In that period, heralded by the words of Al Jolson in The Jazz Singer, fortunes were made and lost, and the American film industry came fully into its own.

    These notes take us behind the scenes, and at the same time brings us into a private world of exhilaration, pain and dramatic conflict.

    Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart - 'the eccentric' - the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play. Named after the U.S.-retitling of Carlos Aured's The Blue Eyes of the Broken Doll, House of Psychotic Women is an examination of these characters through a daringly personal autobiographical lens. Anecdotes and memories interweave with film history, criticism, trivia and confrontational imagery to create a reflective personal history and an examination of female madness, both onscreen and off. This sharply-designed book with a 32-page full-colour section is packed with rare stills, posters, pressbooks and artwork that combine with family photos and artifacts to form a titillating sensory overload, with a filmography that traverses the acclaimed and the obscure in equal measure. Films covered include The Entity, The Corruption of Chris Miller, Singapore Sling, 3 Women, Toys Are Not for Children, Repulsion, Let's Scare Jessica to Death, The Haunting of Julia, Secret Ceremony, Cutting Moments, Out of the Blue, Mademoiselle, The Piano Teacher, Possession, Antichrist and hundreds more!

    By the end of the following year, moviegoers couldn't get enough of him and his iconic persona, the Little Tramp. Perpetually outfitted with baggy pants, a limp cane, and a dusty bowler hat, the character became so beloved that Chaplin was mobbed by fans, journalists, and critics at every turn. Although he never particularly liked giving interviews, he accepted the demands of his stardom, giving detailed responses about his methods of making movies. He quickly progressed from making two-reel shorts to feature-length masterpieces such as The Gold Rush, City Lights, and Modern Times. Charlie Chaplin: Interviews offers a complex portrait of perhaps the world's greatest cinematic comedian and a man who is considered to be one of the most influential screen artists in movie history. The interviews he granted, performances in and of themselves, are often as well crafted as his films. Unlike the Little Tramp, Chaplin the interviewee comes across as melancholy and serious, as the titles of some early interviews-"Beneath the Mask: Witty, Wistful, Serious Is the Real Charlie" or "The Hamlet-Like Nature of Charlie Chaplin"-make abundantly clear. His first sound feature, The Great Dictator, is a direct condemnation of Hitler. His later films such as Monsieur Verdoux and Limelight obliquely criticize American policy and consequently generated mixed reactions from critics and little response from moviegoers. During this late period of his filmmaking, Chaplin granted interviews less often. The three later interviews included here are thus extremely valuable, offering long, contemplative analyses of the man's life and work.

    With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating "A Fistful of Dollars", the first in a trilogy of films (with "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time in the West", these films came to define the Spaghetti Western

    They had already made films that redefined the gangster movie, the screwball comedy, the fable, and the film noir, among others. No Country is just one of many Coen brothers films to center on the struggles of complex characters to understand themselves and their places in the strange worlds they inhabit. To

    Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, SILENT MOVIES captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films. SILENT MOVIES also looks at the technology of early film, the use of color photography, and the restoration work being spearheaded by some of Hollywood's most important directors, such as Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola. Richly illustrated from the Library of Congress's extensive collection of posters, paper prints, film stills, and memorabilia-most of which have never been in print-SILENT MOVIES is an important work of history that will also be a sought-after gift book for all lovers of film.

    It gives a chronological overview of film, analyzing genres such as westerns and sci-fi; explores different artistic approaches, techniques, and effects; and profiles a wide variety of directors, from Alfred Hitchcock to Steven Spielberg.. . The book uncovers the secrets of film reviewing and the conventions reviewers adopt when they evaluate films. This new edition includes an expanded section concerning film studies on the Internet. Whatever readers' interest in film, Teach Yourself Film Studies will provide them with the skills to turn them into well-informed film critics..

    Its focus is on formalism - how the forms of the film create meaning. It is updated with recent films and personalities for students.

    Its fans tend to be fanatical, congregating at 'Lebowski Conventions' in bowling alleys across American and Britain, and even dressing up as characters from the film. Among the funniest films of the last twenty-five years, and one of the high-water marks of 1990s genre recycling and pastiche, The Big Lebowski is also littered with playful and subversive references to film history, especially to Raymond Chandler's world of hardboiled detective classics and the world of film noir. The Big Lebowski is the rarest kind of film, a comedy whose jokes become funnier with repetition. The same goes for its multitudinous jukebox-like references to other films, many of which open up vistas for intertextual interpretation. Underneath the film's breakneck pacing and foul-mouthed characters, a farcical collection of flakes, losers, and phonies, is a surprisingly humane account of what fools we mortals be. It is one of the oddest buddy films ever made, with extraordinary performances by Jeff Bridges and John Goodman. In this study, The Big Lebowski is set into the context of 1990s Hollywood cinema, anatomised for its witty relationship with the classics which it satirises, and discussed in terms of its key theme: the hopeless flailing of ridiculously unmanly men in the world of discombobulated, mixed-up, or put-on identities that is Los Angeles.

    But the drama they project on screen is only half the picture. Stretching back from its earliest days of two-reel silent films to the latest 3-D digital blockbusters, film history provides a cast of characters ready to spill witty bon mots, outrageous pronouncements, and heartfelt reflections. The Filmmaker Says is a colorful compendium of quotations from more than one hundred of history's most influential and opinionated creators of filmed entertainment. Paired like guests at the ultimate filmgeek dinner party—a celebrated filmmaker of today might sit next to a giant from the silent era—the members of this raucous crew puts on a show arguing, complimenting, and disagreeing with each other about every step of the moviemaking process. A perfect gift for working filmmakers, aspiring auteurs, and avid moviegoers, The Filmmaker Says will delight anyone who has dreamed of yelling "action" or just can't wait for the lights to go down and the curtain to go up.

    A LOT OF THESE SCREENWRITING BOOKS LIKE TO FILL YOUR HEAD WITH FALSE PROMISES AND EASY TRICKS. BUT IT’S SO DAMN FAR FROM THE OBVIOUS TRUTH: BECOMING A TALENTED WRITER TAKES A LONG TIME AND A LOT OF HARD WORK. THEY ALSO CONVENIENTLY FORGET TO MENTION THAT THE ODDS ARE AGAINST YOU. THERE ARE OVER A MILLION SCRIPTS ALREADY FLOATING AROUND HOLLYWOOD. HULK HAS READ, OH... A COUPLE THOUSAND OF THEM. AND NEARLY EVERY SINGLE PERSON HULK MEETS IN THE FILM INDUSTRY ALREADY HAS A SCRIPT OF SOME SORT. NOT ONLY DOES THE SHEER VOLUME OF SCRIPTS MAKE IT DIFFICULT TO DISTINGUISH ONESELF IN THIS CLIMATE, BUT SO DOES THE FACT THAT THERE ARE ALREADY A VAST NUMBER OF TALENTED, PROFESSIONAL WRITERS IN NEED OF WORK. SO GIVEN ALL THESE CRIPPLING ODDS, WE SHOULD ALL JUST GIVE UP, RIGHT? WELL, NO. YOU’RE NOT HERE READING THIS BECAUSE THAT REALITY BOTHERS YOU. AND THAT’S THE THING ABOUT THE MOVIES: THEY’RE WONDERFUL. THEY’RE THE IMAGINATION OF STORYTELLING MADE TANGIBLE. THEY’RE OUR DREAMS MADE REAL. WHO WOULDN’T WANT TO BE A PART OF ALL THAT? FILM CRIT HULK WAS CREATED IN A CHAOTIC LAB EXPERIMENT INVOLVING GAMMA RADIATION, THE GHOST OF PAULINE KAEL, AND TELEPODS FOR SOME REASON. NOW HULK HAS A DEEP AND ABIDING LOVE OF CINEMA WHEREIN HULK RECOGNIZES THE INHERENT VALUES OF POPULAR, NARRATIVE, OR EXPERIMENTAL STYLES! THROUGH A UNIQUE JOURNEY, HULK HAS ENDED UP WORKING IN HOLLYWOOD FOR OVER A DECADE AND NOW WRITES ABOUT CINEMA AND STORYTELLING IN THOROUGHLY HULK-SIZED FASHION. AND NOW YOU HOLD IN YOUR HANDS / HAVE ON YOUR SCREEN / WHATEVER IN YOUR WHATEVER, THE FIRST EBOOK BY FILM CRIT HULK. THE ONLY THING IT MEANS TO BE IS HELPFUL. Free sentence case version included!

    The magic of the silent screen, illuminated by the recollections of those who created it.A narrative and photographic history of the early days of the movies, combining fact, anecdote, and reminiscence in a critical survey of films, actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, technicians, and other participants and hangers-on.

    It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just thirty-two days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favorite film, celebrating moral fortitude.Yet what has been often overlooked is that High Noon was made during the height of the Hollywood blacklist, a time of political inquisition and personal betrayal. In the middle of the film shoot, screenwriter Carl Foreman was forced to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his former membership in the Communist Party. Refusing to name names, he was eventually blacklisted and fled the United States. (His co-authored screenplay for another classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, went uncredited in 1957.) Examined in light of Foreman's testimony, High Noon's emphasis on courage and loyalty takes on deeper meaning and importance.In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel tells the story of the making of a great American Western, exploring how Carl Foreman's concept of High Noon evolved from idea to first draft to final script, taking on allegorical weight. Both the classic film and its turbulent political times emerge newly illuminated.

    80 black-and-white photos.