Download or read book The Art and Making of The Greatest Showman written by Signe Bergstrom and published by Weldon Owen. This book was released on 2017-12-12 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The glorious world of P.T. Barnum and the holiday movie The Greatest Showman come to life in this lavish art book. Featuring unit photography and concept art of stars Hugh Jackman, Zac Ephron, Michelle Williams, and Zendaya as well as behind-the-scenes tales of the film’s making. Lyrics to the movie musical’s showstopping tunes, by the song-writing team behind La-La Land. Foreword by Director Michael Gracey.

Download or read book American Showman written by Ross Melnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2014-03-04 with total page 582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Samuel ÒRoxyÓ Rothafel (1882Ð1936) built an influential and prolific career as film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theater manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. He helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and moviegoing become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The first book devoted to RothafelÕs multifaceted career, American Showman examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theater, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. Roxy scored motion pictures, produced enormous stage shows, managed many of New YorkÕs most important movie houses, directed and/or edited propaganda films for the American war effort, produced short and feature-length films, exhibited foreign, documentary, independent, and avant-garde motion pictures, and expanded the conception of mainstream, commercial cinema. He was also one of the chief creators of the radio variety program, pioneering radio broadcasting, promotions, and tours. The producers and promoters of distinct themes and styles, showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the moviegoing experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theater into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. RoxyÕs interest in media convergence also reflects a larger moment in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises, exploit them through content release Òevents,Ó and give rise to feature films, soundtracks, broadcasts, live performances, and related consumer products. Regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the film and radio industries, Roxy was instrumental to the development of film exhibition and commercial broadcasting, musical accompaniment, and a new, convergent entertainment industry.

Download or read book Death of a Showman written by Mariah Fredericks and published by Minotaur Books. This book was released on 2021-04-13 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Mariah Fredericks's Death of a Showman, the fourth in this absorbing series set in Gilded Age New York, lady’s maid Jane Prescott is thrust into the world of show business, where a killer is stalking Broadway. “A lively upstairs/downstairs mystery.”—New York Times Book Review on A Death of No Importance It is the summer of 1914 and lady’s maid Jane Prescott is back in New York with the Tylers after a glittering society wedding in Europe. On their return, Jane learns another wedding has taken place. Her old dancing partner, Leo Hirschfeld, has married a chorus girl in his new Broadway musical. Jane and Louise Tyler are pulled into the sparkling and scandalous world of Broadway, as a star struck Louise invests in Leo's show, and Jane chaperones her at rehearsals. But behind the glittering facade of the theater, there are rivalries, secret romances, and some very dodgy business practices. When the show's abusive producer, Sidney Warburton, is murdered, the list of suspects is long. Was it the comedic star or her gambler boyfriend? The disgruntled costume designer? The beautiful, blond dancer, her jealous husband? Or was it Leo himself, who had more reason than anyone to hate Sidney Warburton? As the First World war looms in the distance, Jane and tabloid reporter Michael Behan must strip back the masks of these consummate performers before one of them kills again.

Download or read book Showman written by Julian Thomas and published by National Library Australia. This book was released on 1990 with total page 27 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Showman and the Slave written by Benjamin Reiss and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2001-10-09 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this compelling story about one of the nineteenth century's most famous Americans, Benjamin Reiss uses P. T. Barnum's Joice Heth hoax to examine the contours of race relations in the antebellum North. Barnum's first exhibit as a showman, Heth was an elderly enslaved woman who was said to be the 161-year-old former nurse of the infant George Washington. Seizing upon the novelty, the newly emerging commercial press turned her act--and especially her death--into one of the first media spectacles in American history. In piecing together the fragmentary and conflicting evidence of the event, Reiss paints a picture of people looking at history, at the human body, at social class, at slavery, at performance, at death, and always--if obliquely--at themselves. At the same time, he reveals how deeply an obsession with race penetrated different facets of American life, from public memory to private fantasy. Concluding the book is a piece of historical detective work in which Reiss attempts to solve the puzzle of Heth's real identity before she met Barnum. His search yields a tantalizing connection between early mass culture and a slave's subtle mockery of her master.

Download or read book Raj Kapoor written by Lata Khubchandani and published by books catalog. This book was released on 2003 with total page 86 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Raj Kapoor, 1924-1988, actor, producer, and director of Hindi motion pictures.

Download or read book A Wandering Showman I written by David Lano and published by MSU Press. This book was released on 2007-04 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is the autobiography of the circus performer and puppeteer David Lano, with many first-hand accounts from American show life in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Lano recounts his seventy-eight years as a professional puppet master. Like his father, grandfather, great-grandfather before him, David Lano was a traditionally trained puppet master who built all his own marionettes and took the shows he performed with his little people on the road. A beautiful look at the life of a traveling showman and at a dying art form.

Download or read book The Genial Showman written by Edward Peron Hingston and published by . This book was released on 1870 with total page 168 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Showman written by David Thomson and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 792 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The authorized biography of this Hollywood producer, who made REBECCA and GONE WITH THE WIND, looking at his career from his swift rise to prominence to the collapse of his empire.

Download or read book Showman of the Screen written by A. T. McKenna and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2016-11-01 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905–1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers. Alternately respected and reviled, this master of movie promotion was responsible for bringing films as varied as Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), Hercules (1958), The Graduate (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and A Bridge Too Far (1977) to American audiences. In the first biography of this controversial pioneer, A. T. McKenna traces Levine's rise as an influential packager of popular culture. He explores the mogul's pivotal role in many significant industry innovations from the 1950s to the 1970s, examining his use of saturation release tactics and bombastic advertising campaigns. Levine was also a trailblazer in promoting European art house cinema in the 1960s. He made Federico Fellini's 8 (1963) a hit in America, feuded with Jean-Luc Godard over their production of Contempt (1963), and campaigned aggressively for Sophia Loren to become the first actress to win an Oscar for a foreign language performance for her role in Two Women (1960). Despite his significant accomplishments and prominent role in shaping film distribution and promotion in the post-studio era, Levine is largely overlooked today. McKenna's in-depth biography corrects misunderstandings and misinformation about this colorful figure, and offers a sober assessment of his contributions to world cinema. It also illuminates Levine's peculiar talent for movie- and self-promotion, as well as his extraordinary career in the motion picture business.

Download or read book Magic and Showmanship written by Henning Nelms and published by Courier Corporation. This book was released on 2012-04-30 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Highly instructive book by a noted authority on the subject analyzes every phase of conjuring, from sleights, devices, misdirection, and controlling audience attention to incorporating patter and the effective use of assistants.

Download or read book E Pluribus Barnum written by Bluford Adams and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 278 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first book to consider the career of P. T. Barnum from a cultural studies perspective. Phineas Taylor Barnum lived from 1810 until 1891, and in the eighty-one years of his life he created show business as we know it. In E Pluribus Barnum, Bluford Adams investigates the influence Barnum had on American popular culture of the nineteenth century, and expands our understanding of the ways he continues to influence us today. Beginning with a discussion of Barnum's early shows, Adams demonstrates the dynamic interplay between Barnum's increasingly "respectable" aspirations for his entertainments and his active cultivation of middle-class sensibilities in his audiences. In his discussion of the 1850-51 concert tour of the "Swedish Nightingale" Jenny Lind, Adams explores the role played by women's rights and class issues in Barnum's management of these concerts. Barnum's American Museum and the "moral dramas" presented in its theater are examined, as well as the later circuses. Adams relates the rise of Barnum to the emergence of a new U.S. society, one riven by conflicts over slavery, feminism, immigration, and capitalism, and considers his career as a crucial moment in the on-going struggle over the politics of U.S. commercial entertainments.

Download or read book Fifty Years of a Showman s Life written by Thomas Forder Plowman and published by . This book was released on 1919 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Seventy Years a Showman written by George Sanger and published by Read Books Ltd. This book was released on 2011-12-13 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: SEVENTY years a showman. Seventy years! A long, long day is waning at last. Here in the peaceful shadows of the Garden of Life I pause awhile. I want to drink in the scene. I want to realize the full meaning of it all. Rest—yes, I can rest now. The way has been long. It has often been weary. A showman’s life, my friends, is not all glory. Beneath the glitter and the tinsel is many a heartache. The open road is often strewn with thorns. And now the journey is nearly ended. Far away in the west I see the setting sun. The garden is hushed in sleep. Ay! The showman’s day is gone. The shutters are up. The camp fire, long lighted, is dying away. In its glowing embers I see strange faces. They are the faces of the Past. Tell us the showman’s tale, you say. And why not? The very thought of it brings back to my ears the jingle of bells. The dim figures before me turn into a thousand shapes and fancies. Tell you the showman’s tale? Ay, that I will. Once more I hear the blare of music and the sound of drums. I catch the laughter of merry children. Walk up! Walk up! Walk up! This way for one of the most singular stories ever told by living man! This way for a tale of strange things, scenes, and adventures!

Download or read book The Lives of a Showman written by Mark Lewis and published by . This book was released on 2011 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These are the memoirs of a magician, psychic consultant, hypnotist and trick card salesman who has operated in different countries and experienced all sorts of mischief and adventures. Mark Lewis is an experienced, professional entertainer, having been a performer for over 40 years. He has worked in the U.K., Holland, Germany Ireland, the USA and Canada. While working in Ireland he virtually became a household name as a psychic, with masses of media publicity. He is recognised as one of the top sleight-of-hand magicians in the world. If you think that biographies and memoirs are dull, boring and stuffy, this book will change your mind. The author is a magician but you ll find no tricks here instead, you ll find a delightful, sometimes touching, and often hilarious account of the life of a professional entertainer. Mark Lewis is a close-up and cabaret magician, a children s performer, a pitchman, a psychic and a hypnotist and now, a writer. In this wonderfully engaging memoir, you will follow him from his early beginnings in posh London nightclubs to selling trick decks of cards in Blackpool, England, from being the most famous psychic in Dublin to becoming a hypnotist in Toronto, from performing for drunks to performing for royalty, and much, much more. Along the way, you will find a cast of colourful and often remarkable people, none more so than the author himself.

Download or read book P T Barnum written by Philip B. Kunhardt and published by Alfred A. Knopf. This book was released on 1995 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A biography of the man who founded the famous circus, a millionaire and entertainer extraordinaire.

Download or read book The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause written by Orest T. Martynowych and published by Univ. of Manitoba Press. This book was released on 2014-09-05 with total page 391 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A quixotic figure, Vasile Avramenko (1895-1981) used folk culture and modern media in a life-long crusade to promote Ukraine’s struggle for independence to North American audiences. From his base in New York City, he built a network of folk dance schools and produced musical spectacles to help Ukrainian immigrants sustain their identity. His feature-length Ukrainian language films made in the 1930s with Hollywood director Edgar G. Ulmer, the “king of ethnic and B movies,” were shown throughout North America. Orest T. Martynowych’s The Showman and the Ukrainian Cause is a fascinating portrait how culture can become a political tool in a diaspora community.