Book picks similar to
Glamour of the Gods: Photographs from the John Kobal Foundation by Robert Dance
cinema
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George Cukor: A Double Life
Patrick McGilligan - 1991
Relates the life of the secretly gay Hollywood director who guided to stardom such legendary actresses as Garbo, Bergman, Garland, and Hepburn.
The Fat Lady Sang
Robert Evans - 2013
From the legendary producer and author of The Kid Stays in the Picture—one of the greatest Hollywood memoirs ever written—comes a long-awaited second work with all the elements of a star-studded blockbuster: glamour and conflict, giddy highs and near-fatal lows, struggle and perseverance, tragedy and triumph.
My Life with Groucho: A Son's Eye View
Arthur Marx - 1954
The author shares his memories of his father and provides an overview of Groucho's career, his family life, and the turmoil of his final years.
Mary Pickford Rediscovered
Kevin Brownlow - 1999
In this lavish tribute to Pickford (1892-1979), her enormous and wide-ranging body of work is illustrated with fabulous film stills, rare production shots, and personal photographs -- most never before published -- from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library.Today's audiences have little knowledge of Pickford's films, let alone of her enormous behind-the-scenes power as one of Hollywood's pioneering producers and cofounder of United Artists. This first illustrated filmography of Pickford's career accords her achievements the recognition they deserve. Noted film historian Kevin Brownlow draws on interviews with Pickford and her circle to provide entertaining film-by-film commentaries full of wonderful anecdotes about the silent era.
Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects: Essential & Advanced Techniques
Chris Meyer - 2000
More than a step-by-step review of the features in After Effects, you will learn how the program thinks so that you can realize your own visions more quickly and efficiently. This full-color book is jammed full of tips, gotchas, and sage advice that will help you survive whatever your next project throws at you. Creating Motion Graphics 4th Edition has been heavily revised, reuniting the previous two volumes plus adding detailed coverage of new features introduced in After Effects 7 and CS3 Professional to form one massive, essential reference. The enclosed DVD-ROM contains source footage and project files for the numerous exercises which help reinforce each concept. The DVD also includes over 180 pages of additional information, including lengthy Bonus Chapters on Expressions and Effects.Authored in CS3, also included is access to a free web chapter written for CS4. * Free CS4 web chapter included with the book* Mastering animation through the use of keyframes, motion paths, and the Graph Editor* Blending imagery using alpha channels, masks, mattes, modes, and stencils* Building groups and hierarchies through parenting and nested comps* Extended coverage of type animation, paint tools and 3D space* Advanced subjects such as keying, motion tracking, expressions, and video issues* Includes over 180 PDF pages of bonus content on the DVD* Extensive coverage of the new CS3 features including the Shape and Puppet tools, Brainstorm, per-character 3D text, color management, and more!
Moe Howard & The 3 Stooges: The Pictorial Biography of the Wildest Trio in the History of American Entertainment
Moe Howard - 1960
Scarlett O'Hara's Younger Sister
Evelyn Keyes - 1977
She left her 1st husband and he committed suicide and she never left another man. She made them leave her. Men and women love this story she knew how to walk the walk and talk the talk.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood
Karina Longworth - 2018
But as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was Howard Hughes—the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer.His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes—perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era—commoditized male desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes’s grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these actresses would not escape his clutches.Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, Seduction is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its golden age—a legacy that endures nearly a century later.
Olivier
Terry Coleman - 2005
But Olivier was as elusive in life as he was on the stage, a bold and practiced pretender who changed names, altered his identity, and defied characterization. In this mesmerizing book, acclaimed biographer Terry Coleman draws for the first time on the vast archive of Olivier’s private papers and correspondence, and those of his family, finally uncovering the history and the private self that Olivier worked so masterfully all his life to obscure. Beginning with the death of his mother at age eleven, Olivier was defined throughout his life by a passionate devotion to the women closest to him. Acting and sex were for him inseparable: through famous romances with Vivien Leigh and Joan Plowright and countless trysts with lesser-known mistresses, these relationships were constantly entangled with his stage work, each feeding the other and driving Olivier to greater heights. And the heights were great: at every step he was surrounded by the foremost celebrities of the time, on both sides of the Atlantic—Richard Burton, Greta Garbo, William Wyler, Katharine Hepburn. The list is as long as it is dazzling.Here is the first comprehensive account of the man whose autobiography, written late in his life, told only a small part of the story. In Olivier, Coleman uncovers the origins of Olivier’s genius and reveals the methods of the century’s most fascinating performer.
Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings: Legends Never Die Updated
Les Macdonald - 2013
Hollywood has so many stories to tell and, unfortunately, so many of them do not have happy endings. From Marilyn Monroe to posthumous Oscar winner Heath Ledger, this book lays bare some of the myths and gets to the heart of some of Hollywood's Unhappiest Endings.
I Know Where I'm Going: A Personal Biography of Katharine Hepburn
Charlotte Chandler - 2010
Introduced by George Cukor, who directed Hepburn in such classic films as Little Women, The Philadelphia Story, and Adam's Rib, Chandler socialized with Hepburn at the Cukor estate, where the star was then living in a cottage on the grounds. Hepburn agreed to allow Chandler to tape their conversations, during which she spoke candidly about her personal and professional lives. She described finding the body of her adored older brother, an apparent suicide at fifteen, and assuming his birthday as her own. She told Chandler intimate details of her marriage and divorce from Ludlow Ogden Smith, "Luddy," who remained a friend, and of her affair with pilot Howard Hughes. She said that she enjoyed diving nude off the wings of his seaplane when they went swimming together. Her warmest recollections were of her twenty-seven-year affair with Spencer Tracy. Chandler also interviewed others who knew and worked with Hepburn during her long career, from Cukor to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., Cary Grant, Christopher Reeve, and many others. All of them described an actress who was supremely talented, professional, and confident, who always knew where she was going. By the time she retired, Hepburn had won a record four Best Actress Academy Awards and had been nominated twelve times. Her acting career spanned six decades, and she was universally acknowledged as one of the finest -- if not the finest -- actors in film history. Her range was enormous: She acted in serious drama and in screwball comedies with equal skill. As she revealed to Chandler in their conversations, her family was a great influence on Hepburn. Her mother was a suffragette and her beloved father a doctor. She would eventually retire to the home where she grew up (although it had been rebuilt after it was destroyed in a storm), symbolically affirming the family values that shaped her personality. She was careful to distinguish her personal and professional lives, telling Chandler that she thought of herself as "Kathy," a childhood name (she had called herself "Jimmy" for a while in childhood), but regarded the public Katharine Hepburn as "the creature." I Know Where I'm Going is a fascinating, delightful, and personal book that brings readers as close as possible to the real Katharine Hepburn.
Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille
Scott Eyman - 2010
DeMille lived a life as epic as any of his cinematic masterpieces. As a child DeMille learned the Bible from his father, a theology student and playwright who introduced Cecil and his older brother, William, to the theater. Tutored by impresario David Belasco, DeMille discovered how audiences responded to showmanship: sets, lights, costumes, etc. He took this knowledge with him to Los Angeles in 1913, where he became one of the movie pioneers, in partnership with Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). Working out of a barn on streets fragrant with orange blossom and pepper trees, the Lasky company turned out a string of successful silents, most of them directed by DeMille, who became one of the biggest names of the silent era. With films such as The Squaw Man, Brewster’s Millions, Joan the Woman, and Don’t Change Your Husband, he was the creative backbone of what would become Paramount Studios. In 1923 he filmed his first version of The Ten Commandments and later a second biblical epic, King of Kings, both enormous box-office successes. Although his reputation rests largely on the biblical epics he made, DeMille’s personal life was no morality tale. He remained married to his wife, Constance, for more than fifty years, but for most of the marriage he had three mistresses simultaneously, all of whom worked for him. He showed great loyalty to a small group of actors who knew his style, but he also discovered some major stars, among them Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, and later, Charlton Heston. DeMille was one of the few silent-era directors who made a completely successful transition to sound. In 1952 he won the Academy Award for Best Picture with The Greatest Show on Earth. When he remade The Ten Commandments in 1956, it was an even bigger hit than the silent version. He could act, too: in Billy Wilder’s classic film Sunset Boulevard, DeMille memorably played himself. In the 1930s and 1940s DeMille became a household name thanks to the Lux Radio Theater, which he hosted. But after falling out with a union, he gave up the program, and his politics shifted to the right as he championed loyalty oaths and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts. As Scott Eyman brilliantly demonstrates in this superbly researched biography, which draws on a massive cache of DeMille family papers not available to previous biographers, DeMille was much more than his clichéd image. A gifted director who worked in many genres; a devoted family man and loyal friend with a highly unconventional personal life; a pioneering filmmaker: DeMille comes alive in these pages, a legend whose spectacular career defined an era.
Woody Allen: A Biography
John Baxter - 1998
It also explores the real Woody Allen, the critically acclaimed filmmaker from the Upper East Side, and his amusing movie persona of a neurotic and lovable loser.Shrewdly and effectively deconstructing Woody, John Baxter's biography illuminates Allen's preoccupation with sex and mortality, his personal quirks and obsessions, his manipulation of celebrity, and his cinematic achievement as chronicler and court jester of Manhattan's intellectual elite."A splendidly written, exhaustive account and a major achievement" - The Observer"Astute and highly entertaining biography" - Daily Telegraph"A bracing corrective to the usual po-faced, sycophantic studies of the cult of Woody" - Mail on Sunday"Full of interesting information for cinema enthusiasts" - The Spectator"The saga [of Woody and Mia] makes compulsive reading" - The Guardian
DSLR Cinema: Crafting the Film Look with Video
Kurt Lancaster - 2010
Exploring the cinematic quality and features offered by hybrid DSLRs, this book empowers the filmmaker to craft visually stunning images inexpensively.Learn to think more like a cinematographer than a videographer, whether shooting for a feature, short fiction, documentary, video journalism, or even a wedding.
DSLR Cinema
offers insight into different shooting styles, real-world tips and techniques, and advice on postproduction workflow as it guides you in crafting a film-like look.Case studies feature an international cast of cutting edge DSLR shooters today, including Philip Bloom (England), Bernardo Uzeda (Brazil), Rii Schroer (Germany), Jeremy Ian Thomas (United States), Shane Hurlbut, ASC (United States), and Po Chan (Hong Kong). Their films are examined in detail, exploring how each exemplifies great storytelling, exceptional visual character, and how you can push the limits of your DSLR.