This biography is the story of how a bankrupt refugee without a studio managed to produce several of the greatest films of all time: "The African Queen, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, " and "Lawrence of Arabia." Film credits aside, Sam Spiegel led a flamboyant and uncompromising life, and the full story has never been told--until now. of photos.
LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
Two-time Academy Award winner Sir David Lean (1908–1991) was one of the most prominent directors of the twentieth century, responsible for the classics The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Doctor Zhivago (1965). British-born Lean asserted himself in Hollywood as a major filmmaker with his epic storytelling and panoramic visions of history, but he started out as a talented film editor and director in Great Britain. As a result, he brought an art-house mentality to blockbuster films. Combining elements of biography and film criticism, Beyond the Epic: The Life and Films of David Lean uses screenplays and production histories to assess Lean’s body of work. Author Gene D. Phillips interviews actors who worked with Lean and directors who knew him, and their comments reveal new details about the director’s life and career. Phillips also explores Lean’s lesser-studied films, such as The Passionate Friends (1949), Hobson’s Choice (1954), and Summertime (1955). The result is an in-depth examination of the director in cultural, historical, and cinematic contexts. Lean’s approach to filmmaking was far different than that of many of his contemporaries. He chose his films carefully and, as a result, directed only sixteen films in a period of more than forty years. Those films, however, have become some of the landmarks of motion-picture history. Lean is best known for his epics, but Phillips also focuses on Lean’s successful adaptations of famous works of literature, including retellings of plays such as Brief Encounter (1945) and novels such as Great Expectations (1946), Oliver Twist (1948), and A Passage to India (1984). From expansive studies of war and strife to some of literature’s greatest high comedies and domestic dramas, Lean imbued all of his films with his unique creative vision. Few directors can match Lean’s ability to combine narrative sweep and psychological detail, and Phillips goes beyond Lean’s epics to reveal this unifying characteristic in the director’s body of work. Beyond the Epic is a vital assessment of a great director’s artistic process and his place in the film industry.
LIFE Magazine is the treasured photographic magazine that chronicled the 20th Century. It now lives on at LIFE.com, the largest, most amazing collection of professional photography on the internet. Users can browse, search and view photos of today’s people and events. They have free access to share, print and post images for personal use.
The motion picture producer describes his early career as an actor, liasons with actresses, rise to powerful studio executive, time in a mental institution, drug use, loss of status in Hollywood, and rise back to power.
New York magazine was born in 1968 after a run as an insert of the New York Herald Tribune and quickly made a place for itself as the trusted resource for readers across the country. With award-winning writing and photography covering everything from politics and food to theater and fashion, the magazine's consistent mission has been to reflect back to its audience the energy and excitement of the city itself, while celebrating New York as both a place and an idea.
Here is the story of Sir David Lean, one of the greatest moviemakers of all time, director of such epics as Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and A Passage to India. Stephen M. Silverman spent the better part of a year meeting with Lean to secure firsthand information for this book. An intensely private man, Lean opened up to Silverman and shared with him the story of his life - from his Quaker upbringing, through his decade as Britain's star film editor, to his work as a director, earning him through his intelligent, literate films a reputation for perfection. Lean's movies, which collected an unprecedented twenty-seven Academy Awards, are noted for their stunning pictorial content as well as their strong narrative flow, and many of Lean's colleagues have shared their personal recollections with the author, who has added a new afterword to the book. The memories and anecdotes from such film notables as Alec Guinness, Katharine Hepburn, Julie Christie, Maurice Jarre, John Mills, Omar Sharif, Judy Davis, and Sarah Miles serve to further enliven this already vivid biographical and critical study. Katharine Hepburn starred in Summertime, Lean's first film to be shot entirely on location. Her Introduction discusses Sir David as both an incomparable director and a great friend. Rolling Stone: "Stephen M. Silverman has guided the famously reclusive Lean into lively, witty, and informative recollections of his life and work on such hits as The Bridge on the River Kwai, Doctor Zhivago, Brief Encounter, and A Passage to India, as well as Lawrence [of Arabia]. Here's that rare book on movies that can really be called indispensable." Los Angeles Times: "Perhaps most surprising to his friends, [Lean] allowed himself to be interviewed at length by critic Stephen Silverman. David Lean is interesting not least for the candor with which Lean admitted that the reviews of Ryan's Daughter devastated him and almost paralyzed him creatively." The Boston Globe: "Bright, chatty, cant-free . . . Without lapsing into critspeak, Silverman adroitly lays out the evidence for what's shaping up as an emergent reassessment of Lean's output and provides flavorful eyewitness testimony, pro and con." Chicago Tribune: "It's fitting that the most exquisitely crafted book on film should deal with one of the motion pictures' supreme craftsmen, David Lean . . . . Lean himself contributes many insights and anecdotes, and there are fascinating behind-the-camera tales of both his meticulous technique and his messy battles with producers and stars." Financial Times: "This portrait of the film director as old lion is well-researched and highly readable. We goggle at the account of Lean's Quaker upbringing and his parents' horror of the cinema. (They wanted him to become an accountant.) We follow Lean's early creative romances with Noël Coward (four films) and Charles Dickens (two). And we listen to Lean and Katharine Hepburn . . . quarreling via Silverman over who was responsible for her ill-fated jump into the Venice canal in Summertime." Variety: "As lavish as Lean's best films, Stephen M. Silverman's David Lean is an important addition to the collective library of film books."
The life and its biographer provide a landmark work on the cinema. Emerging from a childhood of nearly Dickensian darkness, David Lean found his great success as a director of the appropriately titled Great Expectations. There followed his legendary black-and-white films of the 1940s and his four-film movie collaboration with Noel Coward. Lean's 1955 film Summertime took him from England to the world of international moviemaking and the stunning series of spectacular color epics that would gain for his work twenty-seven Academy Awards and fifty-six Academy Award nominations. All are classics, including The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Doctor Zhivago, and A Passage to India. Kevin Brownlow, a film editor in his own right and author of the seminal silent film trilogy initiated with The Parade's Gone By. . ., brings to Lean's biography an exhaustive knowledge of the art and the industry. One learns about the making of movies as realized by a master, but also of the highly personal costs of genius. The troubled Quaker family from which Lean came influenced his relationship with his son, his brother, and his six wives. Yet he showed in his work a deep understanding of humanity. The vastness of this scholarly and entertaining enterprise is augmented by sixteen pages of scenes from Lean's color films, thirty-two pages from his black-and-white movies, and throughout the text a vast number of photographs from his life and location work.
A longtime industry insider and acclaimed Hollywood historian goes behind the scenes to tell the stories of 15 of the most spectacular movie megaflops of the past 50 years, such as Cleopatra, The Cotton Club, and Waterworld. He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.
Winner, 2023 Shapiro Best Book Award, Association for Israel Studies From Frank Sinatra’s early pro-Zionist rallying to Steven Spielberg’s present-day peacemaking, Hollywood has long enjoyed a “special relationship” with Israel. This book offers a groundbreaking account of this relationship, both on and off the screen. Tony Shaw and Giora Goodman investigate the many ways in which Hollywood’s moguls, directors, and actors have supported or challenged Israel for more than seven decades. They explore the complex story of Israel’s relationship with American Jewry and illuminate how media and soft power have shaped the Arab-Israeli conflict. Shaw and Goodman draw on a vast range of archival sources to demonstrate how show business has played a pivotal role in crafting the U.S.-Israel alliance. They probe the influence of Israeli diplomacy on Hollywood’s output and lobbying activities, but also highlight the limits of ideological devotion in high-risk entertainment industries. The book details the political involvement with Israel—and Palestine—of household names such as Eddie Cantor, Kirk Douglas, Elizabeth Taylor, Barbra Streisand, Vanessa Redgrave, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Robert De Niro, and Natalie Portman. It also spotlights the role of key behind-the-scenes players like Dore Schary, Arthur Krim, Arnon Milchan, and Haim Saban. Bringing the story up to the moment, Shaw and Goodman contend that the Hollywood-Israel relationship might now be at a turning point. Shedding new light on the political power that images and celebrity can wield, Hollywood and Israel shows the world’s entertainment capital to be an important player in international affairs.
