Reel Facts: Unbelievable Stuff About Famous Film Stars and Movies That Really Happened
Reel Facts: Unbelievable Stuff About Famous Film Stars and Movies That Really Happened

Author: Jeff Lenburg

Publisher: Moonwater Press

Published: 2023-08-19

Total Pages: 260

ISBN-13: 0996320687

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ONLY IN HOLLYWOOD COULD THINGS THIS UNBELIEVABLE HAPPEN As any actor, producer, director, or screenwriter can attest, working in the movie business isn't easy. After Jack Nicholson filmed his first screen test for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, studio mogul Louis B. Mayer politely told him afterwards: "I don't know what we can use you for, but if we ever do need you, we'll need you real bad." In the late 1960s, Paul, John, George, and Ringo–better known as The Beatles–were set to star in a movie version of J.R.R. Tolkien's epic fantasy novel, The Lord of the Rings, until Tolkien objected over the loudness of their music. Steven Spielberg snubbed Charlton Heston for the lead role in Jaws believing his "save the day" disaster movie performances would overshadow the movie's real star–the killer shark. In prepping for his role of the psychotic Vietnam veteran-turned cab driver in Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Robert De Niro obtained a New York taxicab driver's license and learned how to drive a cab working 12-hour shifts and picking up passengers for a New York cab company. What does this unbelievable stuff have in common? Scores of these and other tantalizing tidbits and scintillating stories that really happened to famous film stars and in the movies are meticulously detailed in one fun, fact-filled volume, REEL FACTS. This fascinating, full-color copiously illustrated treasury offers an inside the Hollywood grapevine look at it all—classic movie star rejections, remarkable movie ideas that misfired (or the greatest movies never made), amazing extremes actors have undertaken in preparing for film roles, unforeseen calamities that disrupted or delayed movies in production, fantastic film foolery perpetrated in popular movies on audiences, notable casting mishaps, the worst screen kissers, and much more. For avid movie lovers and film buffs alike, this entertaining chronicle shows filmdom's favorite stars and movies in general like you have never seen them before.

Reel V. Real
Reel V. Real

Author: Frank Sanello

Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing

Published: 2002-12-28

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13: 1461709334

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All too often, highly fictionalized cinematic depictions of the past are accepted as the unassailable truth by those unfamiliar with the "real" account. This book profiles sixty movies that portray actual moments in history, and compares the mythologized account of each event to what really happened. Movies chronicled include The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, A Man for All Seasons, Gladiator, Gandhi, Apollo 13, The Thin Red Line, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The Last Emperor, All the Presidents Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Bonnie & Clyde, Patton, and Elizabeth. Sanello also contrasts several historical figures with their filmed treatments, including Julius Caesar, Henry V, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Jesus Christ, Catherine the Great, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. Lavishly illustrated with sixty film stills, Reel v. Real shows how a happening's genuine details are frequently reshaped and distorted by Hollywood's bottomless appetite for over-the-top flamboyance and melodrama.

Picturing Tolkien
Picturing Tolkien

Author: Janice M. Bogstad

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2011-09-07

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 078648473X

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This group of new critical essays offers multidisciplinary analysis of director Peter Jackson's spectacularly successful adaptations of J.R.R. Tolkien's Lord of the Rings trilogy: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003). Part One of the collection, "Techniques of Structure and Story," compares and contrasts the organizational principles of the books and films. Part Two, "Techniques of Character and Culture," focuses on the methods used to transform the characters and settings of Tolkien's narrative into the personalities and places visualized on screen. Each of the sixteen essays includes extensive notes and a separate bibliography. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

The Hollywood Renaissance
The Hollywood Renaissance

Author: Peter Krämer

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA

Published: 2018-06-28

Total Pages: 289

ISBN-13: 1501337882

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In December 1967, Time magazine put Bonnie and Clyde on its cover and proudly declared that Hollywood cinema was undergoing a 'renaissance'. For the next few years, a wide range of formally and thematically challenging films were produced at the very centre of the American film industry, often (but by no means always) combining success at the box office with huge critical acclaim, both then and later. This collection brings together acknowledged experts on American cinema to examine thirteen key films from the years 1966 to 1974, starting with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, a major studio release which was in effect exempted from Hollywood's Production Code and thus helped to liberate American filmmaking from (self-)censorship. Long-standing taboos to do with sex, violence, race relations, drugs, politics, religion and much else could now be broken, often in conjunction with extensive stylistic experimentation. Whereas most previous scholarship has examined these developments through the prism of auteurism, with its tight focus on film directors and their oeuvres, the contributors to this collection also carefully examine production histories and processes. In doing so they pay particular attention to the economic underpinnings and collaborative nature of filmmaking, the influence of European art cinema as well as of exploitation, experimental and underground films, and the connections between cinema and other media (notably publishing, music and theatre). Several chapters show how the innovations of the Hollywood Renaissance relate to further changes in American cinema from the mid-1970s onwards.

Framing Blackness
Framing Blackness

Author: Ed Guerrero

Publisher: Temple University Press

Published: 2012-06-20

Total Pages: 270

ISBN-13: 1439904138

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A challenge to Hollywood's one-dimensional images of African Americans.

The Righteous Way (Part 1)
The Righteous Way (Part 1)

Author: Starmel Allah

Publisher: Starmel Allah

Published: 2013-08-18

Total Pages: 318

ISBN-13:

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The Righteous Way is an introduction to the Five Percent Nation that influenced Hip-Hop culture and New York City urban youth. This work lays a foundation for readers to meaningfully build and organize based on the moral and ethical implications of the Nation's teachings. It features an exclusive interview with Allah B on the history of the Nation and The Word, the Nation's first national newspaper, and is Part 1 of The Righteous Way Trilogy.

Cinema and Community
Cinema and Community

Author: Moya Luckett

Publisher: Wayne State University Press

Published: 2013-07-12

Total Pages: 436

ISBN-13: 0814337260

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Investigates how progressivism structured many aspects of understudied era of cinema. Caught between the older model of short film and the emerging classic era, the transitional period of American cinema (1907-1917) has typically posed a problem for studies of early American film. Yet in Cinema and Community: Progressivism, Exhibition, and Film Culture in Chicago, 1907-1917, author Moya Luckett uses the era's dominant political ideology as a lens to better understand its cinematic practice. Luckett argues that movies were a typically Progressive institution, reflecting the period's investment in leisure, its more public lifestyle, and its fascination with celebrity. She uses Chicago, often considered the nation's most Progressive city and home to the nation's largest film audience by 1907, to explore how Progressivism shaped and influenced the address, reception, exhibition, representational strategies, regulation, and cultural status of early cinema. After a survey of Progressivism's general influences on popular culture and the film industry in particular, she examines the era's spectatorship theories in chapter 1 and then the formal characteristics of the early feature film-including the use of prologues, multiple diegesis, and oversight-in chapter 2. In chapter 3, Luckett explores the period's cinema in the light of its celebrity culture, while she examines exhibition in chapter 4. She also looks at the formation of Chicago's censorship board in November 1907 in the context of efforts by city government, social reformers, and the local press to establish community standards for cinema in chapter 5. She completes the volume by exploring race and cinema in chapter 6 and national identity and community, this time in relation to World War I, in chapter 7. As well as offering a history of an underexplored area of film history, Luckett provides a conceptual framework to help navigate some of the period's key issues. Film scholars interested in the early years of American cinema will appreciate this insightful study.