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A real-life, behind-the-scenes glimpse of Hollywood in the 1920s is revealed in letters by Sam Goldwyn's secretary.
“860 glittering pages” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times): The first volume of the full-scale astonishing life of one of our greatest screen actresses—her work, her world, her Hollywood through an American century. Frank Capra called her, “The greatest emotional actress the screen has yet known.” Now Victoria Wilson gives us the first volume of the rich, complex life of Barbara Stanwyck, an actress whose career in pictures spanned four decades beginning with the coming of sound (eighty-eight motion pictures) and lasted in television from its infancy in the 1950s through the 1980s. Here is Stanwyck, revealed as the quintessential Brooklyn girl whose family was in fact of old New Eng...
In Silent Topics, film historian Anthony Slide looks at various under-discussed and generally undocumented areas of silent film. The two lengthiest essays discuss the release of British silent films in the United States and the contribution of gays and lesbians to American silent film. Other essays examine the cost of silent film production, the "Great Events" series produced by Technicolor in the 1920s, and the manner in which early sheet music exploited silent film personalities. There are career essays on the screen's first special effects specialist, Roy Pomeroy, actor/minister Neal Dodd, and Margerie Bonner, the wife of novelist Malcolm Lowry. Silent Topics also includes the only known interview with the most prominent of silent film composers, David Mendoza, as well as a personal discussion on the lack of talent among a number of silent screen actors and actresses.
Samuel Goldwyn was the premier dream-maker of his era - a fierce independent force i a time when studios ruled, a producer of silver screen sagas who was, in all probability, the last Hollywood tycoon. In this riveting book, Pulitzer Prize winning biographer A. Scott Berg tells the life story of this remarkable man - a tale as rich with drama as any feature length epic and as compelling as the history of Hollywood itself.
Dispatches from a land of extremes, by writers and movie stars, natives and visitors, activists and pioneers, and more. California has always been, literally, a place to write home about. Renowned figures and iconoclasts; politicians, actors, and artists; the world-famous and the not-so-much—all have contributed their voices to the patchwork of the state. With this book, cultural historian and California scholar David Kipen reveals this long-storied place through its diaries and letters, and gives readers a highly anticipated follow up to his book Dear Los Angeles. Running from January 1 through December 31, leaping across decades and centuries, Dear California reflects on the state's shif...
Provides a unique biography of Charlie Chaplin, focusing on Chaplin as a political figure, providing students with a fuller picture of the film maker by looking beyond his films. Allows students to see how Chaplin used his films as political criticisms of the Great Depression and the wars of the 20th century, enabling students to see why his films were controversial and the impact Chaplin had on popular opinion. Looks not just at the life of Charlie Chaplin but the culture and politics of the 20th century, enabling students of film history, cultural history and of 20th century history to broaden their focus and offer new ideas for assignments.
The name Vilma Banky is often relegated to dusty history books, fated to be mentioned only in passing. Today, her fame is eclipsed by the men she worked with, and her life remains a mystery to even the most ardent silent film fan. But she was a superstar, plain and simple.Movie mogul Sam Goldwyn saw in her what millions of audiences around the world would soon embrace - the soft, milk-white hands, corn-silk hair, and effortless femininity. Charlie Chaplin was a fan, as was John Gilbert, President Calvin Coolidge, Adolf Hitler, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. The story of Vilma Banky is almost too fantastic, but underneath it all, given fame and opportunity, she struggled to make things right. Goldwyn's long obfuscated Hungarian Rhapsody reemerges from years of misconceptions to reveal what made her such an international sensation in the '20s.
In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a “New Woman.” Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford’s rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood’s first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.
Women held more positions of power in the silent film era than at any other time in American motion picture history. Marion Leonard broke from acting to cofound a feature film company. Gene Gauntier, the face of Kalem Films, also wrote the first script of Ben-Hur. Helen Holmes choreographed her own breathtaking on-camera stunt work. Yet they and the other pioneering filmmaking women vanished from memory. Using individual careers as a point of departure, Jane M. Gaines charts how women first fell out of the limelight and then out of the film history itself. A more perplexing event cemented their obscurity: the failure of 1970s feminist historiography to rediscover them. Gaines examines how it happened against a backdrop of feminist theory and her own meditation on the limits that historiography imposes on scholars. Pondering how silent era women have become absent in the abstract while present in reality, Gaines sees a need for a theory of these artists' pasts that relates their aspirations to those of contemporary women. A bold journey through history and memory, Pink-Slipped pursues the still-elusive fate of the influential women in the early years of film.