Mervyn LeRoy Comes to Town is the first book devoted to the career of one of the director/producers who in the early years of sound cinema was instrumental in establishing the Hollywood model of production that would endure for more than half a century. As a director and producer, LeRoy was responsible for turning out more than sixty feature films in a career that spanned five decades; as a studio executive, he contributed substantially to the success of the industry during the ch...

Explores the "torture" of mannered behavior and the prevalence of etiquette as a theme in classical and contemporary Hollywood and European cinema."Etiquette," as noted toastmaster Herbert V. Prochnow once pointed out, "is knowing how to yawn with your mouth closed"-that is, to spare the feelings of the other person, one must stifle one's own. To be polite, therefore, is to perform. Onscreen, closeups often reveal the effort that goes into maintaining that performa...

Stellar Transformations: Movie Stars of the 2010s circles around questions of stardom, performance, and their cultural contexts in ways that remind us of the alluring magic of stars while also bringing to the fore the changing ways in which viewers engaged with them during the last decade. A salient idea that guides much of the collection is the one of transformation, expressed in these pages as the way in which post-millennial movie stars are in one way or another reshaping ideas...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

With a sharp eye for social detail and the pressures of class inequality, Alfred Hitchcock brought to the American scene a perspicacity and analytical shrewdness unparalleled in American cinema.Murray Pomerance works from a basis in cultural analysis and a detailed knowledge of Alfred Hitchcock's films and production techniques to explore how America of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s is revealed and critically commented upon in Hitchcock's work. Alfred Hitchcock's America is ...

The author of Queer Chivalry presents a biographical study of the celebrity writer "rich with insight into [his] literary and cinematic achievements" ( Publishers Weekly).Truman Capote's legacy is in many ways defined by his complex relationship with Hollywood. In Truman Capote: A Literary Life at the Movies, Tison Pugh explores the author and his literature through a cinematic lens, weaving elements of Capote's biography—including his fl...

Classic film noir offers more than pesky private eyes and beautiful bad girls—it explores the quest for the not-so-attainable American dream.Winner of the CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title of the Choice ACRLDesperate young lovers on the lam (They Live by Night), a cynical con man making a fortune as a mentalist (Nightmare Alley), a penniless pregnant girl mistaken for a wealthy heiress (No Man of Her Own), a wounded veteran who ha...

A wide-ranging survey of the subject that celebrates the variety and complexity of film comedy from the ‘silent’ days to the present, this authoritative guide offers an international perspective on the popular genre that explores all facets of its formative social, cultural and political contextA wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the presentInternational in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, inclu...

For over four decades, Martin Scorsese has been the chronicler of an obsessive society, where material possessions and physical comfort are valued, where the pursuit of individual improvement is rewarded and where male prerogative is respected and preserved.Scorsese has often described his films as sociology and he has a point: his storytelling condenses complex information into comprehensible narratives about society. In this sense, he has been a guide through a dark world of nine...

A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics“Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used ...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Anna Quindlen presents a “swift and compelling paean to the joys of books” (Booklist).“Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, [How Reading Changed My Life] is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.”—Publishers Weekly“Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in w...

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our mi...