For more than a decade, BLOOD 'N' THUNDER has explored American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifested in its mass-market fiction-dime novels, nickel weeklies, pulp magazines-and such complementary storytelling forms as stage melodramas, motion pictures, and Old Time Radio thrillers. The first 21 issues of this award-winning, limited-circulation journal are long out of print, and collectors have been known to pay as much as ten times the original cover price for back numbers that infrequently turn up on eBay. A follow-up to 2011's THE BEST OF BLOOD 'N'...
For more than a decade, BLOOD 'N' THUNDER has explored American popular culture of the late 19th and early 20th centuries as manifested in its mass-ma...
The motion-picture serial, routinely dismissed, overlooked, or undervalued by mainstream film historians, finally gets the attention it deserves in this meticulously researched and lovingly written book. Drawing on the well-established conventions of pulp fiction and blood-and-thunder stage melodrama, the motion-picture chapter play thrilled viewers of all ages and, more importantly, helped make moviegoing a weekly habit for millions of Americans during the Teens and Twenties. Author and film historian Ed Hulse, the editor of publisher of BLOOD 'N' THUNDER magazine, opens the book with a...
The motion-picture serial, routinely dismissed, overlooked, or undervalued by mainstream film historians, finally gets the attention it deserves in th...
In the spring of 1914, American moviegoers were held tightly in the grip of a new film form: the "chapter play," a series of short, interconnected melodramas distinguished by daredevil action and damsels in distress. The most famous of these productions was THE PERILS OF PAULINE, starring vivacious Pearl White. To help promote the serial, newspapers owned by William Randolph Hearst published prose versions of each episodic exploit the day before its theatrical engagements, so readers could get an idea of that week's adventure before seeing it on the big screen. PAULINE was an enormous hit...
In the spring of 1914, American moviegoers were held tightly in the grip of a new film form: the "chapter play," a series of short, interconnected mel...
Frances Marion Dee defied the Hollywood odds, essentially becoming that almost mythical figure: the extra girl plucked from a chorus line or crowd scene arbitrarily and given the Big Break that catapults her to stardom. Frances was a day player at Paramount when someone in the studio's casting department mistook her for a more accomplished actress and gave her a bit role in Ernst Lubitsch's Monte Carlo. Shortly thereafter, a chance meeting with Maurice Chevalier in the Paramount commissary won her the female lead in his next picture, Playboy of Paris, after director Ludwig Berger had rejected...
Frances Marion Dee defied the Hollywood odds, essentially becoming that almost mythical figure: the extra girl plucked from a chorus line or crowd sce...