Download or read book Howard Hughes and the Creation of Modern Hollywood written by Jeffrey Richardson and published by Fonthill Media. This book was released on 2019-07-04 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Hughes was an industrialist, aviator, and eccentric, but he was also the most important movie producer during the golden age of Hollywood. At a time when filmmaking was tightly controlled and highly formulaic, Hughes used his enormous wealth to challenge the dictates and restrictions that defined the motion picture industry. Tackling subjects that were explicitly forbidden, he pushed the boundaries of onscreen sex and violence. He pioneered production and marketing techniques that were revolutionary, including the multimillion-dollar blockbuster and the promotion of scandal. When Hughes became the first person to completely own a major Hollywood studio, he continued his maverick approach to filmmaking as a mogul. Most importantly, Hughes's role in the federal government's antitrust case against the industry led to the collapse of the entire studio system and the transformation of American cinema. Although his contributions are often overlooked, Hughes was instrumental in shaping the motion picture industry that exists today.

Download or read book Seduction written by Karina Longworth and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2018-11-13 with total page 735 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The host of the podcast You Must Remember This explores Hollywood’s golden age via the cinematic life of Howard Hughes and the women who encountered him. Howard Hughes’s reputation as a director and producer of films unusually defined by sex dovetails with his image as one of the most prolific womanizers of the twentieth century. The promoter of bombshell actresses such as Jean Harlow and Jane Russell, Hughes supposedly included among his off-screen conquests many of the most famous actresses of the era, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, Ginger Rogers, and Lana Turner. Some of the women in Hughes’s life were or became stars and others would stall out at a variety of points within the Hollywood hierarchy, but all found their professional lives marked by Hughes’s presence. In Seduction, Karina Longworth draws upon her own unparalleled expertise and an unpreceded trove of archival sources, diaries, and documents to produce a landmark—and wonderfully effervescent and gossipy—work of Hollywood history. It’s the story of what it was like to be a woman in Hollywood during the industry’s golden age, through the tales of actresses involved with Howard Hughes. This was the era not only of the actresses Hughes sought to dominate, but male stars such as Errol Flynn, Cary Grant, and Robert Mitchum; directors such as John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Preston Sturges; and studio chiefs like Irving Thalberg, Darryl Zanuck, and David O. Selznick—many of whom were complicit in the bedroom and boardroom exploitation that stifled and disappointed so many of the women who came to Los Angeles with hopes of celluloid triumph. In his films, Howard Hughes commodified male desire more blatantly than any mainstream filmmaker of his time and in turn helped produce an incredibly influential, sexualized image of womanhood that has impacted American culture ever since. As a result, the story of him and the women he encountered is about not only the murkier shades of golden-age Hollywood, but also the ripples that still slither across today’s entertainment industry and our culture in general. Praise for Seduction “Guaranteed to engross anyone with any interest at all in Hollywood, in movies, in #MeToo and in the never-ending story of men with power and women without.” —New York Times Book Review “The stories Longworth uncovers—about Katharine Hepburn and Jane Russell, yes, but also Ida Lupino and Faith Domergue and Anita Loos—are so rich, so compelling, that they urge you to question how much else in history has been lost within the swirling vortex of Great Men.” —Atlantic “A compelling and relevant must-read.” —Entertainment Weekly

Download or read book Spotlight on Journalism and Popular Heroism written by Caryn Coatney and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2024-09-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book offers fresh insights into the central role of journalism in shaping popular memories of community heroism in times of crisis. Further, it challenges familiar assumptions about Hollywood celebrity reporting and shows journalists’ active role in connecting popular culture icons with local communities. This book showcases fresh insights into how audiences collaborated and contributed to these widespread stories. The chapters included show how His Girl Friday, a Hollywood classic about tabloid newsroom stars, became a must-see movie for journalists, inspiring hundreds to choose the profession. Other appearances include Peter Fleming (James Bond creator Ian Fleming’s brother) and Norman Rockwell who helped create heroic characters in the news that became global symbols of community leadership. This offers a look at digital news activists who recreated heroic icons in social media to champion human rights in the Middle East. The historical and contemporary case studies offer insights into larger news trends that have contributed to the enduring popularity of these diverse, heroic identities in journalism. Presenting unique views of community, collaborative and interactive journalism, this book will be a valuable resource to students and scholars of journalism, communication, media and political history, as well as professionals already operating within the field of journalism.

Download or read book Howard Hughes written by Peter Harry Brown and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2004-11-03 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Hughes was one of the most amazing, intriguing, and controversial figures of the twentieth century. He was the billionaire head of a giant corporation, a genius inventor, an ace pilot, a matinee-idol-handsome playboy, a major movie maker who bedded a long list of Hollywood glamour queens, a sexual sultan with a harem of teenage consorts, a political insider with intimate ties to Watergate, a Las Vegas kingpin, and ultimately a bizarre recluse whose final years and shocking death were cloaked in macabre mystery. Now he is the subject of Martin Scorsese's biopic The Aviator. Few people have been able to penetrate the wall of secrecy that enshrouded this complex man. In this fascinating, revelation-packed biography, the full story of one of the most daring, enigmatic, and reclusive power brokers America has ever known is finally told.

Download or read book Ava Gardner written by Ava Gardner and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-07-02 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Ava Gardner was one of the most glamorous and famous stars in Hollywood in the 1940s and 1950s. Her list of films includes The Killers, Showboat and Mogambo, for which she was nominated for an Academy Award for best actress, and her co-stars included Clark Gable, Gregory Peck, Burt Lancaster, Humphrey Bogart, Charlton Heston, and Richard Burton - the A-list of male Hollywood stars. Married three times - to Mickey Rooney, Artie Shaw, and Frank Sinatra - the first two lasted only about a year each whilst her marriage to Sinatra lasted several. She had a long-running affair with Howard Hughes, and a briefer one with George C. Scott, among others. In Ava Gardner, she has much to say about her husbands and lovers, and some of her co-stars,all of whom get Gardner's unflinchingly honest treatment. Ava Gardner is irresistibly candid and surprising. She began the book because, as she told Evans, 'it's either write the book or sell the jewels and I'm kinda fond of the jewels.' At the time of their collaboration Gardner was living in London, where she had lived for decades, smoking and drinking heavily. Having suffered a stroke that damaged the left side of her face and her left arm she had trouble sleeping and was often depressed - the glamorous wardrobes replaced by grey. Her story could itself have been depressing except for her wit and wickedness, which are on full display in this book. This book tells the story of her life as she wanted to tell it. Ava Gardner is the autobiography that Ava Gardner began with writer Peter Evans in 1988. She never finished it and decided against publishing it because of its frankness. She later collaborated on a tamer autobiography, which was published at her death in 1990. After Gardner's death, her estate authorised the book to be published much as she and Evans had originally conceived it.

Download or read book Mean Moody Magnificent written by Christina Rice and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-06-15 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By the early 1950s, Jane Russell (1921–2011) should have been forgotten. Her career was launched on what is arguably the most notorious advertising campaign in cinema history, which invited filmgoers to see Howard Hughes's The Outlaw (1943) and to "tussle with Russell." Throughout the 1940s, she was nicknamed the "motionless picture actress" and had only three films in theaters. With such a slow, inauspicious start, most aspiring actresses would have given up or faded away. Instead, Russell carved out a place for herself in Hollywood and became a memorable and enduring star. Christina Rice offers the first biography of the actress and activist perhaps most well-known for her role in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes (1953). Despite the fact that her movie career was stalled for nearly a decade, Russell's filmography is respectable. She worked with some of Hollywood's most talented directors—including Howard Hawks, Raoul Walsh, Nicholas Ray, and Josef von Sternberg—and held her own alongside costars such as Marilyn Monroe, Robert Mitchum, Clark Gable, Vincent Price, and Bob Hope. She also learned how to fight back against Howard Hughes, her boss for more than thirty-five years, and his marketing campaigns that exploited her physical appearance. Beyond the screen, Rice reveals Russell as a complex and confident woman. She explores the star's years as a spokeswoman for Playtex as well as her deep faith and work as a Christian vocalist. Rice also discusses Russell's leadership and patronage of the WAIF foundation, which for many years served as the fundraising arm of the International Social Service (ISS) agency. WAIF raised hundreds of thousands of dollars, successfully lobbied Congress to change laws, and resulted in the adoption of tens of thousands of orphaned children. For Russell, the work she did to help unite families overshadowed any of her onscreen achievements. On the surface, Jane Russell seemed to live a charmed life, but Rice illuminates her darker moments and her personal struggles, including her empowered reactions to the controversies surrounding her films and her feelings about being portrayed as a sex symbol. This stunning first biography offers a fresh perspective on a star whose legacy endures not simply because she forged a notable film career, but also because she effectively used her celebrity to benefit others.

Download or read book Hollywood V Hard Core written by Jon Lewis and published by NYU Press. This book was released on 2002-09 with total page 389 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intriguing look at how the American film industry imposed the rating system upon itself to control competition from films independently produced and distributed.

Download or read book A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age written by Geraldine Biddle-Perry and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2020-12-10 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Over the last century, there has been a revolution in self-presentation and social attitudes towards hair. Developments in mass manufacturing, advances in chemical science and new understandings of bodies and minds have been embraced by new kinds of hairdressers and their clientele and embodied in styles that reflect shifting ideals of what it is to be and to look modern. The emergence of the ladies hairdressing salon, the rise of the celebrity stylist, the impact of Hollywood, an expanding mass media, and a new synergy between fashions in clothing and hairstyles have rippled out globally. Fashions in hair styles and their representation have taken on new meanings as a way of resisting dominant social structures, experimenting with social taboos, and expressing a modern sense of self. From the 1920s bob to the punk cut, hair has continued to be deeply involved in society's larger issues. Drawing on a wealth of visual, textual and object sources, and illustrated with 75 images, A Cultural History of Hair in the Modern Age presents essays that explore how politics, science, religion, fashion, beauty, the visual arts, and popular culture have reshaped modern hair and its significance as an agent of social change.

Download or read book The Notorious Ben Hecht written by Julien Gorbach and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 2019-03-15 with total page 504 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 2019 National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Biography. Ben Hecht had seen his share of death-row psychopaths, crooked ward bosses, and Capone gun thugs by the time he had come of age as a crime reporter in gangland Chicago. His grim experience with what he called “the soul of man” gave him a kind of uncanny foresight a decade later, when a loose cannon named Adolf Hitler began to rise to power in central Europe. In 1932, Hecht solidified his legend as "the Shakespeare of Hollywood" with his thriller Scarface, the Howard Hughes epic considered the gangster movie to end all gangster movies. But Hecht rebelled against his Jewish bosses at the movie studios when they refused to make films about the Nazi menace. Leveraging his talents and celebrity connections to orchestrate a spectacular one-man publicity campaign, he mobilized pressure on the Roosevelt administration for an Allied plan to rescue Europe’s Jews. Then after the war, Hecht became notorious, embracing the labels “gangster” and “terrorist” in partnering with the mobster Mickey Cohen to smuggle weapons to Palestine in the fight for a Jewish state. The Notorious Ben Hecht: Iconoclastic Writer and Militant Zionist is a biography of a great twentieth-century writer that treats his activism during the 1940s as the central drama of his life. It details the story of how Hecht earned admiration as a humanitarian and vilification as an extremist at this pivotal moment in history, about the origins of his beliefs in his varied experiences in American media, and about the consequences. Who else but Hecht could have drawn the admiration of Ezra Pound, clowned around with Harpo Marx, written Notorious and Spellbound with Alfred Hitchcock, launched Marlon Brando’s career, ghosted Marilyn Monroe’s memoirs, hosted Jack Kerouac and Salvador Dalí on his television talk show, and plotted revolt with Menachem Begin? Any lover of modern history who follows this journey through the worlds of gangsters, reporters, Jazz Age artists, Hollywood stars, movie moguls, political radicals, and guerrilla fighters will never look at the twentieth century in the same way again.

Download or read book Howard Hawks written by Todd McCarthy and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 1158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first major biography of one of Old Hollywood’s greatest directors. Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Howard Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks’s greatest creation may have been himself. As The Atlantic Monthly noted, “Todd McCarthy. . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work.” “A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed.” —The New York Times Book Review “Hawks’s life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy’s wise and funny Howard Hawks.” —The Wall Street Journal “Excellent. . . . A respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood’s most versatile director.” —Newsweek

Download or read book The Taking of K 129 written by Josh Dean and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2018-09-25 with total page 450 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incredible true tale of espionage and engineering set at the height of the Cold War--a mix between The Hunt for Red October and Argo--about how the CIA, the U.S. Navy, and America's most eccentric mogul spent six years and nearly a billion dollars to steal the nuclear-armed Soviet submarine K-129 after it had sunk to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean; all while the Russians were watching. In the early hours of February 25, 1968, a Russian submarine armed with three nuclear ballistic missiles set sail from its base in Siberia on a routine combat patrol to Hawaii. Then it vanished. As the Soviet Navy searched in vain for the lost vessel, a small, highly classified American operation using sophisticated deep-sea spy equipment found it--wrecked on the sea floor at a depth of 16,800 feet, far beyond the capabilities of any salvage that existed. But the potential intelligence assets onboard the ship--the nuclear warheads, battle orders, and cryptological machines--justified going to extreme lengths to find a way to raise the submarine. So began Project Azorian, a top secret mission that took six years, cost an estimated $800 million, and would become the largest and most daring covert operation in CIA history. After the U.S. Navy declared retrieving the sub "impossible," the mission fell to the CIA's burgeoning Directorate of Science and Technology, the little-known division responsible for the legendary U-2 and SR-71 Blackbird spy planes. Working with Global Marine Systems, the country's foremost maker of exotic, deep-sea drilling vessels, the CIA commissioned the most expensive ship ever built and told the world that it belonged to the reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes, who would use the mammoth ship to mine rare minerals from the ocean floor. In reality, a complex network of spies, scientists, and politicians attempted a project even crazier than Hughes's reputation: raising the sub directly under the watchful eyes of the Russians.

Download or read book The Strange Medical Saga of Howard Hughes written by Forest Tennant and published by . This book was released on 2021-06-25 with total page 211 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Reconstructing American Historical Cinema written by J.E. Smyth and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-10-27 with total page 464 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J. E. Smyth dramatically departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, Smyth argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. Her volume is a major reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history. Rather than emphasizing the divide between American historical cinema and historical writing, Smyth explores the continuities between Hollywood films and history written during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from Carl Becker's famous "Everyman His Own Historian" to Howard Hughes's Scarface to Margaret Mitchell and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind. Hollywood's popular and often controversial cycle of historical films from 1931 to 1942 confronted issues as diverse as frontier racism and women's experiences in the nineteenth-century South, the decline of American society following the First World War, the rise of Al Capone, and the tragic history of Hollywood's silent era. Looking at rarely discussed archival material, Smyth focuses on classical Hollywood filmmakers' adaptation and scripting of traditional historical discourse and their critical revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema uncovers Hollywood's diverse and conflicted attitudes toward American history. This text is a fundamental challenge the prevailing scholarship in film, history, and cultural studies.

Download or read book Esoteric Hollywood II written by Jay Dyer and published by TrineDay. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 539 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Like no other book before it, this work delves into the deep, dark, and mysterious undertones hidden in Tinsel town's biggest films. Esoteric Hollywood is a game-changer in an arena of tabloid-populated titles. After years of scholarly research, Jay Dyer has compiled his most read essays, combining philosophy, comparative religion, symbolism, and geopolitics and their connections to film. Readers will watch movies with new eyes, able to decipher on their own, as the secret meanings of cinema are unveiled.

Download or read book Contemporary Hollywood Cinema written by STEVE NEALE and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-04-15 with total page 361 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A comprehensive overview of the film industry in Hollywood today, Contemporary Hollywood Cinema brings together leading international cinema scholars to explore the technology, institutions, film makers and movies of contemporary American film making.

Download or read book Hollywood Westerns and American Myth written by Robert B. Pippin and published by Yale University Press. This book was released on 2010-06-22 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this pathbreaking book one of America’s most distinguished philosophers brilliantly explores the status and authority of law and the nature of political allegiance through close readings of three classic Hollywood Westerns: Howard Hawks’ Red River and John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance and The Searchers.Robert Pippin treats these films as sophisticated mythic accounts of a key moment in American history: its “second founding,” or the western expansion. His central question concerns how these films explore classical problems in political psychology, especially how the virtues of a commercial republic gained some hold on individuals at a time when the heroic and martial virtues were so important. Westerns, Pippin shows, raise central questions about the difference between private violence and revenge and the state’s claim to a legitimate monopoly on violence, and they show how these claims come to be experienced and accepted or rejected.Pippin’s account of the best Hollywood Westerns brings this genre into the center of the tradition of political thought, and his readings raise questions about political psychology and the political passions that have been neglected in contemporary political thought in favor of a limited concern with the question of legitimacy.

Download or read book Howard Hughes written by Howard Hughes and published by Blake Publishing. This book was released on 2008 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "...Howard Hughes never wrote his autobiography...what you are about to read is actually a hoax...Irving was already a best-selling author when, in late 1970, he hit upon the idea of faking the autobiography of Howard Hughes..."--Foreword.