Showing titles in History & Criticism

Was It Yesterday? explores the impact of nostalgia in 21st-century American film and television. Cultural nostalgia, in both real and imagined forms, is dominant today, but what does the concentration on bringing back the past mean for an understanding of our cultural moment, and what are the consequences for viewers? This book questions the nature of this nostalgic phenomenon, the politics associated with it, and the significance of the different periods, in addition to offering counterarguments that see nostalgia as prevalent throughout film and television history.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema.

Just when you thought paper couldn't be more exciting, this book comes your way! This book unites philosophy with one of the best shows ever: The Office. Addressing both the current American incarnation and the original British version, The Office and Philosophy brings these two wonders of civilization together for a frolic through the mundane yet curiously edifying worlds of Scranton's Dunder-Mifflin and Slough's Wernham-Hogg.

Jeopardy! is a lot of things: record-setting game show, beloved family tradition, and proving ground for many of North America's best and brightest. Nearly four decades into its current edition, Jeopardy! now finds itself facing unprecedented change. This is the chronicle of how the show became a cross-generational touchstone and where it's going next. Answers in the Form of Questions dives deep behind the scenes, with longtime host Alex Trebek talking about his life and legacy and the show's producers and writers explaining how they put together the nightly game.

For a moment in the 1980s, Carolyn Pfeiffer was the only woman in Hollywood who could greenlight a movie. Working with directors like Sam Shepard and Wes Craven, and with actors like River Phoenix and Bette Davis, she had a hand in producing or distributing many landmark films, among them Ridley Scott's The Duellists, Alan Rudolph's Choose Me, and the Academy Award-winning Kiss of the Spider Woman. However, long before establishing herself as a player in the world of film, Carolyn was a horseback-riding tomboy who dreamed of exploring the world beyond her small hometown.

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl took the stage at San Francisco's hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged - Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols, and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others.

Script Culture and the American Screenplay treats the screenplay as a literary work in its own right, presenting analyses of screenplays from a variety of frameworks, including feminism, Marxism, structuralism, philosophy, and psychology. Boon demonstrates that whether we are concerned with aesthetics and identifying rules for distinguishing the literary from the non-literary, or whether we align ourselves with more contemporary theories, which recognize texts as distinguishable in their inter-relationships.

The 10 best Bond movies...ever? It doesn't get much more subjective than this. Or much more fun!

Once a shoestring operation built on plywood sets and Australian rules football, ESPN has evolved into a media colossus. A genius for cross-promotion and its near-mystical rapport with its viewers empower the network to set agendas and create superstars, to curate sports history even as it mainstreams the latest cultural trends. Travis Vogan teams archival research and interviews with an all-star cast to pen the definitive account of how ESPN turned Xs and Os into billions of $$$.

Updated and expanded for the third edition, this volume combines scholarship with movie lore to present a comprehensive account of the development and influence of the American screenwriter. The text is written in an informal style and includes anecdotes and stories that spotlight the writers' creative work and their struggle to achieve recognition.

This comprehensive biography draws from previously unreleased photographs and documents from the Grimaldi family archive and, for the first time, access to the letters between Kelly and Hitchcock. It is also based on interviews with Kelly’s companions and relatives, including an exclusive interview with Prince Albert II of Monaco.

From "Over the Rainbow" to "Moon River" and from Al Jolson to Barbra Streisand, The Songs of Hollywood traces the fascinating history of song in film, both in musicals and in dramatic movies such as High Noon. This delightful book sheds much light on some of Hollywood's best known and loved repertoire, explaining how the film industry made certain songs memorable, and highlighting important moments of film history along the way.

The inspiring true story of Loïe Fuller, a radical 19th-century art nouveau icon who turned artificial light into performance art and became the incandescent inventor of modern dance, is revealed in this transportive and hypnotic historical narrative.

When the Hollywood Ten refused to answer the questions of the House Committee on Un-American Activities about their membership in the Communist Party, they were sentenced to prison, the five who were under contract were fired by their studios, and all were blacklisted from reemployment until they "purged themselves of their communist taint". The Hollywood Motion Picture Blacklist: Seventy-Five Years Later offers new insights on the origins of the blacklist, the characteristics of those blacklisted, and the probability of future proscriptions of the blacklist type.

Ken Davis began his career as a small-town radio DJ during his college years. Little did he know he would later find himself face-to-face with a notorious serial killer in the middle of the night; be nearly shot by a world-famous music producer; or unexpectedly come across the lifeless body of a legendary Hollywood bombshell. Along the way, he hung out with everyone from Barack Obama to Walter Cronkite to Sting.

Until now, Hollywood's political history has been dominated by a steady stream of films and memoirs decrying the nightmare of the Red Scare and how it victimized political innocents. But Ronald and Allis Radosh tell for the first time the “backstory” behind this myth. They show how the Soviet Comintern targeted the film capital in the late 1920s, taking us inside the cells and discussion groups that Communist Party members formed, the guilds and unions they tried to take over, and the studios they aimed to influence.

You might not know the name Tyrus Wong, but you probably know many of the images he shaped, including scenes from the beloved Disney classic Bambi. Yet when he came to this country as a child, Tyrus was an illegal immigrant locked up in an offshore detention center. How did he go on to a long and prosperous career drawing animation cels, storyboards, and greeting cards that shaped the American imagination?

Lena Horne’s life and career are truly remarkable in American film history. She was the first Black performer to become a true star—to receive the kind of glamour treatment at the fabled MGM that the studio had previously given to the likes of Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Lana Turner, and Ava Gardner.

Probablemente, Quentin Tarantino sea uno de los mayores cineastas de la historia, pero de lo que no hay atisbo de duda es de que estamos hablando del espectador que mejor puede contagiar su pasión entusiasta por las películas que ha visto. Ahora, por fin llega el libro con el que tantos años soñaron él y sus seguidores.

Through his radio and film works, such as The War of the Worlds and Citizen Kane, Orson Welles became a household name in the United States. Yet Welles’s multifaceted career went beyond these classic titles and included lesser-known but nonetheless important contributions to television, theater, newspaper columns, and political activism. Orson Welles in Focus: Texts and Contexts examines neglected areas of Welles’s work, shedding light on aspects of his art that have been eclipsed by a narrow focus on his films.