Scoundrels and Spitballers

Scoundrels and Spitballers PDF Author: Philippe Garnier
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780578653693
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
Scoundrels & Spitballers is to be read more as a book about writers and Hollywood, rather than one about screenwriters in Hollywood. The author stresses the vibrancy and free-for-all giddiness of a period when the film industry was young, and its workers even younger. And, perhaps, along the way these tales might define the important and not-always-negative role Hollywood played in the literary life of the 1930s. Hollywood broke a few writers' souls, but it also helped many and definitely inspired a few. Writers profiled in Scoundrels & Spitballers include: Nathaniel West, John Sanford, Marguerite Roberts, Robert Tasker, John Bright, Rowland Brown, Sam Brown, Niven Busch, James M. Cain, A.I. Bezzerides, Horace McCoy, and W.R. Burnett.

Dark City

Dark City PDF Author: Eddie Muller
Publisher: Running Press Adult
ISBN: 076249896X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 264

Book Description
This revised and expanded edition of Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in a definitive, highly illustrated volume. Dark Cityexpands with new chapters and a fresh collection of restored photos that illustrate the mythic landscape of the imagination. It's a place where the men and women who created film noir often find themselves dangling from the same sinister heights as the silver-screen avatars to whom they gave life. Eddie Muller, host of Turner Classic Movies' Noir Alley, takes readers on a spellbinding trip through treacherous terrain: Hollywood in the post-World War II years, where art, politics, scandal, style -- and brilliant craftsmanship -- produced a new approach to moviemaking, and a new type of cultural mythology.

Script for Scandal

Script for Scandal PDF Author: Renee Patrick
Publisher: Severn House Publishers Ltd
ISBN: 1448303494
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 268

Book Description
Sleuthing duo Lillian Frost and Edith Head investigate a behind-the-scenes scandal in this delightful Golden Age of Hollywood mystery. 1939, Los Angeles. Lillian Frost is shocked when her friend, glamorous costume designer Edith Head, hands her the script to a new film that's about to start shooting. Streetlight Story is based on a true crime: the California Republic bank robbery of 1936. Lillian's beau, LAPD detective Gene Morrow, was one of the officers on the case; his partner, Teddy, was tragically shot dead. It seems the scriptwriter has put Gene at the centre of a scandal, twisting fact with fiction - or has he? With Gene reluctant to talk about the case, the movie quickly becoming the hottest ticket in town, a suspicious death on the Paramount studio lot and the police reopening the investigation into Teddy's death, Lillian is determined to find answers. Can Lillian and Edith uncover the truth of what happened that fateful day and clear Gene's name?

In Lonely Places

In Lonely Places PDF Author: Imogen Sara Smith
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786489081
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Book Description
Although film noir is traditionally associated with the mean streets of the Dark City, this volume explores the genre from a new angle, focusing on non-urban settings. Through detailed readings of more than 100 films set in suburbs, small towns, on the road, in the desert, borderlands and the vast, empty West, the author investigates the alienation expressed by film noir, pinpointing its motivation in the conflict between desires for escape, autonomy and freedom--and fears of loneliness, exile and dissolution. Through such films as Out of the Past, They Live by Night and A Touch of Evil, this critical study examines how film noir reflected radical changes in the physical and social landscapes of postwar America, defining the genre's contribution to the eternal debate between the values of individualism and community.

Cary Grant

Cary Grant PDF Author: Scott Eyman
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1501192124
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 576

Book Description
Film historian and acclaimed New York Times bestselling biographer Scott Eyman has written the definitive, “captivating” (Associated Press) biography of Hollywood legend Cary Grant, one of the most accomplished—and beloved—actors of his generation, who remains as popular as ever today. Born Archibald Leach in 1904, he came to America as a teenaged acrobat to find fame and fortune, but he was always haunted by his past. His father was a feckless alcoholic, and his mother was committed to an asylum when Archie was eleven years old. He believed her to be dead until he was informed she was alive when he was thirty-one years old. Because of this experience, Grant would have difficulty forming close attachments throughout his life. He married five times and had numerous affairs. Despite a remarkable degree of success, Grant remained deeply conflicted about his past, his present, his basic identity, and even the public that worshipped him in movies such as Gunga Din, Notorious, and North by Northwest. This “estimable and empathetic biography” (The Washington Post) draws on Grant’s own papers, extensive archival research, and interviews with family and friends making it a definitive and “complex portrait of Hollywood’s original leading man” (Entertainment Weekly).

The Night of the Hunter

The Night of the Hunter PDF Author: Jeffrey Couchman
Publisher: Northwestern University Press
ISBN: 0810125420
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 314

Book Description
Reaching simultaneously into the realms of film and literature, "The Night of the Hunter": A Biography of a Film details the transformation of Davis Grubb's 1953 novel into a motion picture. A popular and critical success, the novel spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list, and Hollywood responded to its atmospheric lyricism. In the hands of first-time director Charles Laughton, the story became equal parts thriller, allegory, and fever dream, filled with slow, inexorable suspense. Yet the film initially failed at the box office. In the first major study of the long-lost first-draft screenplay by James Agee, Jeffrey Couchman confronts a fifty-year controversy about the authorship of the film. He explores many levels of artistic convergence-between novelist and director, director and actor, and cinematic form and audience expectations. The talents that clashed or came together along the road from book to movie created a film of rich stylistic contradiction. Combining biographical and historical analysis with a critical study of both the novel and the film, Couchman makes the case that this initially overlooked cinematic gem is a prismatic work that continually reveals new aspects of itself. Book jacket.

Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy

Leonard Maltin's Movie Crazy PDF Author: Leonard Maltin
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781595821195
Category : Motion picture actors and actresses
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"Portions of this book originally appeared in issues of Leonard Maltin's movie crazy"--T.p. verso.

Buster Keaton

Buster Keaton PDF Author: Imogen Sara Smith
Publisher: Gambit Publishing
ISBN: 0967591740
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 283

Book Description
Smith tells of the most dazzling and enigmatic of the silent clowns, a man who began his career in vaudeville as one-third of the Three Keatons at age four only to fall from grace with shattering swiftness in the early 1930s before eventually making a comeback on television in the 1950s.

Making a Film

Making a Film PDF Author: Federico Fellini
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781940625096
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 410

Book Description
Italian filmmaker Federico Fellini (1920-1993) is one of the most renowned figures in world cinema. Director of a long list of critically acclaimed motion pictures, including La strada, La dolce vita, 81/2, and Amarcord, Fellini's success helped strengthen the international prestige of Italian cinema from the 1950s onward. Often remembered as an eccentric auteur with a vivid imagination and a penchant for quasi-autobiographical works, the carnivalesque, and Rubenesque women, Fellini's inimitable films celebrate the creative potential of cinema as a medium and also provide thought-provoking evocations of various periods in Italian history, from the years of fascism to the age of Silvio Berlusconi's media empire. In Making a Film Fellini discusses his childhood and adolescence in the coastal town of Rimini, the time he spent as a cartoonist, journalist, and screenwriter in Rome, his decisive encounter with Roberto Rossellini, and his own movies, from Variety Lights to Casanova. The director explains the importance of drawing to his creative process, the mysterious ways in which ideas for films arise, his collaborations with his wife, Giulietta Masina, his thoughts on fascism, Jung, and the relationship between cinema and television. Often comic, sometimes tragic, and rife with insightful comments on his craft, Making a Film sheds light on Fellini's life and reveals the motivations behind many of his most fascinating movies. Available for the first time in its entirety in English, this volume contains the complete translation of Fare un film, the authoritative collection of writings edited and reworked by Fellini and initially published by Giulio Einaudi in 1980. The text includes a new translation of the Italo Calvino essay "A Spectator's Autobiography," an introduction by Italian film scholar Christopher B. White, and an afterward by Fellini's longtime friend and collaborator Liliana Betti.

Don't Save Anything

Don't Save Anything PDF Author: James Salter
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640090010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 320

Book Description
"In Don’t Save Anything . . . Kay Eldredge Salter assembles her late husband’s bread–and–butter journalism—yet how delicious good bread and butter can be! . . . As always, Salter emphasizes simple, vivifying details." —Michael Dirda, The Washington Post One of the greatest writers of American sentences in our literary history, James Salter’s acute and glimmering portrayals of characters are built with a restrained and poetic style. The author of several memorable works of fiction—including Dusk and Other Stories, which won the PEN/Faulkner Award—he is also celebrated for his memoir Burning the Days and many nonfiction essays. In her preface, Kay Eldredge Salter writes, “Don’t Save Anything is a volume of the best of Jim’s nonfiction—articles published but never collected in one place until now. Though those many boxes were overflowing with papers, in the end it’s not really a matter of quantity. These pieces reveal some of the breadth and depth of Jim’s endless interest in the world and the people in it . . . One of the great pleasures in writing nonfiction is the writer’s feeling of exploration, of learning about things he doesn’t know, of finding out by reading and observing and asking questions, and then writing it down. That’s what you’ll find here.” This collection gathers Salter’s thoughts on writing and profiles of important writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe that first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People, Condé Nast Traveler, the Aspen Times, among other publications.