, and it has been home to blockbuster franchises like Superman, Batman, Lethal Weapon, and Harry Potter. Produced in conjunction with Warner Bros., this volume is the ultimate guide to the greatest movie studio in history. You Must Remember This: The Warner Bros. Story is also the companion to a five part documentary in the PBS American Masters series by author Richard Schickel that will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in the spring of 2008 and debut on PBS in the fall, to coincide with publication of the book.

MGM

MGM
Author: Steven Bingen
Publisher: Santa Monica Press
Total Pages: 1157
Release: 2011-02-25
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1595808930

M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot is the illustrated history of the soundstages and outdoor sets where Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer produced many of the world’s most famous films. During its Golden Age, the studio employed the likes of Garbo, Astaire, and Gable, and produced innumerable iconic pieces of cinema such as The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and Ben-Hur. It is estimated that a fifth of all films made in the United States prior to the 1970s were shot at MGM studios, meaning that the gigantic property was responsible for hundreds of iconic sets and stages, often utilizing and transforming minimal spaces and previously used props, to create some of the most recognizable and identifiable landscapes of modern movie culture. All of this happened behind closed doors, the backlot shut off from the public in a veil of secrecy and movie magic. M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot highlights this fascinating film treasure by recounting the history, popularity, and success of the MGM company through a tour of its physical property. Featuring the candid, exclusive voices and photographs from the people who worked there, and including hundreds of rare and unpublished photographs (including many from the archives of Warner Bros.), readers are launched aboard a fun and entertaining virtual tour of Hollywood’s most famous and mysterious motion picture studio.

Hollywood be Thy Name

Hollywood be Thy Name
Author: Cass Warner Sperling
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
Total Pages: 416
Release: 1998-01-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 9780813109589

This text charts the real story of the Warner brothers and contains all the drama of a big screen production. The book tells of tension and strife among four brothers, love and marriage, death and divorce, and plotting and betrayal.

We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie

We'll Always Have Casablanca: The Life, Legend, and Afterlife of Hollywood's Most Beloved Movie
Author: Noah Isenberg
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 339
Release: 2017-02-14
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0393243133

A Los Angeles Times bestseller A New York Times Book Review “Editor’s Choice” Selection “Even the die-hardest Casablanca fan will find in this delightful book new ways to love the movie they were certain they could never love more.” —Sam Wasson, best-selling author of Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M. Casablanca is “not one movie,” Umberto Eco once quipped; “it is ‘movies.’” Film historian Noah Isenberg’s We’ll Always Have Casablanca offers a rich account of the film’s origins, the myths and realities behind its production, and the reasons it remains so revered today, over seventy-five years after its premiere.

Hill of Beans

Hill of Beans
Author: Leslie Epstein
Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2021-03-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0826362605

The film Casablanca opens with the words, “With the coming of the Second World War, many eyes in imprisoned Europe turned hopefully, or desperately, toward the freedom of the Americas.” Leslie Epstein’s Hill of Beans is the story of how one nation, one industry, and in particular one man responded to that desperate hope. That man is Jack Warner. His impossible goal is to make world events—most importantly, the invasion of North Africa by British and American forces in 1942—coincide with the release of his new film about a group of refugees marooned in Morocco. Arrayed against him are Stalin and Hitler, as well as Josef Goebbels, Franklin Roosevelt, a powerful gossip columnist, and above all a beautiful young woman with a terrible secret. His only weapons are his hutzpah and his heroism as he struggles to bring cinema and city, conflict and conference together in an epic command performance. Hill of Beans is the novel that Leslie Epstein—the son and nephew of Philip and Julius Epstein, the screenwriters of Casablanca—was born to write.

You Must Remember This

You Must Remember This
Author: Robert J. Wagner
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 276
Release: 2014-03-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 069815147X

A New York Times bestseller and a “charming tribute” (Kirkus) to Hollywood’s most beloved era Film and television star Robert Wagner has been delighting audiences for more than sixty years, and his many fans flocked to bookstores when he began to record his memories on the page. In his second New York Times bestseller, Wagner shares stories of Hollywood life behind the scenes from the 1930s through the 1950s. As poignant as it is revealing—and filled with magical moments like Judy Garland singing Gershwin at a dinner party thrown by Clifton Webb and golf games with Fred Astaire—You Must Remember This is Wagner’s tender farewell to a legendary era.

When Warners Brought Broadway to Hollywood, 1923-1939

When Warners Brought Broadway to Hollywood, 1923-1939
Author: Martin Shingler
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 244
Release: 2018-01-23
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1137406585

This book offers a different take on the early history of Warner Bros., the studio renowned for introducing talking pictures and developing the gangster film and backstage musical comedy. The focus here is on the studio’s sustained commitment to produce films based on stage plays. This led to the creation of a stock company of talented actors, to the introduction of sound cinema, to the recruitment of leading Broadway stars such as John Barrymore and George Arliss and to films as diverse as The Gold Diggers (1923), The Marriage Circle (1924), Beau Brummel (1924), Disraeli (1929), Lilly Turner (1933), The Petrified Forest (1936) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Even the most crippling effects of the Depression in 1933 did not prevent Warners’ production of films based on stage plays, many being transformed into star vehicles for the likes of Ruth Chatterton, Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.

Immortal Films

Immortal Films
Author: Barbara Klinger
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2022-11-15
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 0520296451

Casablanca is one of the most celebrated Hollywood films of all time, its iconic romance enshrined in collective memory across generations. Drawing from archival materials, industry trade journals, and cultural commentary, Barbara Klinger explores the history of Casablanca's circulation in the United States from the early 1940s to the present by examining its exhibition via radio, repertory houses, television, and video. By resituating the film in the dynamically changing industrial, technological, and cultural circumstances that have defined its journey over eight decades, Klinger challenges our understanding of its meaning and reputation as both a Hollywood classic and a cult film. Through this single-film survey, Immortal Films proposes a new approach to the study of film history and aesthetics and, more broadly, to cinema itself as a medium in constant interface with other media as a necessary condition of its own public existence and endurance.

All the Gin Joints

All the Gin Joints
Author: Martin Turnbull
Publisher: Rothesay Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2021-07-19
Genre:
ISBN: 9781737495604

Luke Valenti has never fit into his swaggering family of overbearing loudmouths. Even worse, the world is at war again and Uncle Sam has stamped his draft notice "4-F" - the ultimate rejection - because of a rare eye condition that has left Luke unable to see colors. So instead, he dreams of escaping Brooklyn for the beaches of Montauk. That is, until a stolen prop from The Maltese Falcon pitches him down a reluctant path to Hollywood. Luke is tasked with returning it to Warner Brothers, where Humphrey Bogart is about to embark on the movie that will launch his career into the stratosphere: Casablanca. But the production is chaotic. Bogie is desperately unhappy in his marriage. Ingrid Bergman feels lost and alone. The script is constantly rewritten, and the overbearing director hates that damned song. Nobody thinks this movie will amount to anything-except the guy who sees in black and white. Finally, Luke has found his way in. But studio stuntman Gus O'Farrell wants him out again: Luke has replaced him as the star's stand-in, and Gus is having none of it. Bogie warns Luke to keep his friends close and his enemies closer. It's great advice, but when a chance to reverse his 4-F status presents itself, Luke needs to learn that distinguishing friends from enemies can be a tricky business in a land where artifice blurs reality like murky shadows in a back alley. From the author of the Hollywood's Garden of Allah novels comes a story set against the making of one of the most beloved films of all time-and the beginning of a beautiful friendship.