Search results for ""Author Holly"

At age 26, Advika Srinivasan considers herself a failed screenwriter. To pay the bills and keep her mind off of the recent death of her twin sister, she's taken to bartending A-list events, including the 2015 Governors Ball, the official afterparty of the Oscars. There, in a cinematic dream come true, she meets the legendary Julian Zelding-a film producer as handsome as Paul Newman and ten times as powerful-fresh off his fifth best picture win. Despite their 41-year age difference, Advika falls helplessly under his spell, and their evening flirtation ignites into a whirlwind courtship and elopement. Advika is enthralled by Julian's charm and luxurious lifestyle, but while Julian loves to talk about his famous friends and achievements, he smoothly changes the subject whenever his previous relationships come up. Then, a month into their marriage, Julian's first wife-the famous actress Evie Lockhart-dies, and a tabloid reports a shocking stipulation in her will. A single film reel and $1,000,000 will be bequeathed to "Julian's latest child bride" on one condition: Advika must divorce him first.Shaken out of her love fog and still-simmering grief over the loss of her sister-and uneasy about Julian's sudden, inexplicable urge to start a family-Advika decides to investigate him through the eyes and experiences of his exes. From reading his first wife's biography, to listening to his second wife's confessional albums, to watching his third wife's Real Housewives-esque reality show, Advika starts to realize how little she knows about her husband. Realizing she rushed into the marriage for all the wrong reasons, Advika uses the info gleaned from the lives of her husband's exes to concoct a plan to extricate herself from Julian once and for all.

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The Rebel Heir by Niobia Bryant When it's too hot in the kitchen He'll take it to the bedroom...

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Hollywood is no stranger to murder, and some of the murderers are the most vicious killers known to man. Through extensive research by Brian Clune, the historian for Planet Paranormal Investigations, take a deeper look at 12 stories dealing with the murders and paranormal aftermath of some of Hollywood's most mysterious and gruesome murders from the 1930s to modern times, including Thelma Todd, The Black Dahlia, “Bugsy” Siegel, George Reeves, Marilyn Monroe, Ramon Novarro, Natalie Wood, John Belushi, Tupac Shakur, Biggie Smalls, and more. In addition to bloody confrontations and excessive negative patterns, find out the haunting ghost stories of these individuals—their spirits are still here. Jaw-dropping details will have you trying to close the veil to the otherside before you learn too much... But you're too late. History buffs and paranormal enthusiasts will enjoy this book, however, it is not for the squeamish.

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Hard Bodies is about Ronald Reagan, Robert Bly, "America," Rambo, Dirty Harry, national identity, and individual manhood. By linking blockbuster Hollywood films of the 1980s to Ronald Reagan and his image, Susan Jeffords explores the links between masculinity and U.S. identity and how their images changed during that decade. Her book powerfully defines a distinctly ideological period in the renegotiation of masculinity in the post-Vietnam era. As Jeffords perceptively notes, Reagan was most effective at constructing and promoting his own image. His election in 1980 and his landslide re-election in 1984 offered politicians and the film industry some insight into "what audiences want to see." Audiences--and constituencies--were looking for characters who stood up for individualism, liberty, anti-governmentalism, militarism, and who embodied a kind of mythic heroism. The administration in Washington and Hollywood filmmakers sensed and tried to fill that need. Jeffords describes how movies meshed inextricably with Reagan's life as he cast himself as a hero and influenced the country to believe the same script. Invoking Clint Eastwood in his speeches and treating scenes from movies as if they were real, Reagan played on his image in order to link popular and national narratives. Hollywood returned the compliment.Through her illuminating and detailed analyses of both the Reagan presidency and many blockbuster movies, Jeffords provides a scenario within which the successes of the New Right and the Reagan presidency can begin to be understood: she both encourages an understanding of how this complicity functioned and provides a framework within which to respond to the New Right's methods and arguments. Rambo, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Robocop, Back to the Future, Star Wars, the Indiana Jones series, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, Batman, and Unforgiven are among the films she discusses. In her closing chapter, she suggests the direction that masculinity is taking in the 1990s.

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An empowering, sex-positive, behind-the-scenes look at both Hollywood and the porn industry in this celebrity memoir unlike any other. Perfect for fans of Pleasure Activism and How to Make Love Like a Porn Star.Maitland Ward got her start in acting as a teenager when she was cast in The Bold and the Beautiful, but it wasn’t until she joined the later seasons of the sitcom Boy Meets World that she got her first taste of fame. As the loveable, sexy (but not too sexy) co-ed Rachel McGuire, Ward soon found herself being typecast as the good girl next door and was repeatedly denied darker, more intriguing roles. So she made a career change—one that required her to turn away from the Disney universe—and eventually established herself as one of the most-respected actresses in the porn industry today. Now, Ward reveals the ups and downs of her fascinating career, including personal stories from her time on one of the most beloved shows of the 1990s, in this anything but a run-of-the-mill memoir. By showing Hollywood and triple-X stardom in a whole new light, she offers a fresh and stirring perspective on the sex industry. Ultimately a story of hope and triumph, Rated X is a sharp and provocative look at a former Disney princess who found her fairy tale in porn.

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Offers significant re readings of key classic and contemporary Westerns. Myth of the Western re invigorates the debate surrounding the relationship between the Western and frontier mythology, arguing for the importance of the genre's socio cultural, historical and political dimensions. Taking a number of critical theoretical and philosophical approaches, Matthew Carter applies them to prominent forms of frontier historiography. He also considers the historiographic element of the Western by exploring the different ways in which the genre has responded to the issues raised by the frontier. Carter skilfully argues that the genre has - and continues to reveal - the complexities and contradictions at the heart of US society. With its clear analyses of and intellectual challenges to the film scholarship that has developed around the Western over a 65 year period, this book adds new depth to our understanding of specific film texts and of the genre as a whole - a welcome resource for students and scholars in both Film Studies and American Studies.

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2020 Best Early Career Research Monograph, Monash University MalaysiaDamsels and Divas investigates the meanings of Europeanness in Hollywood during the 1920s by charting professional trajectories of three movie stars: Pola Negri, Vilma Bánky and Jetta Goudal. It combines the investigation of American fan magazines with the analysis of studio documents, and the examination of the narratives of their films, to develop a thorough understanding of the ways in which Negri, Bánky and Goudal were understood within the realm of their contemporary American culture. This discussion places their star personae in the context of whiteness, femininity and Americanization. Every age has its heroines, and they reveal a lot about prevailing attitudes towards women in their respective eras. In the United States, where the stories of rags-to-riches were especially potent, stars could offer models of successful cultural integration.

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A biography chronicling the tumultuous personal and professional life of horror icon Bela Lugosi.Lugosi, the tragic life story of one of horror’s most iconic film stars, tells of a young Hungarian activist forced to flee his homeland after the failed Communist revolution in 1919. Reinventing himself in the U.S., first on stage and then in movies, he landed the unforgettable role of Count Dracula in what would become a series of classic feature films. From that point forward, Lugosi’s stardom would be assured...but with international fame came setbacks and addictions that gradually whittled his reputation from icon to has-been. Lugosi details the actor’s fall from grace and an enduring legacy that continues to this day.

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Who can forget Dorothy's quest for the great and powerful Oz as she tried to return to her beloved Kansas? She thought she needed a wizard's magic, only to discover that home-and the power to get there-had been with her all along. This engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home, and the comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Leading us on a journey through American film, Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative. Each chapter includes a close reading of such classic films as Fleming's The Wizard of Oz, Sirk's Imitation of Life, Burton's Batman Returns, Hitchcock's Rebecca, Ford's The Searchers, and Sayles's Lone Star.

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Lavish musical soundtracks contributed a special grandeur to the new widescreen, stereophonic sound movie experience of postwar biblical epics such as Samson and Delilah, Ben-Hur, and Quo Vadis. In Epic Sound, Stephen C. Meyer shows how music was utilized for various effects, sometimes serving as a vehicle for narrative plot and at times complicating biblical and cinematic interpretation. In this way, the soundscapes of these films reflected the ideological and aesthetic tensions within the genre, and more generally, within postwar American society. By examining key biblical films, Meyer adeptly engages musicology with film studies to explore cinematic interpretations of the Bible during the 1940s through the 1960s.

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Filmmaking is a business—someone has to pay the bills. For much of the industry’s history, that role was shouldered by the studios. The rise of independent filmmakers then led to the rise of independent financiers. But what happens if bad weather closes down a production or a director’s vision pays no heed to the limitations of time and money? Enter Film Finances. The company was founded in London in 1950 to insure against the risk that a film would exceed its original budget or not be completed on time. Its pioneering development of the “completion guarantee”—the financial instrument that provides the essential security for investors to support independent filmmaking—ultimately led to the creation of many thousands of films, including some of the most celebrated ever made: Moulin Rouge (1953), Dr. No (1962), The Outsiders (1982), Pulp Fiction (1994), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), La La Land (2016), and more. Film Finances’s role in filmmaking was little known outside the industry until 2012, when it opened its historical archive to scholars. Drawing on these previously private documents as well as interviews with its executives, Making Hollywood Happen tells the company’s story through seven decades of postwar cinema history and chronicles the growth of the international independent film industry. Focusing on a business that has operated at the meeting point between money and art for more than seventy years, this lavishly illustrated book goes to the heart of how the movie business works.

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The story of racial hierarchy in the American film industry The #OscarsSoWhite campaign, and the content of the leaked Sony emails which revealed, among many other things, that a powerful Hollywood insider didn’t believe that Denzel Washington could “open” a western genre film, provide glaring evidence that the opportunities for people of color in Hollywood are limited. In The Hollywood Jim Crow, Maryann Erigha tells the story of inequality, looking at the practices and biases that limit the production and circulation of movies directed by racial minorities. She examines over 1,300 contemporary films, specifically focusing on directors, to show the key elements at work in maintaining “the Hollywood Jim Crow.” Unlike the Jim Crow era where ideas about innate racial inferiority and superiority were the grounds for segregation, Hollywood’s version tries to use economic and cultural explanations to justify the underrepresentation and stigmatization of Black filmmakers. Erigha exposes the key elements at work in maintaining Hollywood’s racial hierarchy, namely the relationship between genre and race, the ghettoization of Black directors to black films, and how Blackness is perceived by the Hollywood producers and studios who decide what gets made and who gets to make it. Erigha questions the notion that increased representation of African Americans behind the camera is the sole answer to the racial inequality gap. Instead, she suggests focusing on the obstacles to integration for African American film directors. Hollywood movies have an expansive reach and exert tremendous power in the national and global production, distribution, and exhibition of popular culture. The Hollywood Jim Crow fully dissects the racial inequality embedded in this industry, looking at alternative ways for African Americans to find success in Hollywood and suggesting how they can band together to forge their own career paths.

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This book examines postcolonial filmmakers adapting Victorian literature in Hollywood to contend with both the legacy of British imperialism and the influence of globalized media entities.

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Colossal. Stupendous. Epic. These adjectives, used by movie companies to hawk their wares, became clichés long ago. When used to describe the films of one director, they are accurate. More than any filmmaker in the history of the medium, Cecil B. DeMille mastered the art of the spectacle. In the process, he became a filmland founder. One hundred years ago, he made the first feature film ever shot in Hollywood and went on to become the most commercially successful producer-director in history. DeMille told his cinematic tales with painterly, extravagant images. The parting of the Red Sea in The Ten Commandments was only one of these. There were train wrecks ( The Greatest Show on Earth ) orgies ( Manslaughter ) battles ( The Buccaneer ) Ancient Rome ( The Sign of the Cross ) Ancient Egypt ( Cleopatra ) and the Holy Land ( The Crusades ). The best of these images are showcased here, in Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic . This lavish volume opens the King Tut's tomb of cinematic treasures that is the Cecil B. DeMille Archives, presenting storyboard art, concept paintings, and an array of photographic imagery. Historian Mark A. Vieira writes an illuminating text to accompany these scenes. Cecilia de Mille Presley relates her grandfather's thoughts on his various films, and recalls her visits to his sets, including the Egyptian expedition to film The Ten Commandments.Like the director's works, Cecil B. DeMille: The Art of the Hollywood Epic is a panorama of magnificence,celebrating a legendary filmmaker and the remarkable history of Hollywood.

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Cinema Wars explores the intersection of film, politics, and US culture and society through a bold critical analysis of the films, TV shows, and documentaries produced in the early 2000s Offers a thought-provoking depiction of Hollywood film as a contested terrain between conservative and liberal forces Films and documentaries discussed include: Black Hawk Down, The Dark Knight, Star Wars, Syriana, WALL-E, Fahrenheit 9/11 and other Michael Moore documentaries, amongst others Explores how some films in this era supported the Bush-Cheney regime, while others criticized the administration, openly or otherwise Investigates Hollywood’s treatment of a range of hot topics, from terrorism and environmental crisis to the Iraq war and the culture wars of the 2000s Shows how Hollywood film in the 2000s brought to life a vibrant array of social protest and helped create cultural conditions to elect Barack Obama

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Stealing the Show is a study of African American actors in Hollywood during the 1930s, a decade that saw the consolidation of stardom as a potent cultural and industrial force. Petty focuses on five performers whose Hollywood film careers flourished during this period-Louise Beavers, Fredi Washington, Lincoln "Stepin Fetchit" Perry, Bill "Bojangles" Robinson, and Hattie McDaniel-to reveal the "problematic stardom" and the enduring, interdependent patterns of performance and spectatorship for performers and audiences of color. She maps how these actors-though regularly cast in stereotyped and marginalized roles-employed various strategies of cinematic and extracinematic performance to negotiate their complex positions in Hollywood and to ultimately "steal the show." Drawing on a variety of source materials, Petty explores these stars' reception among Black audiences and theorizes African American viewership in the early twentieth century. Her book is an important and welcome contribution to the literature on the movies.

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Bringing to light an often-ignored aspect of Hollywood studio system history, this book focuses on female stars who broke the mold of a male-dominated, often manipulative industry to dictate the path of their own careers through freelancing. Runner-up, Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association, 2016During the heyday of Hollywood’s studio system, stars were carefully cultivated and promoted, but at the price of their independence. This familiar narrative of Hollywood stardom receives a long-overdue shakeup in Emily Carman’s new book. Far from passive victims of coercive seven-year contracts, a number of classic Hollywood’s best-known actresses worked on a freelance basis within the restrictive studio system. In leveraging their stardom to play an active role in shaping their careers, female stars including Irene Dunne, Janet Gaynor, Miriam Hopkins, Carole Lombard, and Barbara Stanwyck challenged Hollywood’s patriarchal structure.Through extensive, original archival research, Independent Stardom uncovers this hidden history of women’s labor and celebrity in studio-era Hollywood. Carman weaves a compelling narrative that reveals the risks these women took in deciding to work autonomously. Additionally, she looks at actresses of color, such as Anna May Wong and Lupe Vélez, whose careers suffered from the enforced independence that resulted from being denied long-term studio contracts. Tracing the freelance phenomenon among American motion picture talent in the 1930s, Independent Stardom rethinks standard histories of Hollywood to recognize female stars as creative artists, sophisticated businesswomen, and active players in the then (as now) male-dominated film industry.

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The Go-Go's were the first all-female rock group in history to write their own songs, play their own instruments, and reach the top of the Billboard charts with their #1 album, Beauty and the Beat. Made In Hollywood is drummer Gina Schock's personal account of the band, which includes a treasure trove of photographs and memorabilia collected over the course of her 40-year career.The Go-Go's debut album, Beauty and the Beat, rose to the top of the charts in 1981 and their hit songs "We Got the Beat", "Our Lips Are Sealed", "Vacation", and "Head Over Heels" (to name a few) served as a soundtrack to our lives in the '80s.Now, after the release of their Critics Choice Award-winning Showtime documentary, and in anticipation of their forthcoming induction into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame and their 2021 West Coast shows, Gina takes fans behind the scenes for a rare look at her personal images documenting the band's wild journey to the heights of fame and stardom. Featuring posters, photographs, Polaroids, and other memorabilia from her archives, Made In Hollywood also includes stories from each member of the Go-Go's, along with other cultural luminaries like Kate Pierson, Jodie Foster, Dave Stewart, Martha Quinn, and Paul Reubens.With a style as bold and distinctive as any Go-Go's album, Made In Hollywood is the perfect tribute to one of the world's most iconic groups.

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From Tom Joad to Norma Rae to Spike Lee's Mookie in Do the Right Thing, Hollywood has regularly dramatized the lives and struggles of working people in America. Ranging from idealistic to hopeless, from sympathetic to condescending, these portrayals confronted audiences with the vital economic, social, and political issues of their times while providing a diversion-sometimes entertaining, sometimes provocative-from the realities of their own lives. In Blue-Collar Hollywood, John Bodnar examines the ways in which popular American films made between the 1930s and the 1980s depicted working-class characters, comparing these cinematic representations with the aspirations of ordinary Americans and the promises made to them by the country's political elites. Based on close and imaginative viewings of dozens of films from every genre-among them Public Enemy, Black Fury, Baby Face, The Grapes of Wrath, It's a Wonderful Life, I Married a Communist, A Streetcar Named Desire, Peyton Place, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, and Boyz N the Hood-this book explores such topics as the role of censorship, attitudes toward labor unions and worker militancy, racism, the place of women in the workforce and society, communism and the Hollywood blacklist, and faith in liberal democracy. Whether made during the Great Depression, World War II, the Cold War, or the Vietnam era, the majority of films about ordinary working Americans, Bodnar finds, avoided endorsing specific political programs, radical economic reform, or overtly reactionary positions. Instead, these movies were infused with the same current of liberalism and popular notion of democracy that flow through the American imagination.

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This book establishes the profound significance of MGM's 1940 film The Mortal Storm, the first major Hollywood production to depict the plight of Jews in Germany before the Holocaust. Based on Phyllis Bottome's best seller, also titled The Mortal Storm, the film was made amidst the bitter debate that occurred between 1938 and 1941 over whether the United States should involve itself in another European war or remain an isolationist country, as Charles Lindbergh among others urged.In 1941, the film triggered the first hostile Congressional investigation of Hollywood where the studios were accused of allegedly propagandizing for war. Lindbergh had secretly urged the Hollywood hearings, inspired by his own growing antisemitism, as his unpublished diary reveals. Hollywood studios, in turn, regarded the growing European crisis with ambivalence. They feared being accused in a film like The Mortal Storm of using the movies to represent the fat

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The New Hollywood boom of the late 1960s and 1970s is celebrated as a time when maverick directors bucked the system. Against the backdrop of counterculture sensibilities and the prominence of auteur theory, New Hollywood directors such as Robert Altman and Francis Ford Coppola seemed to embody creative individualism. In Post-Fordist Cinema, Jeff Menne rewrites the history of this period, arguing that auteur theory served to reconcile directors to Hollywood’s corporate project.Menne traces the surprising affinities between auteur theory and management gurus such as Peter Drucker, who envisioned a more open and flexible corporate style. In founding production companies, New Hollywood filmmakers took part in the creation of new corporate models that emphasized entrepreneurial creativity. For firms such as Kirk Douglas’s Bryna Productions, Altman’s Lion’s Gate Films, the Zanuck-Brown Company, and BBS Productions, the counterculture ethos limbered up the studio system’s sclerotic production process—with striking parallels to how management theory conceived of the role of the individual within the firm. Menne offers insightful readings of how films such as Lonely Are the Brave, Brewster McCloud, Jaws, and The King of Marvin Gardens narrate the conditions in which they were created, depicting shifting notions of work and corporate structure. While auteur theory allowed directors to cast themselves as independent creators, Menne argues that its most consequential impact came as a management doctrine. An ambitious rethinking of New Hollywood, Post-Fordist Cinema sheds new light on the cultural myth of the great director and the birth of the “creative economy.”

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When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence? Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. The book charts how white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed nearly a hundred working actors and drew on published interviews with celebrities, such as Viola Davis, Chris Rock, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Liu, and Ken Jeong, to explore how racial stereotypes categorize and constrain actors. Their stories reveal the day-to-day racism actors of color experience in talent agents’ offices, at auditions, and on sets. Yuen also exposes sexist hiring and programming practices, highlighting the structural inequalities that actors of color, particularly women, continue to face in Hollywood. This book not only conveys the harsh realities of racial inequality in Hollywood, but also provides vital insights from actors who have succeeded on their own terms, whether by sidestepping the system or subverting it from within. Considering how their struggles impact real-world attitudes about race and diversity, Reel Inequality follows actors of color as they suffer, strive, and thrive in Hollywood.

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Why is the U.S. motion picture industry concentrated in Hollywood and why does it remain there in the age of globalization? Allen Scott uses the tools of economic geography to explore these questions and to provide a number of highly original answers. The conceptual roots of his analysis go back to Alfred Marshall's theory of industrial districts and pick up on modern ideas about business clusters as sites of efficient and innovative production. On Hollywood builds on this work by adding major new empirical elements. By examining the history of motion-picture production from the early twentieth century to the present through this analytic lens, Scott is able to show why the industry (which was initially focused on New York) had shifted the majority of its production to Southern California by 1919. He also addresses in detail the bases of Hollywood's long-standing creative energies and competitive advantages. At the same time, the book explores the steady globalization of Hollywood's market reach as well as the cultural and political dilemmas posed by this phenomenon. On Hollywood will appeal not only to general readers with an interest in the motion-picture industry, but also to economic geographers, business professionals, regional development practitioners, and cultural theorists as well.

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Hollywood on the Chesapeake Bay's Eastern Shore. One-hundred years of moviemaking on Delmarva, from Easton to Ocean City and Wilmington to Chincoteague. This is the first comprehensive history of the stars of stage and screen who called the Eastern Shore home during (or after) their lives ... as well as major motion pictures produced on location here. Written with meticulous care and infectious joy by Brent Lewis, a tenth-generation Eastern Shoreman known for his mastery of regional history and lore.

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In the 1970s, Hollywood experienced a creative surge, opening a new era in American cinema with films that challenged traditional modes of storytelling. Inspired by European and Asian art cinema as well as Hollywood's own history of narrative ingenuity, directors such as Martin Scorsese, Robert Altman, William Friedkin, Stanley Kubrick, Woody Allen, and Francis Ford Coppola undermined the harmony of traditional Hollywood cinema and created some of the best movies ever to come out of the American film industry. Critics have previously viewed these films as a response to the cultural and political upheavals of the 1970s, but until now no one has explored how the period's inventive narrative design represents one of the great artistic accomplishments of American cinema.In Hollywood Incoherent, Todd Berliner offers the first thorough analysis of the narrative and stylistic innovations of seventies cinema and its influence on contemporary American filmmaking. He examines not just formally eccentric films—Nashville; Taxi Driver; A Clockwork Orange; The Godfather, Part II; and the films of John Cassavetes—but also mainstream commercial films, including The Exorcist, The Godfather, The French Connection, Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory, Dog Day Afternoon, Chinatown, The Bad News Bears, Patton, All the President's Men, Annie Hall, and many others. With persuasive revisionist analyses, Berliner demonstrates the centrality of this period to the history of Hollywood's formal development, showing how seventies films represent the key turning point between the storytelling modes of the studio era and those of modern American cinema.

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*** LONGLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM HILL SPORTS BOOK OF THE YEAR 2023 ****** ONE OF THE DAILY TELEGRAPH'S SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 ****** ONE OF THE TIMES' SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2023 ***The remarkable inside story of how two Hollywood A-listers, Rob McElhenney and Ryan Reynolds, stunned the football world by buying a non-league club in North Wales.'astute, lovingly detailed ... so entertaining ... so charming' Victoria Segal, the Sunday Times'A superb account of a modern-day success story, told beautifully by one of the best writers in the business. This is one of the great football stories of recent years. No matter who you support, if you love football, you will love the story of Tinseltown.' Daniel Taylor, The Athletic'This is a compelling, multi-layered, page turner, underpinned by a real sense of both place and connection with the eclectic characters involved. It will appeal to anyone with even the slightest interest in the game's enduring place in a changing world.' Louise Taylor, Guardian'...the best sports book I've read all year for many years...It's full on factual but funny, exhaustive but not exhausting and well written and wonderful.' Paul Ross, talkSPORT'terrific ... A richly layered and fascinating story of a club and community reborn' FourFourTwo'This book comes from the heart. It tells the story of how Wrexham, the club I love, has always been special and achieved so much in the past, as well as the present. I really enjoyed it.' Mickey Thomas, Wrexham FC legend and 1992 FA Cup heroIt was one of the most extraordinary takeovers British football has known. In February 2021, Ryan Reynolds joined with Rob McElhenney to buy Wrexham FC, a non-league team in North Wales. Wrexham, a former coal and steel town dealing with its post-industrial legacy, suddenly found itself at the centre of global attention, with broadcast networks around the world descending to discover what was going on. The club became the subject of a smash hit Disney+ docu-series, Welcome to Wrexham.Tinseltown tells the story of this extraordinary, unpredictable and often surreal football takeover and the remarkable events that followed. Written with the full cooperation of Wrexham FC, it is the inside story of what happened when Hollywood met a dot on a map. How a town was transformed when its football club, aspiring only to survive on the fifth rung of the British football ladder, was sprinkled with gold dust and found ambition again. With unique access to key figures, the book charts the club's attempts to climb up the pyramid, providing a vivid sense of what it is like to play for this 'Hollywood' team and the pressure and spotlight that comes with it.At their only press conference since buying the club, nobody laughed when Reynolds and McElhenney said the Premier League could be an aspiration. 'Couldn't we theoretically make this happen?' McElhenney asked. 'Why not dream big?' added Reynolds. 'If you don't dream big, you will never go there, so why not?' Tinseltown is the story of how they did just that.

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For years, major film studios have licensed products related to their most popular films; video game spin-offs have become an important part of these licensing practices. Where blockbuster films are concerned, the video game release has become the rule rather than the exception. In Hollywood Gamers, Robert Alan Brookey explores the business conditions and technological developments that have facilitated the convergence of the film and video game industries. Brookey treats video games as rhetorical texts and critically examines several games to determine how specific industrial conditions are manifest in game design. Among the games (and films) discussed are Lord of the Rings, The Godfather, Spider-Man, and Iron Man.

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In "Hollywood 1938", Catherine Jurca brings to light a tumultuous year of crisis that has been neglected in histories of the studio era. With attendance in decline, negative publicity about stars that were "poison at the box office", and a spate of bad films, industry executives decided that the public was fed up with the movies. Jurca describes their desperate attempt to win back audiences by launching Motion Pictures' Greatest Year, a massive, and unsuccessful, public relations campaign conducted in theaters and newspapers across North America. Drawing on the records of studio personnel, independent exhibitors, moviegoers, and the motion pictures themselves, she analyzes what was wrong - and right - with Hollywood at the end of a heralded decade, and how the industry's troubles changed the making and marketing of films in 1938 and beyond.

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From a hotel in Marrakech in The Man Who Knew Too Much, to small-town Alabama in To Kill a Mockingbird, to Mission Control in Space Cowboys, creating a fictional, yet wholly believable world in which to film a movie has been the passion and life's work of Henry Bumstead, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers. In a career that has spanned nearly seventy years, Bumstead has worked on more than one hundred movies and television films. His many honors include Academy Awards for Art Direction for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting, as well as nominations for Vertigo and The Unforgiven. This popularly written and extensively illustrated book tells the intertwining stories of Henry Bumstead's career and the evolution of Hollywood art direction. Andrew Horton combines his analysis of Bumstead's design work with wide-ranging interviews in which Bumstead talks about working with top directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, and Clint Eastwood, as well as such stars as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Jerry Lewis, and James Cagney. Numerous production drawings, storyboards, and film stills illustrate how Bumstead's designs translated to film. This portrait of Bumstead's career underscores an art director's crucial role in shaping the look of a film and also tracks the changes in production design from the studio era through location shooting to today's use of high-tech special effects.

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All histories of Hollywood are wrong. Why? Two words: Colonel Selig. This early pioneer laid the foundation for the movie industry that we know today. Active from 1896 to 1938, William N. Selig was responsible for an amazing series of firsts, including the first two-reel narrative film and the first two-hour narrative feature made in America; the first American movie serial with cliffhanger endings; the first westerns filmed in the West with real cowboys and Indians; the creation of the jungle-adventure genre; the first horror film in America; the first successful American newsreel (made in partnership with William Randolph Hearst); and the first permanent film studio in Los Angeles. Selig was also among the first to cultivate extensive international exhibition of American films, which created a worldwide audience and contributed to American domination of the medium.In this book, Andrew Erish delves into the virtually untouched Selig archive at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Library to tell the fascinating story of this unjustly forgotten film pioneer. He traces Selig’s career from his early work as a traveling magician in the Midwest, to his founding of the first movie studio in Los Angeles in 1909, to his landmark series of innovations that still influence the film industry. As Erish recounts the many accomplishments of the man who first recognized that Southern California is the perfect place for moviemaking, he convincingly demonstrates that while others have been credited with inventing Hollywood, Colonel Selig is actually the one who most deserves that honor.

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Hollywood Independents explores the crucial period from 1948 to 1962 when independent film producers first became key components of the modern corporate entertainment industry. Denise Mann examines the impact of the radically changed filmmaking climate—the decline of the studios, the rise of television, and the rise of potent talent agencies like MCA—on a group of prominent talent-turned-producers including Burt Lancaster, Joseph Mankiewicz, Elia Kazan, and Billy Wilder. In order to show how these newly independent filmmakers negotiated through an increasingly fraught, reactionary creative atmosphere, Mann analyzes the reflexive portraits of their altered working conditions in such films as A Face in the Crowd, Sweet Smell of Success, and Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter? These artists, she shows, took on the corporate middle-managers at television networks and talent agencies as a way of challenging the status quo without risking censorship or blacklisting. This period saw the evolution of film production from the studio-governed system to one of entrepreneurs. Out of this new arrangement, which encouraged greater creative freedom, emerged a nascent form of independent art cinema that sowed the seeds of the Hollywood Renaissance that followed. Denise Mann is associate professor of film, TV and digital media at UCLA. She is coeditor of Private Screenings: Television and the Female Consumer (Minnesota, 1992).

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Hollywood Movie Songs is the fifth book in Marion Short's popular series about collectible sheet music, taking up where she left off in From Footlights to "The Flickers." This time she concentrates on movie music after sound took over. The golden years, from the dazzling Busby Berkeley movies of the 1930s to the present day, are presented in an exciting kaleidoscope of more than 700 colorful and dramatic sheet music covers from famous movies that feature photos of the world's most beloved film stars. The first section sets the stage for the new Hollywood that took on the challenge of adding sound to motion pictures, and follows significant trends from Al Jolson's first astounding declaration in The Jazz Singer, "You ain't heard nothing yet!" through each decade of increasingly sophisticated development. The second part features brief biographical sketches of 170 well-known film stars with a listing of their movies that yielded sheet music, and representative photos of each star on selected movie covers. This most requested book also includes extensive indexes of songs, stars, and movies, and a thoughtful price guide that will prove invaluable to movie buffs, nostalgia seekers, and dedicated sheet music collectors.

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Have you ever wondered what Angelina Jolie fears the most, or what Dustin Hoffman did to ease tension on a film set? What did Whitney Houston think about fame? Find out the secrets of the stars as you go behind the scenes of some of your favorite films with Reba Merrill, and international entertainment journalist who has interviewed hundreds of celebrities while promoting over 500 feature films. Follow Reba's personal journey as she conquers her own addiction and survives the challenging road to success in Hollywood, learning along the way that a celebrity's problems are not so different from our own.

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In Manufacturing Celebrity Vanessa Díaz traces the complex power dynamics of the reporting and paparazzi work that fuel contemporary Hollywood and American celebrity culture. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, her experience reporting for People magazine, and dozens of interviews with photographers, journalists, publicists, magazine editors, and celebrities, Díaz examines the racialized and gendered labor involved in manufacturing and selling relatable celebrity personas. Celebrity reporters, most of whom are white women, are expected to leverage their sexuality to generate coverage, which makes them vulnerable to sexual exploitation and assault. Meanwhile, the predominantly male Latino paparazzi can face life-threatening situations and endure vilification that echoes anti-immigrant rhetoric. In pointing out the precarity of those who hustle to make a living by generating the bulk of celebrity media, Díaz highlights the profound inequities of the systems that provide consumers with 24/7 coverage of their favorite stars.

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Melvyn Stokesteaches American history and film history at University College, London.Richard Maltbyis Professor of Screen Studies and Head of Humanities at Flinders University in South Australia.

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Harry Dean Stanton (1926-2017) got his start in Hollywood in TV productions such as Zane Grey Theater and Gunsmoke. After a series of minor parts in forgettable westerns, he gradually began to get film roles that showcased his laid-back acting style, appearing in Cool Hand Luke (1967), Kelly's Heroes (1970), The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Alien (1979). He became a headliner in the eighties - starring in Wim Wenders's moving Paris, Texas (1984) and Alex Cox's Repo Man (1984) - but it was his extraordinary skill as a character actor that established him as a revered cult figure and kept him in demand throughout his career.Joseph B. Atkins unwinds Stanton's enigmatic persona in the first biography of the man Vanity Fair memorialized as "the philosopher poet of character acting." He sheds light on Stanton's early life in West Irvine, Kentucky, exploring his difficult relationship with his Baptist parents, his service in the Navy, and the events that inspired him to drop out of college and pursue acting. Atkins also chronicles Stanton's early years in California, describing how he honed his craft at the renowned Pasadena Playhouse before breaking into television and movies.In addition to examining the actor's acclaimed body of work, Atkins also explores Harry Dean Stanton as a Hollywood legend, following his years rooming with Jack Nicholson, partying with David Crosby and Mama Cass, jogging with Bob Dylan, and playing poker with John Huston. "HD Stanton" was scratched onto the wall of a jail cell in Easy Rider (1969) and painted on an exterior concrete wall in Drive, He Said (1971). Critic Roger Ebert so admired the actor that he suggested the "Stanton-Walsh Rule," which states that "no movie featuring either Harry Dean Stanton or M. Emmet Walsh in a supporting role can be altogether bad."Harry Dean Stanton is often remembered for his crowd-pleasing roles in movies like Pretty in Pink (1986) or Escape from New York (1981), but this impassioned biography illuminates the entirety of his incredible sixty-year career. Drawing on interviews with the actor's friends, family, and colleagues, this much-needed book offers an unprecedented look at a beloved figure.

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While Hollywood deserves its reputation for much-maligned portrayals of southern highlanders on screen, the film industry also deserves credit for a long-standing tradition of more serious and meaningful depictions of Appalachia's people. Surveying some two dozen films and the literary and historical sources from which they were adapted, John C. Inscoe argues that in the American imagination Appalachia has long represented far more than deprived and depraved hillbillies. Rather, the films he highlights serve as effective conduits into the region's past, some grounded firmly in documented realities and life stories, others only loosely so. In either case, they deserve more credit than they have received for creating sympathetic and often complex characters who interact within families, households, and communities amidst a wide array of historical contingencies. They provide credible and informative narratives that respect the specifics of the times and places in which they are set. Having used many of these movies as teaching tools in college classrooms, Inscoe demonstrates the cumulative effect of analyzing them in terms of shared themes and topics to convey far more generous insights into Appalachia and its history than one would have expected to emerge from southern California's ""dream factory.

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