Hollywood Goddesses PDF Download

Author: Michael Moellering
Publisher: Bantam Books
ISBN: 9780792450832
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 132

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Author: Michael Jay
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Actresses
Languages : en
Pages : 72

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Profiles of eighteen Hollywood stars from their early struggles to eventual successes.

Author: Nigel Cawthorne
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781853752506
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 780

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Prion's internationally bestselling Sex Lives series presents lighthearted accounts of the sexual escapades of major figures in history, politics, religion, the arts, and film. Irreverent and gossipy, the books are packed with carnal tidbits and eye-opening revelations. Sex has long been the common currency of the Hollywood Dream Factory. Early movie moguls packed their epics with ravishing dancing girls and frequently used the casting couch to determine who should be rocketed to stardom. Louise Brooks and Clara Bow were both brought down by sex scandals--the latter, in a rumored liaison with the USC football team. Mary Astor's career was ruined when explicit extracts from her diaries were read in open court, and silent star Alla Nazimova began the trend for Hollywood lesbians--Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich, and Claudette Colbert were all members of the "Sewing Circle."

Author: Stephen Handzo
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476637776
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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From the first, brief moving images of female nudes in the 1880s to the present, the motion picture camera made the female body a battleground in what we now call the culture wars. Churchmen feared the excitation of male lust; feminists decried the idealization of a body type that devalued the majority of women. This history of Hollywood's treatment of women's bodies traces the full span of the motion picture era. Primitive peepshow images of burlesque dancers gave way to the "artistic" nudity of the 1910s when model Audrey Munson and swimmer Annette Kellerman contended for the title of American Venus. Clara Bow personified the qualified sexual freedom of the 1920s flapper. Jean Harlow, Mae West and the scantily clad chorus girls of the early 1930s provoked the Legion of Decency to demand the creation of a Production Code Administration that turned saucy Betty Boop into a housewife. Things loosened up during World War II when Betty Grable and Rita Hayworth ruled the screen. The postwar years saw the blonde bombshells and "mammary madness" of the 1950s while the 1960's brought bikini-clad sex kittens. With the replacement of the Production Code by a ratings system in 1968, nudity and sex scenes proliferated in the R-rated movies of the 1970s and 1980s. Recent movies, often directed by women, have pointed the way toward a more egalitarian future. Finally, the #MeToo movement and the fall of Harvey Weinstein have forced the industry to confront its own sexism. Each chapter of this book situates movies, famous and obscure, into the context of changes in the movie industry and the larger society.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

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Author: Aubrey Malone
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476619514
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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"Women stars in Hollywood were invariably in two categories," said director Otto Preminger. "One group was of women who were exploited by men, and the other, much smaller group was of women who survived by acting like men." Beginning with silent film vamp Theda Bara and continuing with icons like Greta Garbo, Marilyn Monroe and Raquel Welch, this study of film industry misogyny describes how female stars were maltreated by a sexist studio system--until women like Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis fought for parity. The careers of Doris Day, Brigitte Bardot, Carole Landis, Frances Farmer, Dorothy Dandridge, Inger Stevens and many others are examined, along with more recent actresses like Demi Moore and Sharon Stone. Women who worked behind the scenes, writing screenplays, producing and directing without due credit, are also covered.

Author: Jessica Hope Jordan
Publisher: Cambria Press
ISBN: 1604976632
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 282

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"In the first critical study of the sex goddess in film, Jessica Hope Jordan illustrates how Jean Harlow uses her sexualized body to "affect" and seduce viewers away from any primary identification with those characters and their plotlines that are supposed to lead the film, to identifying instead with the kind of sexual empowerment and self-possession her characters consistently display. Linking the idea of sexual empowerment to the filmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality, the book additionally covers previous feminist discussions of Mae West's performances as "feminist camp" to argue that West sought to both celebrate and embody for women viewers what she viewed as cultural ideals of femininity and women's sexuality. With Lana Turner and the "cinematic code," the book considers the many problems inherent in both the filmic and public celebration of hyper-feminine sexuality in relation to censorship and considers the effects of the Hays Code on hyper-feminine sexuality as depicted in film noir." "The book also importantly presents the first critical discussion of the actress Jayne Mansfield, suggesting that her 1950s open acceptance, celebration, and public promotion of her feminine sexuality, both onscreen and off, makes her not only a precursor of the more sexually liberated 60s, but also, like the other actresses discussed here, a kind of prescient performance artist, even theorist, of feminine sexuality in particular, and cultural ideas about sexuality more generally. Beyond recouping her image as feminist, the book demonstrates how the kind of desire aroused by the sex goddess, a desire which remains endlessly suspended, works as a supreme example of the aesthetic apparatus of cinema itself." --Book Jacket.

Author: Ruby Blondell
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691229627
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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"This book explores the representation of Helen of Troy in Hollywood film and television, with a particular focus on her defining features: transcendent beauty and transgressive erotic agency. The first chapter, on early Hollywood, sets the scene by explaining the importance of ideas about Greek beauty at the beginning of cinema and highlighting some of the problems that continue to bedevil this topic, especially "realism" and the representation of supreme beauty. Blondell argues that the problem of Helen is baked into Hollywood from the start. In subsequent chapters Blondell examines specific screen adaptations in which Helen is featured. Each of these case studies locates a particular work in its historical, cultural, and generic context, as a framework for addressing the ways in which it approaches a range of interlocking questions about beauty, its representation, and the cinematic uses of myth. The second chapter is devoted to the sole Helenic feature film of the silent period, Alexander Korda's Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927). Part II moves to the big screen epic, pairing one film from each of the two great waves of ancient world epic spanning the latter half of the 20th century: Robert Wise's 1956 epic Helen of Troy and Wolfgang Petersen's more recent extravaganza, Troy (2004). In Part III she turns to television, with a chapter on episodic tele-fantasy followed by a study of the 2003 miniseries Helen of Troy. In some of these works Helen is the central character (or "hero"); in others she is at the periphery of a masculine adventure. But in all of them she represents the threat of superhuman beauty as an inheritance from classical Greece"--

Author: James Morrison
Publisher: Rutgers University Press
ISBN: 0813547482
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 259

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Book Description
The book focuses on the way various film icons engaged in and helped define some major issues of cultural and social concern to America by making heavily politicized movies during the 1970s.

Author: M. Williams
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137291494
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
Since the golden era of silent movies, stars have been described as screen gods, goddesses and idols. This is the story of how Olympus moved to Hollywood to divinise stars as Apollos and Venuses for the modern age, and defined a model of stardom that is still with us today.