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In the history of cinema, many film genres have gained and lost popularity with the changing times, but one has maintained its supreme reign—the royal biopic. In Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens, authors Elizabeth A. Ford and Deborah C. Mitchell follow the lives of historical queens as depicted on film from the 1930s to the present. Women as diverse as Catherine the Great, Cleopatra, Mary Stuart, and Marie Antoinette have been represented on the silver screen, dominating the masculine world of politics while maintaining their femininity. During the golden age of American film, these roles gave Hollywood a means of portraying powerful women without threatening the p...
"Epic" films, those concerned with monumental events and larger-than-life characters, cover the period from the Creation to the A.D. 1200s and have been churned out by Hollywood and overseas studios since the dawn of filmmaking. Cecil B. DeMille, a master of the genre, hit upon the perfect mixture of sex, splendor, and the sacred to lure audiences to his epic productions. The 355 film entries include casts and credits, plot synopsis, and narratives on the making of the films. There are 190 photographs in this editon.
In Confessional Cinema, Jorge Pérez analyzes how cinema engaged the shifting role of religion during the last fifteen years of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship. Pérez interrogates the assumption that after 1957, when the Franco regime recast itself in a secular and modernizing fashion, religion vanished from the cultural field. Instead, Spanish cinema addressed the transformation within Spanish Catholicism following Vatican II and Spain’s modernization processes. Confessional Cinema offers the first analysis of a neglected body of Spanish films, "nun films," which focus on the active role of religious women in the transformation of Spanish Catholicism. Pérez argues that commercial film...
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Vampires have been a popular subject for writers since their inception in 19th century Gothic literature and, later, became popular with filmmakers. Now the classical vampire is extinct, and in its place are new vampires who embrace the hi-tech worlds of science fiction. This book is the first to examine the history of vampires in science fiction. The first part considers the role of science and pseudo-science, from late Victorian to modern times, in the creation of the vampire, as well as the "sensation fiction" of J. Sheridan Le Fanu, Bram Stoker, Arthur Conan Doyle and H.G. Wells. The second part focuses on the history of the science fiction vampire in the cinema, from the silent era to the present. More than sixty films are discussed, including films from such acclaimed directors as Roger Corman, David Cronenberg, Guillermo del Toro and Steven Spielberg, among others.
Prague, the 'Hollywood of the East', has played an important role in the history of cinema and World Film Locations: Prague traverses the city’s topography to examine an internationally diverse range of movies made in the Czech capital: landmark early films such as Ecstasy, controversial due to the female nudity that catapulted Hedy Lamarr into stardom in the United States; Steven Soderbergh’s biopic Kafka, starring Jeremy Irons; adaptations of Kafka’s literary works such as The Trial, with a screenplay by Harold Pinter and starring Anthony Hopkins; and action blockbusters like Mission Impossible, The Bourne Identity and Casino Royale. Exploring legendary Prague landmarks as they appea...
For the major broadcast networks, the heyday of made-for-TV movies was 20th Century programming like The ABC Movie of the Week and NBC Sunday Night at the Movies. But with changing economic times and the race for ratings, the networks gradually dropped made-for-TV movies while basic cable embraced the format, especially the Hallmark Channel (with its numerous Christmas-themed movies) and the Syfy Channel (with its array of shark attack movies and other things that go bump in the night). From the waning days of the broadcast networks to the influx of basic cable TV movies, this encyclopedia covers 1,370 films produced during the period 2000-2020. For each film entry, the reader is presented with an informative storyline, cast and character lists, technical credits (producer, director, writer), air dates, and networks. It covers the networks (ABC, CBS, Fox, Ion, and NBC) and such basic cable channels as ABC Family, Disney, Fox Family, Freeform, Hallmark, INSP, Lifetime, Nickelodeon, Syfy, TBS and TNT. There is also an appendix of "Announced but Never Produced" TV movies and a performer's index.
The weekly source of African American political and entertainment news.
Some acting careers are made by one great role and some fall into obscurity when one is declined. Would Al Pacino be the star he is today if Robert Redford had accepted the role of Michael Corleone in The Godfather? Imagine Tom Hanks rejecting Uma Thurman, saying that she acted like someone in a high school play when she auditioned to play opposite him in The Bonfire of the Vanities. Picture Danny Thomas as The Godfather, or Marilyn Monroe as Cleopatra. This reference work lists hundreds of such stories: actors who didn't get cast or who turned down certain parts. Each entry, organized alphabetically by film title, gives the character and actor cast, a list of other actors considered for that role, and the details of the casting decision. Information is drawn from extensive research and interviews. From About Last Night (which John Belushi turned down at his brother's urging) to Zulu (in which Michael Caine was not cast because he didn't look "Cockney" enough), this book lets you imagine how different your favorite films could have been.