Download or read book Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling written by Mark Minett and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2021 with total page 401 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H, Brewster McCloud, McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Images, The Long Goodbye, Thieves Like Us, California Split, and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema. Its findings and approach hold important implications for the study of cinematic authorship. Largely avoiding thematic exegesis, it employs an historical poetics approach, robust functionalist frameworks, archival research, and formal and statistical analysis to demystify the essential features of the standard account of Altman's filmmaking history and profile-lax narrative form, heavy reliance on the zoom, sound design replete with overlapping dialogue, improvisational infidelity to the screenplay, and a desire to subvert based in his time in the training grounds of industrial filmmaking and filmed television. The book provides a clear example of how a filmmaker might work collaboratively and pragmatically within and across media institutions to elaborate upon their sanctioned practices and aims. We misunderstand Altman's work, and the creative work of Hollywood filmmakers in general, when we insist on describing innovation as opposition to institutional norms and on describing those norms as simply assimilating innovation.
Download or read book Expanding the Standard Story written by and published by . This book was released on 2016 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation seeks to provide a more accurate understanding of director Robert Altman's early 1970s films, from M*A*S*H (1970) to Nashville (1975), and in doing so attempts to clarify the disputed relationship between Altman, whose work is often characterized as oppositional art cinema, and the norms of classical Hollywood filmmaking. To address this question the dissertation applies a methodology that requires close analysis of the moment-by-moment details of Altman's films that in places utilizes a quantitative approach. This provides a remedy to scholarship and critical work on Altman's films of the early 1970s that tends to claim too much while describing too little. The dissertation also relies on archival resources to support its account, including production and pre-production documents. This approach is employed within the larger project of historical poetics and in coordination with a problem/solution model of artistic endeavor, in which filmmakers act as rational agents setting goals and pursuing strategies meant to effect definable aims. The dissertation's first four chapters focus on key aspects of Altman's biographical legend: his approach to narrative, his use of the zoom, his employment of overlapping dialogue, and his use, or misuse, of the pre-production script. This reexamination finds that rather than characterizing Altman's filmmaking approach as oppositional art cinema, it is best understood as elaborative and amplificatory, expanding upon classical Hollywood storytelling practices in the service of authorially expressive, realist, and aesthetic motivations. The final chapter re-describes Altman's time in the "training grounds" of industrial filmmaking and filmed television prior to his move to feature filmmaking in the late 1960s. In doing so it employs the methodology of the previous chapters while also finding evidence to support and extend their findings. Altman's early career shows how a binary opposition between institutional norms and radical opposition fails to capture the manner in which maverick auteurs might shift the dominant filmmaking paradigm through the accumulation of more incremental, and perhaps more sustainable, innovations.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Daniel O'Brien and published by Batsford. This book was released on 1995 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Mitchell Zuckoff and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2009-10-20 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Robert Altman—visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend—comes roaring to life in this rollicking oral biography. After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with M*A*S*H. He reinvented American filmmaking, and went on to produce such masterpieces as McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Nashville, The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. In Robert Altman, Mitchell Zuckoff has woven together Altman’s final interviews; an incredible cast of voices including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Paul Newman, among scores of others; and contemporary reviews and news accounts into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life.
Download or read book Robert Altman written by Mitchell Zuckoff and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2009 with total page 560 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on the perspectives of family members, colleagues, and actors to assess the director's life and artistic achievements, discussing such topics as his womanizing reputation, his heart transplant, and the creation of his films.
Download or read book Connection written by Randy Olson and published by . This book was released on 2013 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The power and importance of storytelling is now widely accepted, but this book goes further to focus on storymaking. CONNECTION brings together a former scientist, a story consultant, and an improv actor to give you the critical thinking of science combined with a century of Hollywood knowledge in the creation and shaping of stories. The material is relevant to lawyers, politicians, public health workers, educators, activists-- everyone. In today's "Twitterfied" world, CONNECTION provides the narrative tools for effective communication.
Download or read book The Best Story Wins written by Matthew Luhn and published by Morgan James Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-07 with total page 135 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How to use the principles of Pixar-style storytelling to meet the needs of entrepreneurs, marketers, and business-minded storytellers of all stripes. Pixar movies have transfixed viewers around the world and stirred a hunger in creative and corporate realms to adopt new and more impactful ways of telling stories. Former Pixar and The Simpsons animator and story artist Matthew Luhn translates his two and half decades of storytelling techniques and concepts to the CEOs, advertisers, marketers, and creatives in the business world and beyond. A combination of Luhn’s personal stories and storytelling insights, The Best Story Wins retells the “Hero’s Journey” story building methods through the lens of the Pixar films to help business minds embrace the power of storytelling for themselves! “Award-winning Pixar storyteller, artist, and writer Matthew Luhn has a message for CEOs, marketers, and business professionals: to capture your audience’s attention, you need to hook them with a great story.” —Seattlepi.com
Download or read book Modular Narratives in Contemporary Cinema written by A. Cameron and published by Springer. This book was released on 2008-07-11 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Since the early 1990s there has been a trend towards narrative complexity within popular cinema. This book examines a number of contemporary films that play overtly with narrative structure, raising questions of chance and destiny, memory and history, simultaneity and the representation of time.
Download or read book The Player The Rapture The New Age written by Michael Tolkin and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2007-12-01 with total page 227 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Three film scripts, including an Academy Award nominee, from the man described as an “Antonioni with a sense of humor” (The New Yorker). From his earliest works to the Emmy-nominated Showtime limited series Escape at Dannemora, Michael Tolkin is known as one of the industry’s biggest talents—and sharpest satirists. This volume contains three of his acclaimed screenplays. The Player, about the twisted world of Hollywood, was directed by Robert Altman and starred Tim Robbins and Greta Scacchi. It won an Edgar Award for Best Motion Picture Screenplay and has been hailed as “one of the smartest, funniest, most penetrating movies about moviemaking ever made” (Vanity Fair). The Rapture explores the emotionally intense, surreal world of Christian fundamentalism. The Los Angeles Times called it “a nervy, unsettling, edgy piece of work, that most audacious of cinematic ventures, a film of theological ideas, intent on looking into what we believe and why we believe it, determined, even eager, to explore the issues of heaven, hell, and the hereafter.” And The New Age tells the story of a young couple’s fall from financial grace and their quest for spirituality in a world defined by materialism.
Download or read book Robert Altman s The Player written by Lewis Mitchell and published by . This book was released on 2009 with total page 118 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Theories of Authorship written by John Caughie and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2013-10-08 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The film director or `auteur' has been central in film theory and criticism over the past thirty years. Theories of Authorship documents the major stages in the debate about film authorship, and introduces recent writing on film to suggest important ways in which the debate might be reconsidered.
Download or read book The Sounds of Early Cinema written by Richard Abel and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-03 with total page 350 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Sounds of Early Cinema is devoted exclusively to a little-known, yet absolutely crucial phenomenon: the ubiquitous presence of sound in early cinema. "Silent cinema" may rarely have been silent, but the sheer diversity of sound(s) and sound/image relations characterizing the first 20 years of moving picture exhibition can still astonish us. Whether instrumental, vocal, or mechanical, sound ranged from the improvised to the pre-arranged (as in scripts, scores, and cue sheets). The practice of mixing sounds with images differed widely, depending on the venue (the nickelodeon in Chicago versus the summer Chautauqua in rural Iowa, the music hall in London or Paris versus the newest palace cinema in New York City) as well as on the historical moment (a single venue might change radically, and many times, from 1906 to 1910). Contributors include Richard Abel, Rick Altman, Edouard Arnoldy, Mats Björkin, Stephen Bottomore, Marta Braun, Jean Châteauvert, Ian Christie, Richard Crangle, Helen Day-Mayer, John Fullerton, Jane Gaines, André Gaudreault, Tom Gunning, François Jost, Charlie Keil, Jeff Klenotic, Germain Lacasse, Neil Lerner, Patrick Loughney, David Mayer, Domi-nique Nasta, Bernard Perron, Jacques Polet, Lauren Rabinovitz, Isabelle Raynauld, Herbert Reynolds, Gregory A. Waller, and Rashit M. Yangirov.
Download or read book Storytelling in the New Hollywood written by Kristin Thompson and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 1999-11-05 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Drawing on a wide range of films from the 1920s to the 1990s—from Keaton’s Our Hospitality to Casablanca to Terminator 2, Kristin Thompson offers the first in-depth analysis of Hollywood’s storytelling techniques and how they are used to make complex, easily comprehensible, entertaining films.
Download or read book Robert Towne s Journey Through Hollywood written by Rachel Grace and published by Independently Published. This book was released on 2024-07-14 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Embark on an unforgettable journey through the heart of Hollywood's Golden Age with the captivating biography, "Robert Towne's Journey Through Hollywood: From 'Chinatown' to 'Mission: Impossible'-The Life and Lasting Influence of a Legendary Screenwriter and Director." This meticulously researched and engaging biography unveils the extraordinary life and career of Robert Towne, the brilliant screenwriter and director whose genius shaped some of the most iconic films of our time. From the shadowy depths of the noir masterpiece "Chinatown" to the pulse-pounding thrills of "Mission: Impossible," Towne's work has captivated audiences worldwide. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Towne navigated the ever-evolving landscape of the film industry with a steadfast passion and an unwavering commitment to his craft. Beginning his career writing for legendary exploitation filmmaker Roger Corman, he quickly rose to prominence during the New Hollywood era, leaving an indelible mark on cinematic history. In this comprehensive biography, we not only look into Towne's professional achievements but also explore the man behind the scripts. Through personal anecdotes and interviews, we gain insight into his creative process, his collaborations with renowned directors and actors, the challenges he faced, and the triumphs he celebrated. Why should you read this book? In-depth Analysis: Gain a deep understanding of Towne's creative process, the themes that resonate throughout his work, and the techniques he employed to craft unforgettable stories. Historical Insight: Journey through the evolution of Hollywood, from its Golden Age to the modern era, through the eyes of one of its most influential figures. Personal Stories: Delve into the personal relationships and experiences that shaped Towne's life and fueled his writing, painting a portrait of a complex and multifaceted individual. Inspiration for Writers and Filmmakers: Discover the secrets behind Towne's perseverance and innovative approach to storytelling, providing valuable lessons and inspiration for aspiring creators. Legacy and Influence: Explore how Towne's contributions continue to resonate in contemporary cinema, from his impact on the neo-noir genre to his contributions to action blockbusters. Don't miss this opportunity! Whether you're a devoted cinephile, a budding screenwriter, or simply someone who appreciates the art of storytelling, this book is a treasure trove of insights and inspiration. Embark on an adventure through the life and times of Robert Towne, a true master of intrigue, and uncover the secrets behind his enduring legacy. Secure your copy today and immerse yourself in the magic of Hollywood's Golden Age.
Download or read book Ovitz written by Robert Slater and published by McGraw-Hill Companies. This book was released on 1997 with total page 384 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Michael Ovitz is the iron-fisted CAA talent agent and dealmaker who negotiated unprecedented salaries for his agency's clients and, with unbridled tenacity and street-wise cunning, wrested power from the almighty studios. His ascension to the pinnacle of Hollywood power impressed both his friends and foes ... but his rapid fall from grace stunned even the most hardened Hollywood insiders (not to mention an astronomical severance package that weighed in at over $125 million.)" "Now, for the first time, here is the inside story of the charismatic yet media-shy mogul, in a behind-the-scenes account that exposes not only the underpinnings of his meteoric success, but also the often-hidden machinations of the entertainment industry. This revealing new biography is based upon the author's unprecedented series of interviews with Michael Ovitz, as well as 150 exclusive interviews with Hollywood's top celebrities."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved
Download or read book The Voice in Cinema written by Michel Chion and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 1999 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Chion analyzes imaginative uses of the human voice by directors like Lang, Hitchcock, Ophuls, Duras, and de Palma.
Download or read book Playing the Waves written by Jan Simons and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dogma 95, the avant-garde filmmaking movement founded by the Danish director Lars von Trier and three of his fellow directors, was launched in 1995 at an elite cinema conference in Paris—when von Trier was called upon to speak about the future of film but instead showered the audience with pamphlets announcing the new movement and its manifesto. A refreshingly original critical commentary on the director and his practice, Playing the Waves is a paramount addition to one of new media’s most provocative genres: games and gaming. Playing the Waves cleverly puns on the title of one of von Trier’s most famous features and argues that Dogma 95, like much of the director’s low-budget realist productions, is a game that takes cinema beyond the traditional confines of film aesthetics and dramatic rules. Simons articulates the ways in which von Trier redefines the practice of filmmaking as a rule-bound activity, and stipulates the forms and structures of games von Trier brings to bear on his films, as well as the sobering lessons he draws from economic and evolutionary game theory. Much like the director’s films, this fascinating volume takes the traditional point of view of film theory and film aesthetics to the next level and demonstrates we have much to learn from the perspective of game studies and game theory.
