Download or read book Hit and Run written by Nancy Griffin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-01-12 with total page 500 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hit and Run tells the improbable and often hilarious story of how two Hollywood film packagers went on a campaign to reinvent themselves as studio executives -- at Sony's expense. Veteran reporters Nancy Griffin and Kim Masters chronicle the rise of Jon Peters, a former hairdresser, seventh-grade dropout, and juvenile delinquent, and his soulless soul mate, Peter Guber -- and all the sex, drugs, and fistfights along the way. It is the story of the ultimate Hollywood con job and the standard by which every subsequent business blunder has been measured. Hit and Run delivers rock-solid business reporting liberally laced with inside gossip and outrageous scandal -- plus a new afterword bringing us up to date on the latest fallout from the Guber-Peters legacy.
Download or read book Hollywood in the New Millennium written by Tino Balio and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 317 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood is facing unprecedented challenges – and is changing rapidly and radically as a result. In this major new study of the contemporary film industry, leading film historian Tino Balio explores the impact of the Internet, declining DVD sales and changing consumer spending habits on the way Hollywood conducts its business. Today, the major studios play an insignificant role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents and have fled to safety, relying on big-budget tentpoles, franchises and family films to reach their target audiences. Comprehensive, compelling and filled with engaging case studies (TimeWarner, DreamWorks SKG, Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, IMAX, Netflix, Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate and Sundance), Hollywood in the New Millennium is a must-read for all students of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, communication studies, and radio and television.
Download or read book Myrna Loy written by Emily W. Leider and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2011 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the beginning, Myrna Loy's screen image conjured mystery, a sense of something withheld. This first ever biography of the wry and sophisticated actress, best known for her role as Nora Charles in The Thin Man, offers an unprecedented picture of her life and a career that spanned six decades. Opening with Loy's rough-and-tumble upbringing in Montana, the book takes us to Los Angeles from the 1920s, through the thirties, when Loy became a top box office draw, and to her robust post-World War II career. Throughout, Emily W. Leider illuminates the actress's friendships with luminaries such as Cary Grant, Clark Gable, and Joan Crawford and her collaborations with the likes of John Barrymore, David O. Selznick, Sam Goldwyn, and William Wyler, among many others. This biography offers a fascinating slice of studio era history and gives us the first full picture of a woman who has often been overlooked.--From publisher description.
Download or read book The Big Picture written by Edward Jay Epstein and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2006-01-10 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this unprecedented, all-encompassing, and thoroughly entertaining account of the movie business, acclaimed writer Edward Jay Epstein reveals the real magic behind moviemaking: how the studios make their money. Epstein shows that in Hollywood, the only art that matters is the art of the deal: Major films turn huge profits not from the movies themselves but through myriad other enterprises, from video-game spin-offs and soundtracks to fast-food tie-ins, and even theme-park rides. The studios may compete for stars and Oscars, but their corporate parents view wth one another in less glamorous markets such as cable, home video, and pay-TV. Money, though, is only a small part of the Hollywood story; the social and political milieus–power, prestige, and status–tell the rest. Alongside its remarkable financial revelations and incisive profiles of the pioneers who helped build Hollywood, The Big Picture is filled with eye-opening insider stories. If you are interested in Hollywood today and the complex and fascinating way it has evolved in order to survive, you haven’ t seen the big picture until you’ve read The Big Picture.
Download or read book Hit and Run written by Nancy C. Griffin and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 479 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Gross written by Peter Bart and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2000-02-21 with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A look at the new Hollywood by the longtime editor-in-chief of Variety. The ultimate insider follows the winners and losers of Hollywood's 1998 Summer Season. Welcome to Hollywood, where gambling is a way of life -- and the wagers run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. But in the summer of 1998 all bets are off. The man who knows every mover, shaker, and faker explains why no one can explain the surprising season. Peter Bart goes behind the scenes like no one can to track the summer movies from development through release. He will reveal why "Godzilla" could never live up to its hype; how intense rivals Robert Redford and Warren Beatty saw their worst nightmares come true when they went head-to-head at the box office; how Jim Carrey's "Truman Show" stole the show; and how Steven Spielberg regained his title of king of the summer in a season where sleepers upset would-be blockbusters. While asteroid movies were colliding with each other, a billionaire newcomer was making superhuman attempts to resuscitate a moribund Universal Studios. With interviews from studio executives, producers, directors, agents, and stars, Peter Bart unveils the winners and losers in the new Hollywood, where creativity and commerce hang in a precarious balance.
Download or read book When Hollywood Had a King written by Connie Bruck and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2004-07-13 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In When Hollywood Had a King, the distinguished journalist Connie Bruck tells the sweeping story of MCA and its brilliant leader, a man who transformed the entertainment industry— businessman, politician, tactician, and visionary Lew Wasserman. The Music Corporation of America was founded in Chicago in 1924 by Dr. Jules Stein, an ophthalmologist with a gift for booking bands. Twelve years later, Stein moved his operations west to Beverly Hills and hired Lew Wasserman. From his meager beginnings as a movie-theater usher in Cleveland, Wasserman ultimately ascended to the post of president of MCA, and the company became the most powerful force in Hollywood, regarded with a mixture of fear and awe. In his signature black suit and black knit tie, Was-serman took Hollywood by storm. He shifted the balance of power from the studios—which had seven-year contractual strangleholds on the stars—to the talent, who became profit partners. When an antitrust suit forced MCA’s evolution from talent agency to film- and television-production company, it was Wasserman who parlayed the control of a wide variety of entertainment and media products into a new type of Hollywood power base. There was only Washington left to conquer, and conquer it Wasserman did, quietly brokering alliances with Democratic and Republican administrations alike. That Wasserman’s reach extended from the underworld to the White House only added to his mystique. Among his friends were Teamster boss Jimmy Hoffa, mob lawyer Sidney Korshak, and gangster Moe Dalitz—along with Presidents Johnson, Clinton, and especially Reagan, who enjoyed a particularly close and mutually beneficial relationship with Wasserman. He was equally intimate with Hollywood royalty, from Bette Davis and Jimmy Stewart to Steven Spielberg, who began his career at MCA and once described Wasserman’s eyeglasses as looking like two giant movie screens. The history of MCA is really the history of a revolution. Lew Wasserman ushered in the Hollywood we know today. He is the link between the old-school moguls with their ironclad studio contracts and the new industry defined by multimedia conglomerates, power agents, multimillionaire actors, and profit sharing. In the hands of Connie Bruck, the story of Lew Wasserman’s rise to power takes on an almost Shakespearean scope. When Hollywood Had a King reveals the industry’s greatest untold story: how a stealthy, enterprising power broker became, for a time, Tinseltown’s absolute monarch.
Download or read book Hollywood Husbands written by Jackie Collins and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1990-05 with total page 566 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Hollywood Wives, " with its ten-million copy sales and its spectacular success as a television mini-series, left Jackie Collins' devoted audience avid for the other side of the story.
Download or read book The Last Word written by Justin Gautreau and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2020-10-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.
Download or read book The Big Picture written by Ben Fritz and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2018 with total page 309 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A chronicle of the massive transformation in Hollywood since the turn of the century and the huge changes yet to come, drawing on interviews with key players, as well as documents from the 2014 Sony hack
Download or read book Sleepless in Hollywood written by Lynda Obst and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-06-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The veteran producer and author of the bestseller Hello, He Lied takes a witty and critical look at the new Hollywood. Over the past decade, producer Lynda Obst gradually realized she was working in a Hollywood that was undergoing a drastic transformation. The industry where everything had once been familiar to her was suddenly disturbingly strange. Combining her own industry experience and interviews with the brightest minds in the business, Obst explains what has stalled the vast moviemaking machine. The calamitous DVD collapse helped usher in what she calls the New Abnormal (because Hollywood was never normal to begin with), where studios are now heavily dependent on foreign markets for profit, a situation which directly impacts the kind of entertainment we get to see. Can comedy survive if they don’t get our jokes in Seoul or allow them in China? Why are studios making fewer movies than ever—and why are they bigger, more expensive and nearly always sequels or recycled ideas? Obst writes with affection, regret, humor and hope, and her behind-the-scenes vantage point allows her to explore what has changed in Hollywood like no one else has. This candid, insightful account explains what has happened to the movie business and explores whether it’ll ever return to making the movies we love—the classics that make us laugh or cry, or that we just can’t stop talking about.
Download or read book Hollywood s Lost Backlot written by Steven Bingen and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-12-01 with total page 265 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hollywood is a transitory place. Stars and studios rise and fall. Genres and careers wax and wane. Movies and movie moguls and movie makers and movie palaces are acclaimed and patronized and loved and beloved, and then forgotten. And yet… And yet one place in Southern California, built in the 1920s by (allegedly murdered) producer Thomas Ince, acquired by Cecil B. DeMille, now occupied by Amazon.com, has been the home for hundreds of the most iconic and legendary films and television shows in the world for a remarkable and star-studded fifty years. This bizarre, magical place was the location for Tara in Gone with The Wind, the home of King Kong and Superman, of Tarzan and Batman, of the Green Hornet, of Elliot Ness, of Barney Fife, of Tarzan, of Rebecca, of Citizen Kane, of Hogan’s Heroes and Gomer Pyle, of Lasse, of A Star is Born and Star Trek, and at least twice, of Jesus Christ. For decades, every conceivable star in Hollywood, from Clark Gable to Warren Beatty, worked and loved and gave indelible performances on the site. And yet, today, it is completely forgotten. Pretty much anyone alive today, from college professors to longshoremen, have probably heard of Paramount and of MGM, of Warner Bros. and of Universal, and of Disney and Fox and Columbia, but the place where many of these studio’s beloved classics were minted is today as mysterious and unknowable as the sphinx. Hollywood’s Lost Backlot: 40 Acres of Glamour and Mystery will, for the first time ever, unwind the colorful and convoluted threads that make for the tale of one of the most influential and photographed places in the world. A place which most have visited, at least on screen, and which has contributed significantly and unexpectedly to the world’s popular culture, and yet which few people today, paradoxically, have ever heard of.
Download or read book Starmaker written by Milan Hain and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2023-08-07 with total page 277 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: David O. Selznick (1902–1965) was one of the most prominent film producers of the Hollywood studio era, responsible for such artistic and commercial triumphs as King Kong, David Copperfield, Anna Karenina, A Star Is Born, Gone with the Wind, Rebecca, Spellbound, and The Third Man. However, film production was not his only domain. Starting in the late 1930s, he built an impressive stable of stars within his own independent company, including Ingrid Bergman, Vivien Leigh, Joan Fontaine, Jennifer Jones, and Gregory Peck. In Starmaker: David O. Selznick and the Production of Stars in the Hollywood Studio System, author Milan Hain reveals the mechanisms by which Selznick and his collaborators discovered and promoted new stars and describes how these personalities were marketed, whether for financial gain or symbolic recognition and prestige. Using a wide range of archival materials, the book significantly complements and reshapes our understanding of Selznick’s celebrated career by focusing on heretofore neglected aspects of his creative and business activities. It also sheds light on the US film industry during the Golden Age of Hollywood studios and in the postwar period when the established order began to break down. By structuring the book around Selznick and his role as a starmaker, Hain demonstrates that star production and development in the Hollywood studio system was a highly organized and systematic activity, though the respective strategies and procedures were often hidden from the public eye.
Download or read book Portraits from Hollywood s Golden Age of Glamour written by Colin Slater and The Hollywood Photo Archive and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-09-17 with total page 160 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In photographs only seen briefly as part of studio press kits distributed upon release of a new film, these long-lost stills of Hollywood’s leading ladies have been reverently rendered into color portraits that not only evoke a treasured past of beauty and glamour, but also seem comfortably familiar to the contemporary eye. These posed photos have been chosen not only for their bespoke sensuality, but also for how the discrete addition of color has elevated a black and white still to a kind of artistic grace, prompting rediscovery of classic Hollywood’s most beautiful women. Actresses portrayed here include Julie Andrews, Anna Mae Wong, Audrey Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, Carroll Baker, Joan Crawford, Marion Davies, Angie Dickinson, Eva Marie Saint, and many others.
Download or read book Me Cheeta written by Cheeta and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2009-03-03 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The grandaddy of all Hollywood animals tells his remarkable true life story from the Golden Age of the Silver Screen. Cheeta the Chimp, star of the Tarzan films, bares all--as only he can. b&w photo insert.
Download or read book Beneath Mulholland written by David Thomson and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1997 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "It's time David Thomson be generally recognized not just as one of our sharpest writers-on-film, but as one of our wisest and best writers, period." --Film Comment "The most obvious contender for the best film critic in the world." --The Independent (London) David Thomson is at his incomparable best in this stunning collection of essays on Hollywood films--their stars and the illusions they create. He explores a sort of twilight zone where film actors and the characters they play become part of our reality, as living beings and as ghosts, residing on or buried beneath Mulholland Drive, or wandering among us. Like all of Thomson's writing on the movies, Beneath Mulholland is rich in its understanding of Hollywood, laced with irony, thoroughly provocative and brilliantly creative. There is also a steady fascination with love, sex, death, voyeurism, money and glory, all the preoccupations of Los Angeles--or of that movie L.A. whose initials, Thomson says, stand for Lies Allowed. He writes about James Stewart in Vertigo, Jack Nicholson in Chinatown, about Cary Grant ("Having fun, perched somewhere between skill and exhilaration, Grant is both the deft director of the circus and a kid in love with the show"), Greta Garbo ("She knows that she is a latent force that works in the minds of audiences she will never meet") and about stardom in general: "The star is adored but not liked: that is the consequence of a religious respect that enjoys no ordinary relations with the object of its desire." Entering another dimension, we meet James Dean at age 50--he survived the car crash--and discover how his career developed (and how it affected Paul Newman's). We see whathappened to Tony Manero (John Travolta) after Saturday Night Fever ended and how Susie Diamond (Michelle Pfeiffer) moved on when The Fabulous Baker Boys was over. We are given a rollicking but instructive version of how Sony learned to live and die in Hollywood. We learn the 20 Things People Like to Forget About Hollywood ("All People in Hollywood Are Dysfunctional" is the first). And there is insight into How People Die in Movies--the empire of bang bang. Dazzling in its range, its style and its wisdom, Beneath Mulholland immeasurably enlarges and enriches our already undying memories of, and pleasure in, the Hollywood movie.
Download or read book Hollywood in the Information Age written by Janet Wasko and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2013-06-26 with total page 318 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a major new assessment of the American movie industry in the 1990's, focusing on the development of new communication technologies such as cable and home video and examining their impact on the production and distribution of motion pictures.
