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Author: Jeff Jaeckle
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2015-10-08
Total Pages: 338
ISBN-13: 1474406564
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis first collection of critical essays on Preston Sturges-director, screenwriter, comic genius of Hollywood-reawakens interest in the filmmaker's life and works and reminds readers why his movies continue to be culturally significant and immensely enjoyable.
Author: Jaeckle Jeff Jaeckle
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2015-10-08
Total Pages: 493
ISBN-13: 1474406572
DOWNLOAD EBOOKDirector, screenwriter and comic genius, Preston Sturges has been an influence on filmmakers ranging from Orson Welles to the Coen brothers. The first person to win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, he wrote and directed some of the most bizarre, controversial, and downright hilarious comedies of the 1940s, including Sullivan's Travels and Hail the Conquering Hero. He may be the most talented Hollywood filmmaker yet to receive the critical recognition he deserves. The Films of Preston Sturges is a pioneering collection of essays by world-famous scholars that chart Sturges' contributions to Hollywood cinema, revealing his pivotal status as an early writer-director, exploring his inimitable style, and making a bold case for his ongoing influence today. Reawakening interest in this filmmaker's life and works, this book will remind readers why Sturges' movies remain not only immensely enjoyable, but of great cultural significance as well.
Author: Stuart Klawans
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2023-01-10
Total Pages: 174
ISBN-13: 023155690X
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948—The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them—all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs. In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads—discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight—and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers—and funnier than ever.
Author: Alexandra Heller-Nicholas
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
Published: 2019-06-24
Total Pages: 264
ISBN-13: 1474440207
DOWNLOAD EBOOKSpanning from obscurity to notoriety, the films of director, screenwriter, actor and comic Elaine May have recently experienced a long-overdue renaissance. Although she made only four films - A New Leaf (1971), The Heartbreak Kid (1972), Mikey and Nicky (1976) and Ishtar (1987) - and never reached the level of acclaim of her frequent collaborator Mike Nichols, May's work is as enigmatic, sophisticated and unceasingly fascinating as her own complicated, reluctant star persona. This collection focuses both on the films she has directed, and also emphasises her work with other high profile collaborators such as John Cassavetes, Warren Beatty and Otto Preminger.
Author: NICK;STURGES SMEDLEY (TOM.)
Publisher:
Published: 2019
Total Pages:
ISBN-13: 9781789380262
DOWNLOAD EBOOKAuthor: Virginia Wright Wexman
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Published: 2020-07-21
Total Pages: 191
ISBN-13: 0231551436
DOWNLOAD EBOOKToday, the director is considered the leading artistic force behind a film. The production of a Hollywood movie requires the labor of many people, from screenwriters and editors to cinematographers and boom operators, but the director as author of the film overshadows them all. How did this concept of the director become so deeply ingrained in our understanding of cinema? In Hollywood’s Artists, Virginia Wright Wexman offers a groundbreaking history of how movie directors became cinematic auteurs that reveals and pinpoints the influence of the Directors Guild of America (DGA). Guided by Frank Capra’s mantra “one man, one film,” the Guild has portrayed its director-members as the creators responsible for turning Hollywood entertainment into cinematic art. Wexman details how the DGA differentiated itself from other industry unions, focusing on issues of status and creative control as opposed to bread-and-butter concerns like wages and working conditions. She also traces the Guild’s struggle for creative and legal power, exploring subjects from the language of on-screen credits to the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations of the movie industry. Wexman emphasizes the gendered nature of images of the great director, demonstrating how the DGA promoted the idea of the director as a masculine hero. Drawing on a broad array of archival sources, interviews, and theoretical and sociological insight, Hollywood’s Artists sheds new light on the ways in which the Directors Guild of America has shaped the role and image of directors both within the Hollywood system and in the culture at large.
Author: Maria San Filippo
Publisher: Wayne State University Press
Published: 2021-05-18
Total Pages: 343
ISBN-13: 0814346758
DOWNLOAD EBOOKThis volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.
Author: Alessandro Pirolini
Publisher: McFarland
Published: 2014-01-10
Total Pages: 213
ISBN-13: 0786456140
DOWNLOAD EBOOKMost published works on writer-director Preston Sturges (1898-1959) have focused on the elements that made him a symbol of classic Hollywood comedy or his contributions to the genre via such 1940s classics as The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels and Miracle of Morgan's Creek. In contrast, this critical study asserts that there are enough unexplained incongruities, fragmentations and contradictions in Sturges' output to demand a re-evalution of his place in film history as a predecessor (and perhaps progenitor) of later postmodern filmmakers. Four appendices offer a generous selection of previously unavailable material, including an exclusive interview with the director's fourth wife Sandy Sturges.
Author: Diane Jacobs
Publisher: Univ of California Press
Published: 2022-08-19
Total Pages: 540
ISBN-13: 0520335406
DOWNLOAD EBOOKIn this first critical biography of Preston Sturges, Diane Jacobs brings to life the great comic filmmaker whose career Andrew Sarris described as "one of the most brilliant and bizarre bursts of creation in the history of the American cinema." Jacobs uses letters and manuscripts never before revealed, as well as interviews with people who knew Sturges—including three of his wives—to portray this fascinating, contradictory man. In addition to discussing his major films, she also examines heretofore unknown work and shows that Sturges was highly creative even near the end of his life, a time when many believed he had lost his touch. Sturges secured his place in film history as the creator of such classic films as The Lady Eve, Sullivan's Travels, and The Palm Beach Story. In 1939 he became the first screenwriter to win the right to direct his own script—the result was the Oscar-winning The Great McGinty. Creator of Unfaithfully Yours, The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero, he was the third highest-paid man in the United States by the late 1940s. He owned a swank Hollywood restaurant and was known as an ebullient raconteur as well as a world-famous filmmaker. A little over a decade later, Sturges died in New York, impoverished and rejected by Hollywood. The euphoria of success, the fitfulness of luck, the promise and poignancy of the American Dream—the themes of Sturges's work also marked the man. Diane Jacobs achieves a singular success in illuminating his extraordinary life. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1992.
