Download or read book A History of American Movies written by Paul Monaco and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2023-06-14 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A History of American Movies: A Film-by-Film Look at the Art, Craft and Business of Cinema, Paul Monaco provides a survey of the narrative feature film from the 1920s to the present. The book focuses on 170 of the most highly regarded and recognized feature films selected by the Hollywood establishment: each Oscar winner for Best Picture, as well as those voted the greatest by members of the American Film Institute. By focusing on a select group of films that represent the epitome of these collaborations, Monaco provides an essential history of one of the modern world's most complex and successful cultural institutions: Hollywood. Divided into three sections, "Classic Hollywood, 1927-1948," "Hollywood In Transition, 1949-1974," and "The New Hollywood, 1975 To The Present," Monaco examines some of the most memorable works in cinematic history, including The General, Wings, Bringing Up Baby, Gone with the Wind, Citizen Kane, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, The Searchers, Psycho, West Side Story, The Godfat

Download or read book American History Goes to the Movies written by W. Bryan Rommel Ruiz and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2011-01-26 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether they prefer blockbusters, historical dramas, or documentaries, people learn much of what they know about history from the movies. In American History Goes to the Movies, W. Bryan Rommel-Ruiz shows how popular representations of historic events shape the way audiences understand the history of the United States, including American representations of race and gender, and stories of immigration, especially the familiar narrative of the American Dream. Using films from many different genres, American History Goes to the Movies draws together movies that depict the Civil War, the Wild West, the assassination of JFK, and the events of 9/11, from The Birth of a Nation and Gone with the Wind to The Exorcist and United 93, to show how viewers use movies to make sense of the past, addressing not only how we render history for popular enjoyment, but also how Hollywood’s renderings of America influence the way Americans see themselves and how they make sense of the world.

Download or read book Movie Made America written by Robert Sklar and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2012-10-31 with total page 428 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hailed as the definitive work upon its original publication in 1975 and now extensively revised and updated by the author, this vastly absorbing and richly illustrated book examines film as an art form, technological innovation, big business, and shaper of American values. Ever since Edison's peep shows first captivated urban audiences, film has had a revolutionary impact on American society, transforming culture from the bottom up, radically revising attitudes toward pleasure and sexuality, and at the same time, cementing the myth of the American dream. No book has measured film's impact more clearly or comprehensively than Movie-Made America. This vastly readable and richly illustrated volume examines film as art form, technological innovation, big business, and cultural bellwether. It takes in stars from Douglas Fairbanks to Sly Stallone; auteurs from D. W. Griffith to Martin Scorsese and Spike Lee; and genres from the screwball comedy of the 1930s to the "hard body" movies of the 1980s to the independents films of the 1990s. Combining panoramic sweep with detailed commentaries on hundreds of individual films, Movie-Made America is a must for any motion picture enthusiast.

Download or read book The American Film Institute Desk Reference written by Melinda Corey and published by DK Publishing (Dorling Kindersley). This book was released on 2002 with total page 616 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An in-depth resource on the art of filmmaking looks at the history of film, along with information on actors, designers, directors, writers, cinematographers, sound effects, and editors.

Download or read book A History of the American Film written by Christopher Durang and published by Samuel French , Incorporated. This book was released on 1978 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musical / 9m, 6f / Various Sets A hilarious take off on American films, especially from the 1930s through the 1970s. The principals play a variety of characters. There is a Cagney Bogart Dean Brando type-- and a Fonda Stewart Peck Perkins type. The women, too, are types-- basically Bette Davis, Loretta Young and Eve Arden. The parts they play are wild parodies from many Hollywood genres; a silent tearjerker, slum idyll, gangster epic, courtroom melodrama, chain gang social justice thriller, screwball comedy, Busby Berkeley backstage musical, war propaganda canteen musical-- not to forget "Casablanca," "Citizen Kane" and a variety of minor genres. "Christopher Durang has written one of the funniest, zaniest, most entertaining plays of the last decade...What we see is the American way of life reflected through a distortion mirror...Its true that Durang has serious points to make...but this is no message play, thank goodness. Most everything in it is pure, unadulterated, uproarious fun.... Durangs] witty comedy about the movies is a splendid, constantly surprising treat." - Stanley Eichelbaum, San Francisco Examiner "A grand popular entertainment. A significant act of film criticism as well as wise social commentary. Mr. Durang has the waggishness of four Marxes and the malice of Jonathan Swift. Through the history of the American film, we see a history of America - the turn from patriotism to cynicism, from optimism to sensationalism...The clown-sharp company of comic actors strikes precisely the correct stance - total conviction and not camp...A History of the American Film is an A-movie, a glorious montage of myth-America. - Mel Gussow, The New York Times

Download or read book Movies and American Society written by Steven J. Ross and published by Wiley-Blackwell. This book was released on 2002-06-10 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This outstanding collection of the best film history scholarship gathers recent essays and supporting documents to illustrate the power of movies to change, and be changed by, American society.

Download or read book American Royals written by Katharine McGee and published by Ember. This book was released on 2020-05-05 with total page 466 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING SERIES • What if America had a royal family? If you can't get enough of Harry and Meghan or Kate and William, meet American princesses Beatrice and Samantha. Crazy Rich Asians meets The Crown. Perfect for fans of Red, White, and Royal Blue and The Royal We! Two princesses vying for the ultimate crown. Two girls vying for the prince's heart. This is the story of the American royals. When America won the Revolutionary War, its people offered General George Washington a crown. Two and a half centuries later, the House of Washington still sits on the throne. Like most royal families, the Washingtons have an heir and a spare. A future monarch and a backup battery. Each child knows exactly what is expected of them. But these aren't just any royals. They're American. As Princess Beatrice gets closer to becoming America's first queen regnant, the duty she has embraced her entire life suddenly feels stifling. Nobody cares about the spare except when she's breaking the rules, so Princess Samantha doesn't care much about anything, either . . . except the one boy who is distinctly off-limits to her. And then there's Samantha's twin, Prince Jefferson. If he'd been born a generation earlier, he would have stood first in line for the throne, but the new laws of succession make him third. Most of America adores their devastatingly handsome prince . . . but two very different girls are vying to capture his heart. The duty. The intrigue. The Crown. New York Times bestselling author Katharine McGee imagines an alternate version of the modern world, one where the glittering age of monarchies has not yet faded--and where love is still powerful enough to change the course of history. "The lives of the American royal family will hook you in the very first pages and never let go. Relatable, believable, fantastical, aspirational, and completely addictive." --Sara Shepard, #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Pretty Little Liars and Perfectionists series

Download or read book The American Film Industry written by Tino Balio and published by Univ of Wisconsin Press. This book was released on 1985-03-04 with total page 677 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Upon its original publication in 1976, The American Film Industry was welcomed by film students, scholars, and fans as the first systematic and unified history of the American movie industry. Now this indispensible anthology has been expanded and revised to include a fresh introductory overview by editor Tino Balio and ten new chapters that explore such topics as the growth of exhibition as big business, the mode of production for feature films, the star as market strategy, and the changing economics and structure of contemporary entertainment companies. The result is a unique collection of essays, more comprehensive and current than ever, that reveals how the American movie industry really worked in a century of constant change-from kinetoscopes and the coming of sound to the star system, 1950s blacklisting, and today's corporate empires.

Download or read book American Audiences on Movies and Moviegoing written by Tom Stempel and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A unique perspective on half a century of American cinema -- from the audience's point of view. Tom Stempel goes beyond the comments of professional reviewers, concentrating on the opinions of ordinary people. He traces shifting trends in genre and taste, examining and questioning the power films have in American society. Stempel blends audience response with his own observations and analyzes box office results that identify the movies people actually went to see, not just those praised by the critics. Avoiding statistical summary, he presents the results of a survey on movies and moviegoing in the respondents' own words -- words that surprise, amuse, and irritate. The moviegoers respond: "Big bad plane, big bad motorcycle, and big bad Kelly McGillis." -- On Top Gun "All I can recall were the slave girls and the Golden Calf sequence and how it got me excited. My parents must have been very pleased with my enthusiasm for the Bible." -- On why a seven-year-old boy stayed up to watch The Ten Commandments "I learned the fine art of seduction by watching Faye Dunaway smolder." -- A woman's reaction to seeing Bonnie and Clyde "At age fifteen Jesus said he would be back, he just didn't say what he would look like." -- On E.T. "Quasimodo is every seventh grader." -- On why The Hunchback of Notre Dame should play well with middle-schoolers "A moronic, very 'Hollywoody' script, and a bunch of dancing teddy bears." -- On Return of the Jedi "I couldn't help but think how Mad magazine would lampoon this." -- On The Exorcist

Download or read book A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies written by Martin Scorsese and published by . This book was released on 1997 with total page 191 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This account of American films is balanced between subjective enthusiasm and objective analysis. Scorsese starts from his own childhood love affair with the cinema, when he discovered King Vidor's Dual in the Sun as a boy.

Download or read book Accent in North American Film and Television written by Charles Boberg and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 379 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A phonetic analysis of accents in North American film and television: how they vary and how they have changed.

Download or read book Hollywood and the Culture Elite written by Peter Decherney and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2005-04-06 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As Americans flocked to the movies during the first part of the twentieth century, the guardians of culture grew worried about their diminishing influence on American art, education, and American identity itself. Meanwhile, Hollywood studio heads were eager to stabilize their industry, solidify their place in mainstream society, and expand their new but tenuous hold on American popular culture. Peter Decherney explores how these needs coalesced and led to the development of a symbiotic relationship between the film industry and America's stewards of high culture. Formed during Hollywood's Golden Age (1915-1960), this unlikely partnership ultimately insured prominent places in American culture for both the movie industry and elite cultural institutions. It redefined Hollywood as an ideal American industry; it made movies an art form instead of simply entertainment for the masses; and it made moviegoing a vital civic institution. For their part, museums and universities used films to maintain their position as quintessential American institutions. As the book delves into the ties between Hollywood bigwigs and various cultural leaders, an intriguing cast of characters emerges, including the poet Vachel Lindsay, film producers Adolph Zukor and Joseph Kennedy, Hollywood flak and censor extraordinaire Will Hays, and philanthropist turned politician Nelson Rockefeller. Decherney considers how Columbia University's film studies program helped integrate Jewish students into American culture while also professionalizing screenwriting. He examines MoMA's career-savvy film curator Iris Barry, a British feminist once dedicated to stemming the tide of U.S. cultural imperialism, who ultimately worked with Hollywood and the U.S. government to fight fascism and communism and promote American values abroad. Other chapters explore Vachel Lindsay's progressive vision of movies as reinvigorating the public sphere through film libraries and museums; the promotion of movie connoisseurship at Harvard and other universities; and how the heir of a railroad magnate bankrolled the American avant-garde film movement. Amid ethnic diversity, the rise of mass entertainment, world war, and the global spread of American culture, Hollywood and cultural institutions worked together to insure their own survival and profitability and to provide a coherent, though shifting, American identity.

Download or read book The American Movie written by William K. Everson and published by Edizioni Savine. This book was released on 2016-03-14 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: ORIGINAL DESCRIPTION (1963) - One hundred years ago, seventy-five even, there were no movies at all. Today, they are accepted as a part of life, whether they are viewed in the movie theater or at home on the television screen. What happened to make movies accepted so quickly? The answer can be found, at least in part, in this broad survey of American film history and film art. Here is a discussion of the great film pioneers and great film landmarks, a look at technological changes, trends and cycles in movie making, a glance at the present and ahead to see where movies may be going. Beyond this, the book is also a guide, based on history and on a knowledge of what makes great films, to what a knowing movie viewer looks for when he watches a picture. It is a discussion of “film grammar,” of technique and of style in movie production, that makes the viewing of all movies, both old and new, a new adventure for the reader.

Download or read book Reforming Hollywood written by William D. Romanowski and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2012-06-14 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Religious Communication Association's Book of the Year Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable. In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. He shows how a broad spectrum of religious forces have played a role in Hollywood, from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched sources, he describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation's moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. "It is this human choice," noted one Protestant leader, "that is the basis of our religion." Tensions with Catholics, too, have loomed large--many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood's corrupting power. Romanowski shows that the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture, in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced "Hollywood elites," major studios noted the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. 20th Century-Fox formed FoxFaith to go after the "Passion dollar," and Disney took on evangelical Philip Anschutz as a partner to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen. William Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture. Reforming Hollywood is his most revealing, provocative, and groundbreaking work on this vital area of American society.

Download or read book High Comedy in American Movies written by Steve Vineberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2005 with total page 230 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: High Comedy in American Movies explores the 'comedy of manners' film throughout the twentieth century, from the advent of movie sound to recent films, and shows how class comedy's inside view of the aristocratic lifestyle has been influenced by the culture and times in which the movies are produced. Outlining the conventions of class comedy, Steve Vineberg discusses its British roots and analyzes how many American filmmakers have modified the genre, creating a distinctly American approach to class. Easily accessible, High Comedy in American Movies makes an engaging supplement to courses in American film, film genre, and film studies.

Download or read book We ll Always Have the Movies written by Robert L. McLaughlin and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2006-03-03 with total page 377 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We'll Always Have the Movies explores how movies made in Hollywood during World War II were vehicles for helping Americans understand the war. Far from being simplistic, flag-waving propaganda designed to evoke emotional reactions, these films offered audiences narrative structures that formed a foundation for grasping the nuances of war. These films asked audiences to consider the implications of the Nazi threat, they put a face on both our enemies and allies, and they explored changing wartime gender roles. We'll Always Have the Movies reveals how film after film repeated the narratives, character types, and rhetoric that made the war and each American's role in it comprehensible. Robert L. McLaughlin and Sally E. Parry have screened more than 600 movies made between 1937 and 1946—including many never before discussed in this context—and have analyzed the cultural and historical importance of these films in explaining the war to moviegoers. Pre-Pearl Harbor films such as Sergeant York, Foreign Correspondent, and The Great Dictator established the rationale for the war in Europe. After the United States entered the war, films such as Air Force, So Proudly We Hail! and Back to Bataan conveyed reasons for U.S. involvement in the Pacific. The Hitler Gang, Sahara, and Bataan defined our enemies; and Mrs. Miniver, Mission to Moscow, and Dragon Seed defined our allies. Some movies—The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, Hail the Conquering Hero, and Lifeboat among them—explored homefront anxieties about the war's effects on American society. Of the many films that sought to explain the politics behind and the social impact of the war—and why it concerned Americans—Casablanca is perhaps one of the most widely recognized. McLaughlin and Parry argue that Rick's Café Américain serves as a United Nations, sheltering characters who represent countries being oppressed by Germany. At Rick's, these characters learn that they share a common love of freedom, which is embodied in patriotism; from this commonality, they overcome their differences and work together to solve a conflict that affects them all. As the representative American, Rick Blain (Humphrey Bogart) cannot idly stand by in the face of injustice, and he ultimately sides with those being oppressed. Bogart's character is a metaphor for America, which could also come out of its isolationism to be a true world leader and unite with its allies to defeat a common enemy. Collectively, Hollywood's war-era films created a mythic history of the war that, even today, has more currency than the actual events of World War II.

Download or read book The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States written by American Film Institute and published by Univ of California Press. This book was released on 1997 with total page 962 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: After more than fifteen years, this initial volume of the American Film Institute Catalog series is again in print. The 1920s set covers the important filmmaking period when "movies" became "talkies," and the careers of many influential directors and actors were launched. Films such as Wings, The Phantom of the Opera, All Quiet on the Western Front, and The Jazz Singer are included in this volume.