This book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and reveals instead the genius of a system of collaboration and conflict. Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making-and unmaking-of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel. Richly illustrated and highly readable, The Genius of the System gives the definitive view of the workings of the Old Hollywood and the foundations of the New.

    She catapulted to fame after winning Motion Picture magazine's 1921 "Fame and Fortune" contest. The greatest box-office draw of her day she once received 45,000 fan letters in a single month, Clara Bow's on screen vitality and allure that beguiled thousands, however, would be her undoing off-camera. David Stenn captures her legendary rise to stardom and fall from grace, her success marred by studio exploitation and sexual scandals.

    In this first collection of Harlan Ellison's cinema criticism (with expanded, never-before-collected articles as well as an essay written especially for this volume) come from the darkened interiors of a thousand movie houses where this most peculiar of all Observers of the Passing Scene has spent much of his life. The view is guaranteed to make you grind your teeth in anger, nod your head in blessed agreement, and open your eyes in a manner of judging films that is definitely not plebeian. Harlan Ellison's love affair with movies is obvious. As an essayist, he has no equal; as a film critic he has no friends. Take care.

    An invaluable reference source.

    Screenplays for Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living, and the unmade sequel Flamingos Forever.

    This is the new screenwriter′s bible.

    There are also fresh insights from Burton's peers, in an attempt to provide a frank and intimate account of his life.

    Combining biographical information with discussions of the films' aesthetic strategies and cultural significance, David Bordwell questions the popular image of Ozu as the traditional Japanese artisan and examines the aesthetic nature and functions of his cinema.

    It provides a self-portrait in words of Truffaut 's generous, lively personality as well as his valued opinions on film theory and criticism. Within this collection are letters to Alfred Hitchcock, Louis Malle, Jean-Luc Godard, and many up-and-coming screen-writers Truffaut was eager to nurture. What emerges is an insightful account of both the film industry and one of its most influential, articulate directors.

    It was director George Cukor's first foray into musicals, his first color film, and it was, without a doubt, Judy Garland's greatest screen performance.With incredible detail and color, Ronald Haver gives us the fascinating story of the making, marketing and restoration of this groundbreaking classic. Here is how producer Sid Luft orchestrated the deal for his wife, how Cukor was selected to direct, how James Mason was cast to co-star and how Moss Hart's script was developed. Here are the myriad techincal problems, the clashes of personalities and the shocking emotional ups and downs of the film's star. Here, finally, is the author's own mission to restore the film to its original length and glory in the 1980s.

    Not even Walt Disney has produced a more popular and brilliantly witty oeuvre of cartoon shorts (as was written in Newsweek recently, Disney cartoons may have been more beautiful; Warner's cartoons were always more interesting.). 100 line drawings, 255 full-color illustrations.

    

    Over the past few decades, however, independent cinema has produced a body of fascinating films that provide intensive critiques of nearly every element of the cinematic apparatus. The experience of these films simultaneously depends on and redefines our relationship to the movies.Critical Cinema provides a collection of in-depth interviews with some of the most accomplished "critical" filmmakers. These interviews demonstrate the sophistication of their thinking about film (and a wide range of other concerns) and serve as an accessible introduction to this important area of independent cinema. Each interview is preceded by a general introduction to the filmmaker's work; detailed filmographies and bibliographies are included. Critical Cinema will be a valuable resource for all those involved in the formal study of film, and will be essential reading for film lovers interested in keeping abreast of recent developments in North American cinema.INTERVIEWEES: Hollis Frampton, Larry Gottheim, Robert Huot, Taka Iimura, Carolee Schneeman, Tom Chomont, J.J. Murphy, Beth B and Scott B, John Waters, Vivienne Dick, Bruce Conner, Robert Nelson, Babette Mangolte, George Kuchar, Diana Barrie, Manuel DeLanda, Morgan Fisher.

    It had a tremendous influence on French filmmakers and on world cinema in general. Beyond its significance in film history, it was also a film of considerable cultural impact. In Breathless, Jean-Luc Godard captured the spirit of a disillusioned generation and fashioned a style, which drew on the past, to parade that disillusionment.         In his introduction, Dudley Andrew brilliantly explains what Godard set out to accomplish in Breathless. He illuminates the intertextual and cultural references of the film and the tensions within it between tradition and innovation. This volume also features, for the first time in English, the complete and accurate continuity script of Breathless, together with Francois Truffaut's surprisingly detailed original treatment. Also included are an in-depth selection of reviews and criticism in French and English; a brief biographical sketch of the director's life that covers the development of his career, as well as a filmography and selected bibliography.

    His life, it seems in retrospect, can be seen in three phases: his early life in his native state of California; the war years of the 1940s, and the years thereafter.In the earliest interviews in this collection, his is seen actually hiding from publicity, living in and near Monterey Bay, California, as he struggled to become established as a writer.Later, the publication of The Grapes of' Wrath, in 1939, became extremely controversial; he left the country for a time to escape the unceasing demands of' the press and the public. The Grapes of Wrath is now generally considered the definitive novel of Depression-era America and is still widely read. Interviews in this collection show him dealing with two failed marriages before a successful third marriage; moving from one writing project to another, dealing with fame and controversy and traveling. These collected interviews offer a unique portrait of a major twentieth-century novelist at work and throughout his life. John Steinbeck won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1962.

    In opposition to these positions, Modleski asserts that Hitchcock is deeply ambivalent towards his female characters. The Women Who Knew Too Much examines both the director's complex attitude toward femininity, and the implications of that attitutde for the audience. The book represents a significant contribution to the debates in film theory around the issue of gender and film spectatorship; in particular, it seeks to complicate the view that women's response to patriarchal cinema can only be masochistic, while men's response is necessarily sadistic.Applying the theories of psychoanalysis, mass culture, and a broad range of film (and) feminist criticism, Modleski offers compelling readings of seven Hitchcock films from various periods in his career.

    It is a masterly conflation of the Shakespearean history plays that feature Falstaff, the great comic figure played by Welles himself in the film. For Welles, the character was also potentially tragic: the doomed friendship between Falstaff and Prince Hal becomes an image of the end of an age. To this epic subject Welles brings the innovative film techniques that made him famous in Citizen Kane, The Lady from Shanghai,"and Touch of Evil.This volume offers a complete continuity script of Chimes at Midnight, including its famous battle sequence. Each shot is described in detail and is keyed to the original Shakesperian sources, thus making the volume an invaluable guide to Welles as an adaptor and creator of texts. The first complete transcription of the continuity script of Chimes is accompanied by the editor's critical introduction on Welles's transformation of Shakespeare; a special interview with Keith Baxter, one of the film's principal actors, which discusses its production history; reviews and articles; and a biographical sketch of Welles, a filmography, and a bibliography.

    This book turns a long-overdue spotlight on many who made memorable contributions to that crowded, exhilarating filmmaking scene. John Agar, Beverly Garland, Samuel Z. Arkoff, Gene Corman, and two dozen more reminisce about the most popular genre titles of the era. Lengthy, in-depth interviews feature canny questions, pointed observations, rare photos, and good fun.

    Rodowick offers a critical analysis of the development of film theory since 1968. He shows how debates concerning the literary principles of modernism—semiotics, structuralism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, and feminism—have transformed our understanding of cinematic meaning. Rodowick explores the literary paradigms established in France during the late 1960s and traces their influence on the work of diverse filmmaker/theorists including Jean-Luc Godard, Peter Gidal, Laura Mulvey, and Peter Wollen. By exploring the "new French feminisms" of Irigaray and Kristeva, he investigates the relation of political modernism to psychoanalysis and theories of sexual difference. In a new introduction written especially for this edition, Rodowick considers the continuing legacy of this theoretical tradition in relation to the emergence of cultural studies approaches to film.

    Probably the most outrageous autobiography ever--less a memoir than a hyperbolically pornographic performance piece.--Newsweek. photos.

    Here Kristin Thompson "defamiliarizes" the reader with eleven different films. Developing the technique formulated in her Eisenstein's Ivan the Terrible (Princeton, 1981), she clearly demonstrates the flexibility of the neoformalist approach. She argues that critics often use cut-and-dried methods and choose films that easily fit those methods. Neoformalism, on the other hand, encourages the critic to deal with each film differently and to modify his or her analytical assumptions continually.Thompson's analyses are thus refreshingly varied and revealing, ranging from an ordinary Hollywood film, Terror by Night, to such masterpieces as Late Spring and Lancelot du Lac. She proposes a formal historical way of dealing with realism, using Bicycle Thieves and The Rules of the Game as examples. Stage Fright and Laura provide cases in which the classical cinema defamiliarizes its own conventions by playing with audience expectations. Other chapters deal with Tati's Les Vacances de Monsieur Hulot and Play Time and Godard's Tout va bien and Sauve qui peut (la vie).Although neoformalist analysis is a rigorous, distinctive approach, it avoids extensive specialized vocabulary and esoteric concepts: the essays here can be read separately by those interested in the individual films. The book's overall purpose, however, goes beyond making these particular films more accessible and intriguing to propose new ways of looking at cinema as a whole.

    Richard Abel has devised an organizational scheme of six nearly symmetrical periods that serve to bite into the discursive flow of early French writing on the cinema. Each of the periods is discussed in a separate and extensive historical introduction, with convincing explications of the various concepts current at the time. In each instance, Abel goes on to provide a complementary anthology of selected texts in translation. Amounting to a portable archive, these anthologies make available a rich selection of nearly one hundred and fifty important texts, most of them never before published in English.

    But on July 23, 1982, a spectacular explosion on the set of Twilight Zone: The Movie knocked a helicopter out of the sky and into the path of two small children and veteran actor Vic Morrow, crushing one child and decapitating Morrow and the other youngster.How could this tragedy occur? Was anyone to blame? Outrageous Conduct reveals the facts behind the accident, when skilled movie-makers exceeded the bounds of safety; the anxiety, when Hollywood closed ranks to protect its own; and the raucous and very public trial, when countercharges of "outrageous conduct" flew between the attorney and the furious film director, John Landis.Here are the intimate stories of the people behind the headlines: Landis, the driven young director of Animal House and other hits; Steven Spielberg, the superstar co-producer; Deputy District Attorney Lea D'Agostino, who accused Landis of manslaughter, but would have preferred a charge of murder; Vic Morrow, the fading star who would risk everything to salvage his career; and Renee Chen, six, and Myca Lee [sic], seven, whose parents had emigrated to the United States in search of a better life only to lose their children in a "make-believe" war. Here too are the opinions of top Hollywood professionals, forced to choose sides in a legal battle that tore the movie world apart.Outrageous Conduct probes the boundaries between art and safety, daring and responsibility. Like Indecent Exposure and Final Cut, it exposes the excesses and hubris of the world's most glamorous and seductive profession.STEPHEN FARBER was the film critic for New West magazine. He has also written for The New York Times, Esquire, and Film Comment.MARC GREEN was the film critic for Books and Arts and has written for California Magazine. He and Stephen Farber have reported on the Hollywood scene for almost twenty years and are the authors of Hollywood Dynasties.

    

    It was a time when big studios lavished fortunes on poster campaigns - from modest one-sheets posted on neighbourhood fences to the gargantuan forty-eight sheets that usurped entire sides of multi-storey buildings. Hollywood knew that the right image could seduce millions past the box office and into the theatre. Today such graphics fetch five-figure prices from collectors seeking a Casablanca or a King Kong.

    Importantly, this was also the period of Eisenstein’s great silent masterpieces, The Strike, The Battleship Potemkin, October and The General Line, and of his controversial sojourns in Hollywood and Mexico.

    600 plates in B&W AND COLOUR.

    Reasons why this movie guide will improve your horror viewing:- Capsulized reviews of almost 4,000 genre films, with major cast and directing credits- Reviews of films ignored by other major movie guides- Coded so you can instantly see if a certain title can be rented or purchased at your video store- Reviews of movies and offbeat items made exclusively for videocassette- Hundreds of new photographs from the author's private collection, many never before printed.The authorities in the field know The Creature Features Movie Guide is the only true index to Horror from A to Z.

    

    This time, he and Lisa Jones document his transition from struggling independent to mainstream filmmaker with the making of the Columbia Pictures film, School Daze. No longer working with a small cast and a painfully tight budget, Spike Lee and his crew find themselves working in a swirl of university politics, a cast of thousands, big musical production numbers and the not-insignificant pressures of coming up with a hit in the majors. He "uplifts the race" by demystifying the process of producing an entertaining commercial film that, at the same time, delivers a stinging - yet funny - critique on American culture.

    

    Kesler's definitive book, The Wild Wild West, The Series (1988). Completely re-edited and redesigned, much of the previous book's overall style and content remains. Lots of color has been added, along with cleaner copy and fresh material. There are great photos of the original book's 1988 San Diego Comic-Con launch. This is an absolute MUST for any fan of the series (1965-1969).

    It illustrates how masochism extends into the area of artistic form, language and the production of pleasure.

    The genesis for Oscar nominated screenplay to the film lies in a faded notebook in Terry Gilliam's attic. It began life in 1977 when Gilliam was working on the Jabberwocky. He had had in his mind for years an image of a totalitarian state, an image of a superficial society where dreams have become scarce. He retired to a cottage in Wales for a month with Jabberwocky screenwriter Charles Alverson and created a 150 page screenplay which, eight years later he and Tom Stoppard used as the blueprint for the final film. previously undisclosed fantasy sequences, plot lines and characters. The original script is wonderfully biting. It also has some of the most eccentric characters in all of cinematic history. In addition to the full, restored, previously unseen screen-play, the book includes an extensive foreword chronicling the beginnings of the project, featuring extracts and sketches from Gilliam's notebooks and includes new in-depth interviews with both Terry Gilliam and Charles Alverson talking for the first time about his contribution to the movie. With its huge cult appeal this is a fascinating insight into the evolution of a modern movie classic.

    The director of his greatest hit, Enter the Dragon, brings you this explosive biography. Over 150 rare photos of the Little Dragon's life and career. Interviews with his family and friends. Includes over 200 pages of facts, quotes, and photos, many published for the first time.

    This comprehensive volume celebrates the innovative studio that gave birth to Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Snow White, Bambi and many other animated favorites.

    

    Ranging from the earliest short subjects of Charles Chaplin to the contemporary features of Robert DeNiro, he develops a useful means of analyzing performance in the age of mechanical reproduction; at the same time, he reveals the ideological implications behind various approaches to acting, and suggests ways that behavior on the screen can be linked to the presentation of self in society.Naremore's discussion of such figures as Lillian Gish, Marlene Dietrich, James Cagney, and Cary Grant will interest the specialist and the general reader alike, helping to establish standards and methods for future writing about performers and their craft.

    This is a complete and unabridged version of the book.

    Viera presents an unrivaled collection of movie stills and portrait photographs from Hollywood's golden years, including notes on the films for which they were taken and anecdotes about the stars.

    Share in her stories about Nazimova, Valentino, Lon Chaney, Tom Mix, Clark Cable, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Barrymore, Charlie Chaplin, Greta Garbo, John Gilbert, Gloria Swanson and many others. She appeared in over 60 films and was best remembered for her role as Esmeralda in the 1923, "The Hunchback of Notre Dame".

    Schuchman's inquiry into how deafness has been treated in   movies provides us with yet another window onto social history in addition to   a fresh angle from which to view Hollywood. Moreover, he joins the ranks of   the few scholars who have made use of Hollywood studio archives."   -- Thomas Cripps, author of Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American   Film, 1900-1942