Download or read book Clown Prince of Hollywood written by Bob Thomas and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1990 with total page 362 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the life and career of the influential producer, shares the impressions of those who worked with him, and surveys Warner Brothers films.
Download or read book The Clown Prince of Wanderlust written by Douglass F. Parkhirst and published by Samuel French, Inc.. This book was released on 1960 with total page 60 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Jean Negulesco written by Michelangelo Capua and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-09-15 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Originally a successful painter from Romania, Jean Negulesco worked in Hollywood first as an art director, then as a second unit director. He was later hired as a director by various studios--mostly for ballet and musical shorts--before being assigned to a number of commercially successful films. During his 30-year career, he worked in several European countries yet it was in the U.S. he achieved his greatest success, with Warner Brothers and 20th Century Fox. Dubbed "The Prince of Melodrama" by critics, he directed films of all genres, working with stars like Joan Crawford, John Garfield, Marilyn Monroe, Lauren Bacall, Bette Davis, Richard Burton, Alec Guinness, Fred Astaire and many others. Negulesco was nominated for Best Director by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in 1948 for Johnny Belinda--now considered a classic, along with his The Mask of Dimitrios (1944), Humoresque (1946), How to Marry a Millionaire (1953) and Three Coins in the Fountain (1954). This book--the first on him since his 1984 autobiography--covers his extraordinary life and career, with extensive analyses of his films.
Download or read book The Warner Brothers written by Chris Yogerst and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2023-09-05 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: One of the oldest and most recognizable studios in Hollywood, Warner Bros. is considered a juggernaut of the entertainment industry. Since its formation in the early twentieth century, the studio has been a constant presence in cinema history, responsible for the creation of acclaimed films, blockbuster brands, and iconic superstars. These days, the studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment as we know it. In The Warner Brothers, Chris Yogerst follows the siblings from their family's humble origins in Poland, through their young adulthood in the American Midwest, to the height of fame and fortune in Hollywood. With unwavering resolve, the brothers soldiered on against the backdrop of an America reeling from the aftereffects of domestic and global conflict. The Great Depression would not sink the brothers, who churned out competitive films that engaged audiences and kept their operations afloat—and even expanding. During World War II, they used their platform to push beyond the limits of the Production Code and create important films about real-world issues, openly criticizing radicalism and the evils of the Nazi regime. At every major cultural turning point in their lifetime, the Warners held a front-row seat. Paying close attention to the brothers' identities as cultural and economic outsiders, Yogerst chronicles how the Warners built a global filmmaking powerhouse. Equal parts family history and cinematic journey, The Warner Brothers is an empowering story of the American dream and the legacy four brothers left behind for generations of filmmakers and film lovers to come.
Download or read book Lion of Hollywood written by Scott Eyman and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2008-06-23 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lion of Hollywood is the definitive biography of Louis B. Mayer, the chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—MGM—the biggest and most successful film studio of Hollywood’s Golden Age. An immigrant from tsarist Russia, Mayer began in the film business as an exhibitor but soon migrated to where the action and the power were—Hollywood. Through sheer force of energy and foresight, he turned his own modest studio into MGM, where he became the most powerful man in Hollywood, bending the film business to his will. He made great films, including the fabulous MGM musicals, and he made great stars: Garbo, Gable, Garland, and dozens of others. Through the enormously successful Andy Hardy series, Mayer purveyed family values to America. At the same time, he used his influence to place a federal judge on the bench, pay off local officials, cover up his stars’ indiscretions and, on occasion, arrange marriages for gay stars. Mayer rose from his impoverished childhood to become at one time the highest-paid executive in America. Despite his power and money, Mayer suffered some significant losses. He had two daughters: Irene, who married David O. Selznick, and Edie, who married producer William Goetz. He would eventually fall out with Edie and divorce his wife, Margaret, ending his life alienated from most of his family. His chief assistant, Irving Thalberg, was his closest business partner, but they quarreled frequently, and Thalberg’s early death left Mayer without his most trusted associate. As Mayer grew older, his politics became increasingly reactionary, and he found himself politically isolated within Hollywood’s small conservative community. Lion of Hollywood is a three-dimensional biography of a figure often caricatured and vilified as the paragon of the studio system. Mayer could be arrogant and tyrannical, but under his leadership MGM made such unforgettable films as The Big Parade, Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and An American in Paris. Film historian Scott Eyman interviewed more than 150 people and researched some previously unavailable archives to write this major new biography of a man who defined an industry and an era.
Download or read book Charles the Clown Prince written by Simon Regan and published by . This book was released on 1978 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Thalberg written by Bob Thomas and published by Phoenix Books. This book was released on 2000-09-16 with total page 471 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than seventy-five years after his death, Irving Thalberg remains a legendary Hollywood figure. In this definitive biography, his legend comes to life -- from his beginnings as the "Boy Wonder of Hollywood", to the creation with Louis B. Mayer of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, to his tragic death at the age of thirty-seven. With his remarkable talent for developing stars and doctoring scripts, this architect of the American film created some of America's best-loved movies: Ben-Hur, Mutiny on the Bounty, A Night at the Opera, Grand Hotel, Romeo and Juliet, The Good Earth, Camille. His genius has made his name a legend in the land of legends.
Download or read book Lou s on First written by Chris Costello and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 1982-12-15 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This intimate portrait of Lou Costello (1906-1959) offers a rare look at one of the most talented comedians of all time. Starting in the 1930s, Costello attained enormous fame touring the burlesque circuits with straight man Bud Abbott (1895-1974). Their live skits (including "Who's on First?"), radio programs, and films such as One Night in the Tropics, Buck Privates, Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein, and In the Navy made comic history. Behind the scenes, however, Costello faced numerous crises: a bout with rheumatic fever that left him bedridden for months, the drowning death of his young son, and constant haggles with Universal Studios over its reluctance to adequately finance productions of Abbot and Costello films. Lou's on First goes beyond Costello's clownish persona to explore his Pagliacci nature: the private demons behind the happy public face, the heartbreaking moments in an otherwise storybook marriage, the business ventures soured by unscrupulous managers, and the true nature of the breakup of his twenty-one-year partnership with Bud Abbott.
Download or read book Cagney written by John McCabe and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 701 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: John McCabe's participation in the writing of James Cagney's autobiography, the many years of friendship that followed, and an intense period of interview and discussion in preparation for a musical comedy based on Cagney's life--a show that never saw the light of day--make him Cagney's ideal biographer. And, indeed, he has written a searching chronicle of this major actor's life and career, packed with history and anecdote, and profusely illustrated. Cagney came from a poor Irish-American New York family but once he found his métier as an actor, it was not long before he was recognized as a brilliantly energetic and powerful phenomenon. After the tremendous impact of Public Enemy--in which he notoriously pushed half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face--he was typecast as a gangster because of the terrifying violence that seemed to be pent up within him. Years of pitched battle with Warner Brothers finally liberated him from those roles, and he went on to star in such triumphs as the musicals Yankee Doodle Dandy (winning the 1942 Oscar for best actor) and Love Me or Leave Me. Even so, one of his greatest later roles involved a return to crime--as the psychopathic killer in the terrifying White Heat. He retired from films in 1961 after making Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, only to return twenty years later for Ragtime. But however much Cagney personified violence and explosive energy on the screen, in life he was a quiet, introspective, and deeply private man, a poet, painter, and environmentalist, whose marriage to his early vaudeville partner was famously loyal and happy. His story is one of the few Hollywood biographies that reflect a fulfilled life as well as a spectacular career.
Download or read book Zachary Scott written by Ronald L. Davis and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2009-09-28 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout the 1940s, Zachary Scott (1914-1965) was the model for sophisticated, debonair villains in American film. His best-known roles include a mysterious criminal in The Mask of Dimitrios and the indolent husband in Mildred Pierce. He garnered further acclaim for his portrayal of villains in Her Kind of Man, Danger Signal, and South of St. Louis. Although he earned critical praise for his performance as a heroic tenant farmer in Jean Renoir's The Southerner, Scott never quite escaped typecasting. In Zachary Scott: Hollywood's Sophisticated Cad, Ronald L. Davis writes an appealing biography of the film star. Scott grew up in privileged circumstances—his father was a distinguished physician; his grandfather was a pioneer cattle baron—and was expected to follow his father into medical practice. Instead, Scott began to pursue a career in theater while studying at the University of Texas and subsequently worked his way on a ship to England to pursue acting. Upon his return to America, he began to look for work in New York. Excelling on stage and screen throughout the 1940s, Scott seemed destined for stardom. By the end of 1950, however, he had suffered through a turbulent divorce. A rafting accident left him badly shaken and clinically depressed. His frustration over his roles mounted, and he began to drink heavily. He remarried and spent the rest of his career concentrating on stage and television work. Although Scott continued to perform occasionally in films, he never reclaimed the level of stardom that he had in the mid-1940s. To reconstruct Scott's life, Davis uses interviews with Scott and colleagues and reviews, articles, and archival correspondence from the Scott papers at the University of Texas and from the Warner Brothers Archives. The result is a portrait of a talented actor who was rarely allowed to show his versatility on the screen.
Download or read book Giant written by Don Graham and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2018-04-10 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Featuring James Dean, Rock Hudson, and Elizabeth Taylor, Giant is an epic film of fame and materialism, based around the discovery of oil at Spindletop and the establishment of the King Ranch of south Texas. Isolating his star cast in the wilds of West Texas, director George Stevens brought together a volatile mix of egos, insecurities, sexual proclivities, and talent. Stevens knew he was overwhelmed with Hudson's promiscuity, Taylor's high diva-dom, and Dean's egotistical eccentricity. Yet he coaxed performances out of them that made cinematic history, winning Stevens the Academy Award for Best Director and garnering nine other nominations, including a nomination for Best Actor for James Dean, who died before the film was finished. Don Graham chronicles the stories of Stevens, whose trauma in World War II intensified his ambition to make films that would tell the story of America; Edna Ferber, a considerable literary celebrity, who meets her match in the imposing Robert Kleberg, proprietor of the vast King Ranch; and Glenn McCarthy, an American oil tycoon; and Errol Flynn lookalike with a taste for Hollywood. Drawing on archival sources Graham's Giant is a comprehensive depiction of the film's production showing readers how reality became fiction and fiction became cinema. "--Adapted from dust jacket.
Download or read book Billy the Kid on Film 1911 2012 written by Johnny D. Boggs and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2013-10-04 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive filmography, this book is composed of lengthy entries on about 75 films depicting legendary New Mexico outlaw Billy the Kid--from the lost Billy the Kid (1911) to the blockbuster Young Guns (1988) to the direct-to-video 1313: Billy the Kid(2012) and everything in between. Each entry gives a synopsis, cast and credits, critical reception, and a discussion of the events of the films compared to the historical record. Among the entries are made-for-TV and direct-to-video films, foreign movies, and continuing television series in which Billy the Kid made an appearance.
Download or read book The Dream Endures written by Kevin Starr and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2002-11-28 with total page 513 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come. Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle. The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone." Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.
Download or read book Riviera Dreaming written by Maureen Emerson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1926 Barry Dierks, a young American architect, arrived in Paris and fell in love with France... With his partner, an ex-officer in the British Army, he built a white, flat-roofed Modernist masterpiece that rested on the rocks below the Esterel, with views across the Mediterranean. They called it Le Trident. From the moment it was built, it captivated the Riviera. As commissions for more villas flooded in, Barry Dierks and Eric Sawyer, "those two charmers", flourished at the heart of Riviera society. Over the years, Dierks would design and build over 70 of the Riviera's most recognisable villas for clients ranging from Somerset Maugham's Villa Mauresque and Jack Warner's Villa Aujourd'hui to the Marquess of Cholmondeley's Villa Le Roc, and Maxine Elliott's Chateau de l'Horizon, later the home of Aly Khan and Rita Hayworth. Riviera Dreaming tells the dazzling story of the lives, loves and adventures that played out behind the walls of these glamorous houses and provides an unparalleled portrait of life on the Cote d'Azur at the height of the Jazz Age.
Download or read book The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry written by Anthony Slide and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-02-25 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry is a completely revised and updated edition of Anthony Slide's The American Film Industry, originally published in 1986 and recipient of the American Library Association's Outstanding Reference Book award for that year. More than 200 new entries have been added, and all original entries have been updated; each entry is followed by a short bibliography. As its predecessor, the new dictionary is unique in that it is not a who's who of the industry, but rather a what's what: a dictionary of producing and releasing companies, technical innovations, industry terms, studios, genres, color systems, institutions and organizations, etc. More than 800 entries include everything from Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to Zoom Lens, from Astoria Studios to Zoetrope. Outstanding Reference Source - American Library Association
Download or read book A Dictionary of Cinema Quotations from Filmmakers and Critics written by Stephen M. Ringler and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2008-04-19 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The cinema isn’t a slice of life, it’s a slice of cake”—Alfred Hitchcock. “If you make a popular movie, you start to think where have I failed?”—Woody Allen. “A film is the world in an hour and a half”—Jean-Luc Godard. “I think you have to be slightly psychopathic to make movies”—David Cronenberg. This compendium contains more than 3,400 quotations from filmmakers and critics discussing their craft. About 1,850 film people are included—Buñuel, Capra, Chaplin, Disney, Fellini, Fitzgerald, Griffith, Kael, Kurasawa, Pathé, Sarris, Schwarzenegger, Spielberg, Waters and Welles among them. The quotations are arranged under 31 topics such as acting, animation, audience, budget, casting, critics, costume design, directing, locations, reviews, screenwriting, special effects and stardom. Indexing by filmmakers (or critics), by film titles and by narrow subjects provides a rich array of points of access.
