Genre: Comedy Characters: 4 males, 4 females Scenery: Interior A Hollywood writer in need of some research material finds Susan, a 17 year old delinquent, on his doorstep on a rainy Christmas Eve. He learns her life, decides he wont let her be sent to the prison farm, and therefore contrives to have her marry him in Las Vegas. Before she awakens after their all night ride back, Joe leaves for his mountain cabin to write a play about Susan. In his absence, Joes old Navy pal talks Susan into studying acting. Finally Joes play opens with Susan in the cast, and she immediately becomes the talk of Broadway. However, she walks out on the play to go back to Joe, who has since realized how much he really loved her. She has little trouble convincing him that age differences mean nothing when two people love each other.
From a former reporter for The Associated Press (Kazickas) and a 20/20 news correspondent (Sherr) comes this witty and informative illustrated guide to over 1,000 historic landmarks commemorating the words and deeds of American heroines from Anne Hutchinson to Christa McAuliffe.
Frank Tashlin (1913–1972) was a supremely gifted satirist and visual stylist who made an indelible mark on 1950s Hollywood and American popular culture—first as a talented animator working on Looney Tunes cartoons, then as muse to film stars Jerry Lewis, Bob Hope, and Jayne Mansfield. Yet his name is not especially well known today. Long regarded as an anomaly or curiosity, Tashlin is finally given his due in this career-spanning survey. Tashlinesque considers the director's films in the contexts of Hollywood censorship, animation history, and the development of the genre of comedy in American film, with particular emphasis on the sex, satire, and visual flair that comprised Tashlin's distinctive artistic and comedic style. Through close readings and pointed analyses of Tashlin's large and fascinating body of work, Ethan de Seife offers fresh insights into such classic films as Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter?, The Girl Can't Help It, Artists and Models, The Disorderly Orderly, and Son of Paleface, as well as numerous Warner Bros. cartoons starring Porky Pig, among others. This is an important rediscovery of a highly unusual and truly hilarious American artist. Includes a complete filmography.
The Hollywood "sex comedy"--a feature-length film in which sex motivates the storyline and the laughs are triggered by sexual situations--came into its own with the 1953 release of the once-controversial The Moon Is Blue. That film received very positive critical and audience response despite being denied a seal of approval from the Production Code Administration and receiving a "Condemned" rating from the Legion of Decency. (These two formidable watchdog agencies would continue to be challenged--and audiences would continue to be convulsed--by the abundance of sex comedies still to come.) The present informal survey focuses on 25 selected examples of the genre, released between 1953 and 1964. Along with such familiar works as The Seven Year Itch, The Tender Trap, Pillow Talk and Kiss Me, Stupid, several lesser-known sex comedies like I Married a Woman, The Tunnel of Love, Happy Anniversary and Period of Adjustment are documented, analyzed and placed in context with their times. Some are masterpieces, others mildly amusing and a few downright awful, but all are fascinating artifacts of a bygone era in popular entertainment.
From The Big Sleep to Babette's Feast, from Lawrence of Arabia to Drugstore Cowboy, The Movie Guide offers the inside word on 3,500 of the best motion pictures ever made. James Monaco is the president and founder of BASELINE, the world's leading supplier of information to the film and television industries. Among his previous books are The Encyclopedia of Film, American Film Now, and How to Read a Film.
Readers will discover real-life, yet upbeat portraits of the "shredder" jobs of the industry, such as assistant or d-girl, and how they can lead to the "keeper" jobs of actor, agent, or studio executive. Each career overview features a clever analysis of the classic film characters who memorably played these jobs on screen; an insightful rewards-risks assessment of the job; and a brief look at such essential job qualities as durability, length of stay, "food chain value" and desirability factor. Part how-to guide, part historical document, and part social commentary, this book will delight career seekers, Hollywood insiders, and film aficionados alike!
THROUGHOUT ERICA HELLER’S LIFE, when people learned that Joseph Heller was her father, they often remarked, “How terrific!” But was there a catch? Like his most famous work, her father was a study in contradictions: eccentric, brilliant, and voracious, but also mercurial, competitive, and stubborn, with a love of mischief that sometimes cut too close to the bone. Being raised by such a larger than- life personality could be claustrophobic, even at the sprawling Upper West Side apartments of the Apthorp, which the Hellers called home—in one way or another—for forty-five years. Yossarian Slept Here is Erica Heller’s wickedly funny but also poignant and incisive memoir about growing up in a family—her iconic father; her wry, beautiful mother, Shirley; her younger brother, Ted; her relentlessly inventive grandmother Dottie—that could be by turns caring, infuriating, and exasperating, though anything but dull. From the forbidden pleasures of ordering shrimp cocktail when it was beyond the family’s budget to spending a summer, as her father’s fame grew, at the Beverly Hills Hotel, Erica details the Hellers’ charmed—and charmingly turbulent— trajectory. She offers a rare glimpse of meetings with the Gourmet Club, where her father would dine weekly with Mel Brooks, Zero Mostel, and Mario Puzo, among others (and from which all wives and children were strictly verboten). She introduces us to many extraordinary residents of the Apthorp, some famous—George Balanchine, Sidney Poitier, and Lena Horne, to name a few—and some not famous, but all quite memorable. Yet she also manages to limn the complex bonds of loyalty and guilt, hurt and healing, that define every family. Erica was among those present at her father’s bedside as he struggled to recover from Guillain-Barré syndrome and then cared for her mother when Shirley was diagnosed with terminal cancer after the thirty-eight-year marriage and intensely passionate partnership with Joe had ended. Witty and perceptive, and displaying the descriptive gifts of a born storyteller, this authentic and colorful portrait of life in the Heller household unfolds alongside the saga of the family’s moves into four distinctive apartments within the Apthorp, each representing a different phase of their lives together—and apart. It is a story about achieving a dream; about fame and its aftermath; about lasting love, squandered opportunities, and how to have the best meal in Chinatown.
Historical and theoretical analysis of the “clear line” style in comics and cinema The “clear line”, a term coined in 1977 by Dutch essayist and artist Joost Swarte, has become shorthand in the field of comics studies for the style originally developed by Hergé and the École de Bruxelles. It refers to certain storytelling strategies that generate a deceptively simple, lucid, and hygienic narration: in Philippe Marion’s words, it is a style “made out of light, fluidity and limpid clarity”. By cataloguing and critically analysing clear line comics from historical and theoretical perspectives, this book offers a new outlook on the development of the style in the 20th and 21st centuries, especially focused on the context of the European bande dessinée. In addition, it pioneeringly expands the concept of “clear line” to other artistic domains by introducing and defending its transmedial use, which is particularly relevant for the understanding of the oeuvres of certain filmmakers of the 20th century working in the postwar period, such as Yasujirô Ozu in Japan, Jacques Tati in France and Frank Tashlin in the United States. The Clear Line in Comics and Cinema is therefore a key theoretical work for both bande dessinée enthusiasts and comics scholars, as well as a fundamental contribution to present-day film studies and transmedial narratology.
Tales of human history at world's end -- of the explorers, adventurers and settlers who have ventured to the Galápagos Islands since their discovery four centuries ago.
Two narratives intertwine in The Chenango Kid. One is the personal story of the author, Roger Miller, who grew up on Chenango Street, a main artery of the medium-sized industrial city of Binghamton, New York, in the 1950s. The second is the larger story of the 1950s. Each narrative enlarges upon the other. Many elements make up the personal: a devastating house fire; a single mother who liked to work and to frequent taverns; a father, mystified by life, less devoted to work than to benignly stalking his son; a half-sister long unknown; a drunken and/or crazy uncle or two; a boyhood paradise in the hills of Pennsylvania; and a passion for reading and art. All in all an unconventionally conventional working-class youth. The Chenango Kid also connects Chenango Street to the wider world of the Fifties, a vibrant, explosive decade in art, literature, music, movies, and television--making it The Decade That Never Ends. The popular culture of no other ten-year span in the century continues to exert its influence as strongly or to be revived as often as that of the 1950s.
