Kategoria BISAC: Performing Arts >> Film - History & Criticism

Smedley Butler's life and career epitomize the contradictory nature of American military policy through the first part of this century. Butler won renown as a Marine battlefield hero, campaigning in most of America's foreign military expeditions from 1898 to the late 1920s. He became the leading national advocate for paramilitary police reform. Upon his retirement, however, he renounced war and imperialism and devoted his energy and prestige to various dissident and leftist political causes.

As a young Jewish boy growing up in Vienna, Georgia, Abe Orovitz could never have predicted the twists and turns his life would take. Many years later, as retired film director with more than thirty movies to his credit, Vincent Sherman is no less surprised when he looks back on that life.

In Studio Affairs he retraces his life with candor and enthusiasm. Sherman discusses the details of his three-year relationship with Joan Crawford, his inadvertent connection with the death of Bette Davis's second husband, and his poignant romantic involvement with Rita Hayworth. Providing...

"She was one of the world's four best comediennes," said Milton Berle, "but she lived a life of personal disaster." Martha Raye sang, danced, and joked her way into the spotlight of the entertainment world with a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed everything from vaudeville to television commercials to entertaining U.S. troops.

Take It from the Big Mouth, the first full-fledged biography of the multi-talented performer, explores Raye's life and career with candor and insight. Raye got her big break when she caught the attention of a film director as she kidded...

" Thomas Dixon has a notorious reputation as the writer of the source material for D.W. Griffith's groundbreaking and controversial 1915 feature film The Birth of a Nation. Perhaps unfairly, Dixon has been branded an arch-conservative and a racist obsessed with what he viewed as "the Negro problem." As American Racist makes clear, however, Dixon was a complex, multitalented individual who, as well as writing some of the most popular novels of the early twentieth century, was involved in the production of some eighteen films. Dixon used the motion picture as a propaganda tool for his often...

At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915--1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles's career after Kane was a long decline and that he...

Academy Award--winning director Martin Scorsese is one of the most significant American filmmakers in the history of cinema. Although best known for his movies about gangsters and violence, such as Mean Streets, Goodfellas, Casino, and Taxi Driver, Scorsese has addressed a much wider range of themes and topics in the four decades of his career. In The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese, an impressive cast of contributors explores the complex themes and philosophical underpinnings of Martin Scorsese's films. The essays concerning Scorsese's films about crime and violence investigate the nature...

As part of its effort to expose Communist infiltration in the United States and eliminate Communist influence on movies, from 1947--1953 the House Committee on Un-American Activities subpoenaed hundreds of movie industry employees suspected of membership in the Communist Party. Most of them, including screenwriter Paul Jarrico (1915--1997), invoked the Fifth Amendment and refused to answer questions about their political associations. They were all blacklisted.

In The Marxist and the Movies, Larry Ceplair narrates the life, movie career, and political activities of Jarrico,...

In this first-ever biography of Greer Garson, Michael Troyan sweeps away the many myths that even today veil her life. The true origins of her birth, her fairy-tale discovery in Hollywood, and her career struggles at Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer are revealed for the first time. Garson combined an everywoman quality with grace, charm, and refinement. She won the Academy Award in 1941 for her role in Mrs. Miniver, and for the next decade she reigned as the queen of MGM. Co-star Christopher Plummer remembered, "Here was a siren who had depth, strength, dignity, and humor who could inspire great...

"A knockout of a biography." -- Newsweek A silent-film star. A woman who played children, wide-eyed and gamine, skipping about in frills and long curls. That's how most people remember Mary Pickford. In reality, Pickford was a towering figure in movie history, central to the evolution of film acting and the development of the Hollywood motion picture industry. Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford began acting as a child. She switched from stage to film at seventeen, joining D.W. Griffith's Biograph Company, and became almost unimaginably popular. This allowed her to dictate the terms of her...

"A wide-ranging inquiry into an important area of contemporary scholarly interest, and also an engaging, well written and intelligently conceived collection." -Eric Smoodin, author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era

Despite the success of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and their Looney cohorts, Warner Bros. animation worked in the shadow of Disney for many years. The past ten years have seen a resurgence in Warner Bros. animation as they produce new Bugs Bunny cartoons and theatrical features like Space Jam as well as television shows like Tiny Toon...

The evolution of television news, as told by industry insiders

News is People: The Rise of Local TV News and the Fall of News from New York explores 50 years of television broadcasting to discover the cultural transformations that built the news media we know today. Interviews with 200 station managers, news directors, producers, anchors, and other insiders cover everything from the post-war transition to local news, to the rise of women in broadcasting, to media criticisms and more. Anyone pursuing a career in journalism will find valuable insight in this engaging...