Download or read book Hollywood Independents written by Denise Mann and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008-01-01 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Hollywood Independents' explores the crucial period between 1948 and 1962 when independent film producers first became key components of the modern corporate entertainment industry. Mann examines their impact, the decline of the studios, the rise of television, and the rise of potent talent agencies such as MCA.
Download or read book Hollywood Quarterly written by Eric Loren Smoodin and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2002-05-17 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This selection of essays taken from Hollywood Quarterly reflect the eclecticism of the journal, with sections on animation, the avant-garde, and documentary to go along with a representative sampling of articles about feature-length narrative films.
Download or read book Film Noir American Workers and Postwar Hollywood written by Dennis Broe and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2009-01-25 with total page 272 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Film noir, which flourished in 1940s and 50s, reflected the struggles and sentiments of postwar America. Dennis Broe contends that the genre, with its emphasis on dark subject matter, paralleled the class conflict in labor and union movements that dominated the period. By following the evolution of film noir during the years following World War II, Broe illustrates how the noir figure represents labor as a whole. In the 1940s, both radicalized union members and protagonists of noir films were hunted and pursued by the law. Later, as labor unions achieve broad acceptance and respectability, the central noir figure shifts from fugitive criminal to law-abiding cop. Expanding his investigation into the Cold War and post-9/11 America, Broe extends his analysis of the ways film noir is intimately connected to labor history. A brilliant, interdisciplinary examination, this is a work that will appeal to a broad spectrum of readers.
Download or read book Runaway Hollywood written by Daniel Steinhart and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2019-02-26 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon “runaway” production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry’s creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.
Download or read book Hard Boiled Hollywood written by Jon Lewis and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 2017-04-19 with total page 246 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The history of Hollywood's postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era's last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence during which the company town's many competing subcultures--celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients--came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, whose reality was anything but glamorous"--Provided by publisher.
Download or read book Theaters of Occupation written by Jennifer Fay and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 261 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the aftermath of total war and unconditional surrender, Germans found themselves receiving instruction from their American occupiers. It was not a conventional education. In their effort to transform German national identity and convert a Nazi past into a democratic future, the Americans deployed what they perceived as the most powerful and convincing weapon-movies. In a rigorous analysis of the American occupation of postwar Germany and the military’s use of “soft power,” Jennifer Fay considers how Hollywood films, including Ninotchka, Gaslight, and Stagecoach, influenced German culture and cinema. In this cinematic pedagogy, dark fantasies of American democracy and its history were unwittingly played out on-screen. Theaters of Occupation reveals how Germans responded to these education efforts and offers new insights about American exceptionalism and virtual democracy at the dawn of the cold war. Fay’s innovative approach examines the culture of occupation not only as a phase in U.S.–German relations but as a distinct space with its own discrete cultural practices. As the American occupation of Germany has become a paradigm for more recent military operations, Fay argues that we must question its efficacy as a mechanism of cultural and political change. Jennifer Fay is associate professor and codirector of film studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University.
Download or read book Hollywood s Tennessee written by R. Barton Palmer and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2009-04-01 with total page 373 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No American dramatist has had more plays adapted than Tennessee Williams, and few modern dramatists have witnessed as much controversy during the adaptation process. His Hollywood legacy, captured in such screen adaptations as A Streetcar Named Desire, Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, and Suddenly, Last Summer, reflects the sea change in American culture in the mid-twentieth century. Placing this body of work within relevant contexts ranging from gender and sexuality to censorship, modernism, art cinema, and the Southern Renaissance, Hollywood's Tennessee draws on rarely examined archival research to recast Williams's significance. Providing not only cultural context, the authors also bring to light the details of the arduous screenwriting process Williams experienced, with special emphasis on the Production Code Administration--the powerful censorship office that drew high-profile criticism during the 1950s--and Williams's innovative efforts to bend the code. Going well beyond the scripts themselves, Hollywood's Tennessee showcases findings culled from poster and billboard art, pressbooks, and other production and advertising material. The result is a sweeping account of how Williams's adapted plays were crafted, marketed, and received, as well as the lasting implications of this history for commercial filmmakers and their audiences.
Download or read book Hollywood Genres and Postwar America written by Mike Chopra-Gant and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2005-10-28 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a clear and engrossing account of how popular films in America just after the close of the Second World War played out America's mood at that crucial time. It is also a revisionist challenge to received scholarly understanding of this mood, which has tended to be seen as characterized by an abiding pessimism most clearly manifested in the films noir of the period. Chopra-Gant makes here an important contribution to film genre, which proposes that the 'noir and Zeitgeist' reading is based on the retrospective promotion of selected movies. He turns to the top box office successes of the period, including "Best Years of our Lives", "The Jolson Story" and "Two Years Before the Mast", finding that these films emphasise rather the triumph of American beliefs in democracy, classlessness and individualism. They deploy positive, performative masculinities and the pleasures of male friendships and celebrate the traditional American family, while recognising the problems of 'momism' and absent fathers.
Download or read book Homemade Men in Postwar Austrian Cinema written by Maria Fritsche and published by Berghahn Books. This book was released on 2013-05-01 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Despite the massive influx of Hollywood movies and films from other European countries after World War II, Austrian film continued to be hugely popular with Austrian and German audiences. By examining the decisive role that popular cinema played in the turbulent post-war era, this book provides unique insights into the reconstruction of a disrupted society. Through detailed analysis of the stylistic patterns, narratives and major themes of four popular genres of the time, costume film, Heimatfilm, tourist film and comedy, the book explains how popular cinema helped to shape national identity, smoothed conflicted gender relations and relieved the Austrians from the burden of the Nazi past through celebrating the harmonious, charming, musical Austrian man.
Download or read book Gender Meets Genre in Postwar Cinemas written by Christine Gledhill and published by University of Illinois Press. This book was released on 2012-01-15 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This remarkable collection uses genre as a fresh way to analyze the issues of gender representation in film theory, film production, spectatorship, and the contexts of reception. With a uniquely global perspective, these essays examine the intersection of gender and genre in not only Hollywood films but also in independent, European, Indian, and Hong Kong cinemas. Working in the area of postcolonial cinema, contributors raise issues dealing with indigenous and global cinemas and argue that contemporary genres have shifted considerably as both notions of gender and forms of genre have changed. The volume addresses topics such as the history of feminist approaches to the study of genre in film, issues of female agency in postmodernity, changes taking place in supposedly male-dominated genres, concepts of genre and its use of gender in global cinema, and the relationship between gender and sexuality in film. Contributors are Ira Bhaskar, Steven Cohan, Luke Collins, Pam Cook, Lucy Fischer, Jane Gaines, Christine Gledhill, Derek Kane-Meddock, E. Ann Kaplan, Samiha Matin, Katie Model, E. Deidre Pribram, Vicente Rodriguez Ortega, Adam Segal, Chris Straayer, Yvonne Tasker, Deborah Thomas, and Xiangyang Chen.
Download or read book Cinema and the Cultural Cold War written by Sangjoon Lee and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2020-12-15 with total page 310 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cinema and the Cultural Cold War explores the ways in which postwar Asian cinema was shaped by transnational collaborations and competitions between newly independent and colonial states at the height of Cold War politics. Sangjoon Lee adopts a simultaneously global and regional approach when analyzing the region's film cultures and industries. New economic conditions in the Asian region and shared postwar experiences among the early cinema entrepreneurs were influenced by Cold War politics, US cultural diplomacy, and intensified cultural flows during the 1950s and 1960s. By taking a closer look at the cultural realities of this tumultuous period, Lee comprehensively reconstructs Asian film history in light of the international relationships forged, broken, and re-established as the influence of the non-aligned movement grew across the Cold War. Lee elucidates how motion picture executives, creative personnel, policy makers, and intellectuals in East and Southeast Asia aspired to industrialize their Hollywood-inspired system in order to expand the market and raise the competitiveness of their cultural products. They did this by forming the Federation of Motion Picture Producers in Asia, co-hosting the Asian Film Festival, and co-producing films. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War demonstrates that the emergence of the first intensive postwar film producers' network in Asia was, in large part, the offspring of Cold War cultural politics and the product of American hegemony. Film festivals that took place in cities as diverse as Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, and Kuala Lumpur were annual showcases of cinematic talent as well as opportunities for the Central Intelligence Agency to establish and maintain cultural, political, and institutional linkages between the United States and Asia during the Cold War. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War reanimates this almost-forgotten history of cinema and the film industry in Asia.
Download or read book Hollywood Exiles in Europe written by Rebecca Prime and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2014-01-14 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rebecca Prime documents the untold story of the American directors, screenwriters, and actors who exiled themselves to Europe as a result of the Hollywood blacklist. During the 1950s and 1960s, these Hollywood émigrés directed, wrote, or starred in almost one hundred European productions, their contributions ranging from crime film masterpieces like Du rififi chez les hommes (1955, Jules Dassin, director) to international blockbusters like The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, screenwriters) and acclaimed art films like The Servant (1963, Joseph Losey, director). At once a lively portrait of a lesser-known American “lost generation” and an examination of an important transitional moment in European cinema, the book offers a compelling argument for the significance of the blacklisted émigrés to our understanding of postwar American and European cinema and Cold War relations. Prime provides detailed accounts of the production and reception of their European films that clarify the ambivalence with which Hollywood was regarded within postwar European culture. Drawing upon extensive archival research, including previously classified material, Hollywood Exiles in Europe suggests the need to rethink our understanding of the Hollywood blacklist as a purely domestic phenomenon. By shedding new light on European cinema’s changing relationship with Hollywood, the book illuminates the postwar shift from national to transnational cinema.
Download or read book Bringing Up Daddy written by Stella Bruzzi and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-07-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Offering a broad perspective on the Hollywood dad, looking at important Hollywood fathers and discussing films from many genres, this book adopts a multi-faceted theoretical approach, making use of psychoanalysis, sociology and masculinity studies and contextualising the father figure within both Hollywood and American history.
Download or read book The Baseball Film in Postwar America written by Ron Briley and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work focuses on the baseball movie genre in the years following World War II, beginning with the 1948 biopic The Babe Ruth Story and ending with the 1962 Mickey Mantle-Roger Maris vehicle Safe at Home!, when the consensus was that conflict should be limited in American society by emphasizing economic growth and a strong stand against Communism. This study of selected films indicates, however, that this strategy was not entirely effective; while offering a certain amount of nostalgia, these films could not provide shelter from the storm gathering in postwar America which challenged conventional ideas of race, gender and class and broke in the 1960s.
Download or read book Keep Em in the East written by Richard Koszarski and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2021-07-20 with total page 544 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The year 1955 was a watershed one for New York’s film industry: Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront took home eight Oscars, and, more quietly, Stanley Kubrick released the low-budget classic Killer’s Kiss. A wave of films that changed how American movies were made soon followed, led by directors such as Sidney Lumet, William Friedkin, Francis Ford Coppola, and Martin Scorsese. Yet this resurgence could not have occurred without a deeply rooted tradition of local film production. Richard Koszarski chronicles the compelling and often surprising origins of New York’s postwar film renaissance, looking beyond such classics as Naked City, Kiss of Death, and Portrait of Jennie. He examines the social, cultural, and economic forces that shaped New York filmmaking, from city politics to union regulations, and shows how decades of low-budget independent production taught local filmmakers how to capture the city’s grit, liveliness, and allure. He reveals the importance of “race films”—all-Black productions intended for segregated African American audiences—that not only helped keep the film business afloat but also nurtured a core group of writers, directors, designers, and technicians. Detailed production histories of On the Waterfront and Killer’s Kiss—films that appear here in a completely new light—illustrate the distinctive characteristics of New York cinema. Drawing on a vast array of research—including studio libraries, censorship records, union archives, and interviews with participants—“Keep ’Em in the East” rewrites a crucial chapter in the history of American cinema.
Download or read book Stardust written by Joseph Kanon and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-09-29 with total page 511 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The acclaimed, bestselling author of The Good German and Los Alamos returns with his most absorbing and accomplished novel yet—a mesmerizing tale of Hollywood, postwar political intrigue, and one man's determination to learn the truth about his brother's death. Hollywood, 1945. Ben Collier has just arrived from war-torn Europe to find his brother has died in mysterious circumstances. Why would a man with a beautiful wife, a successful movie career, and a heroic past choose to kill himself? Ben enters the uneasy world beneath the glossy shine of the movie business, where politics and the dream factories collide and Communist witch hunts are rendering the biggest star makers vulnerable. Even here, where the devastation of Europe seems no more real than a painted movie set, the war casts long and dangerous shadows. When Ben learns troubling facts about his own family’s past and embarks on a love affair that never should have happened, he is caught in a web of deception that shakes his moral foundation to its core. Rich with atmosphere and period detail, Stardust flawlessly blends fact and fiction into a haunting thriller evoking both the glory days of the movies and the emergence of a dark strain of American political life.
Download or read book Celluloid Pueblo written by Jennifer L. Jenkins and published by University of Arizona Press. This book was released on 2016-10-18 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Celluloid Pueblo tells the story of Western Ways Features and its role in the invention of the Southwest of the imagination. The story closely follows the boom and bust arc of this region in the mid-twentieth century and the constantly evolving representations of an exotic--but safe and domesticated--frontier and the landscape, regional development, and diverse cultures of Arizona and the Southwest.
