Although stardom and celebrity have sometimes been seen as antithetical to traditional British notions of restraint and modesty, female stars have nenetheless always been an important attraction for audiences of British cinema, offering specifically British takes on ideas of glamour, acting prowess and femininity. This book will explore in detail the history of British female stardom from the 1940's to the present day through an examination of careers and star personae, from Anna Neagle, who enjoyed record-breaking popularity in the immediate post-war years, to key contemporary figures such as Keira Knightley and Helen Mirren. This is a major new study of stardom in British cinema and the first to focus on female stars.
Television Personalities offers an exciting, engaging approach to studying and understanding the most prominent and popular performers in television and celebrity culture. It is an original, indispensable guide for undergraduate and postgraduate students of media, television and celebrity studies, as well as those interested in digital culture more widely.
Eleanor Roosevelt recognized the power of film and television, especially as educational tools to reach young people. She hosted three political talk shows in the 1950s and early 1960s, often appearing in guest spots to promote the United Nations, Democratic candidates, and progressive issues with Ed Sullivan, Bob Hope, Frank Sinatra, Mike Wallace, and Edward R. Murrow. In the 1930s and '40s, fan magazines such as Photoplay and Modern Screen published her opinions on the movies, and she boldly appeared in an interventionist prologue to the 1940 anti-Nazi film Pastor Hall. During World War II, she contributed to civil defense films and became a staple joke in Hollywood comedies. She also negotiated postwar representations of FDR on the big screen, culminating in 1960's Sunrise at Campobello, which portrayed her as the perfect wife. This book is the first to address Eleanor Roosevelt's moving image record and her relationship to film and television in the three decades from the 1932 presidential campaign to her death in 1962.
Australians have become increasingly visible outside of the country as speakers and actors in radio and television, their media moguls have frequently bought up foreign companies, and people around the world have been able to enjoy such Australian productions as The Flying Doctors, Neighbours, and Kath and Kim. The origins, early development, and later adaptations of radio and television show how Australia has gone from being a minor and rather parochial player to being a significant part of the international scene. The A to Z of Australian Radio and Television provides essential facts and information concerning the Australian radio and television industry. This is accomplished through the use of a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on directors, producers, writers, actors, television and radio series, and television and radio stations.
When Ozzie Nelson died in 1975, he was no longer a household name. For a guy who had created the longest-running TV sitcom in history, invented the rock video, and fronted one of the most successful big bands of the 1930s, it's baffling that Nelson has faded so far from American media memory. Larger than life offscreen--an attorney, college football star, cartoonist, songwriter, major band leader--Ozzie created a smaller-than-life TV persona, the bumbling average Dad who became known to the rock generation (which included his teen idol son Rick Nelson) as the essence of blandness. But America also saw Ozzie as their iconic Dad: not a "father knows best," since his pontifications usually proved flawed by the end of each episode, but the father who tried his best. This book is the only full-length biography of Ozzie Nelson since he published his memoirs in 1973. It treats the big band and early TV icon with affection and hints that American pop culture may owe more to Ozzie than is generally acknowledged.
Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, & Television, edited by Deborah E. Barker and Theresa Starkey, examines the often-overlooked and undervalued impact of the U.S. South on the origins and development of the detective genre and film noir. This wide-ranging collection engages with ongoing discussions about genre, gender, social justice, critical race theory, popular culture, cinema, and mass media. Focusing on the South, these essays uncover three frequently interrelated themes: the acknowledgment of race as it relates to slavery, segregation, and discrimination; the role of land as a source of income, an ecologically threatened space, or a place of seclusion; and the continued presence of the southern gothic in recurring elements such as dilapidated plantation houses, swamps, family secrets, and the occult. Twenty-two critical essays probe how southern detective narratives intersect with popular genre forms such as neo-noir, hard-boiled fiction, the dark thriller, suburban noir, amateur sleuths, journalist detectives, and television police procedurals. Alongside essays by scholars, Detecting the South in Fiction, Film, and Television presents pieces by authors of detective and crime fiction, including Megan Abbott and Ace Atkins, who address the extent to which the South and its artistic traditions influenced their own works. By considering the diversity of authors and characters associated with the genre, this accessible collection provides an overdue examination of the historical, political, and aesthetic contexts out of which the southern detective narrative emerged and continues to evolve.
First published in 1973, The Shadow in the Cave explores the history of broadcasting conflicts and shows how they are built into the very roots of broadcasting. Every nation has built into its radio and television system a coded version of anxieties about the nature and effects of mass communication. The whole of the culture of broadcasting- its genres and its style – is an expression of the dilemmas which have bedevilled broadcasting form the moment of its invention. Anthony Smith’s book provides for the first time a connected and carefully researched picture of the real issues involved in the debate about broadcasting. This book shows how the argument about levels of taste in broadcasting, about balance and fairness, about trivialisation, control and freedom of access are elements of a gigantic problem which threatens the whole structure of democratic freedom. The book shows some of the path to be taken if broadcasting is not to undermine the basic notion of freedom of expression. Topical, subtle and revealing, this is an important historical document, a must read for scholars and researchers of media studies, news media, media history, mass communication and political studies.
Before television, radio was the sole source of simultaneous mass entertainment in America. The medium served as launching pad for the careers of countless future stars of stage and screen. Singers and conductors became legends by offering musical entertainment directly to Americans in their homes, vehicles, and places of work and play. This volume presents biographies of 24 renowned performers who spent a significant portion of their careers in front of a radio microphone. Profiles of individuals like Steve Allen, Rosemary Clooney, Bob Crosby, Johnny Desmond, Jo Stafford, and Percy Faith, along with groups such as the Ink Spots and the King's Men, reveal the private lives behind the public personas and bring to life the icons and ambiance of a bygone era.
African societies are gifted with a rich creativity, often expressed in intimate corporeal terms. For the Yaka people of southwestern Congo, such manifestations can have individual, social, or even cosmic significance. The Law of the Lifegivers investigates the importance among the Yaka of body and space in their daily life, exercise of power, and initiatic traditions. Through this analysis, Devisch and Brodeur show that body, desire, and symbol are intertwined, so that bodily expression can act as sensuous and powerful symbol. The domestication of passion and the institutionalizing of a subject are all expressed in bodily terms, particularly during initiations; the ethical order of law rests on many bodily symbols, including the importance of maternal and paternal lifegivers. The authors vividly describe the different life-giving or life-threatening roles which function in this society, such as sorcerer, diviner, therapist, and chief, as well as the funeral drama which shapes the passage to the afterlife with the ancestors, as experienced by the dying subject and his community. Through their dialogue and correspondence, Devisch and Brodeur (an anthropologist and a psychoanalyst, respectively) bring together two, sometimes conflicting, intellectual approaches. They aim to unravel a truth which is freed, as much as possible, from the presumption that only the West possesses the knowledge of objective discourse and science. Through the interaction, the authors reveal the semantic threads, located at the very heart of the most vital, life-giving processes, which weave the fabric of the practice and thought of a riveting, passionate Africa.
More than 700 uncredited scriptwriters who created the memorable characters and thrilling stories of radio's Golden Age receive due recognition in this reference work. For some, radio was a stepping stone on the way to greater achievements in film or television, on the stage or in literature. For others, it was the culmination of a life spent writing newspaper copy. Established authors dabbled in radio as a new medium, while working writers saw it as another opportunity to earn a paycheck. When these men and women came to broadcasting, they crafted a body of work still appreciated by modern listeners.
