Showman of the Screen
Showman of the Screen

Author: A. T. McKenna

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 305

ISBN-13: 0813168732

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Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905–1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers. Alternately respected and reviled, this master of movie promotion was responsible for bringing films as varied as Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), Hercules (1958), The Graduate (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and A Bridge Too Far (1977) to American audiences. In the first biography of this controversial pioneer, A. T. McKenna traces Levine's rise as an influential packager of popular culture. He explores the mogul's pivotal role in many significant industry innovations from the 1950s to the 1970s, examining his use of saturation release tactics and bombastic advertising campaigns. Levine was also a trailblazer in promoting European art house cinema in the 1960s. He made Federico Fellini's 8 (1963) a hit in America, feuded with Jean-Luc Godard over their production of Contempt (1963), and campaigned aggressively for Sophia Loren to become the first actress to win an Oscar for a foreign language performance for her role in Two Women (1960). Despite his significant accomplishments and prominent role in shaping film distribution and promotion in the post-studio era, Levine is largely overlooked today. McKenna's in-depth biography corrects misunderstandings and misinformation about this colorful figure, and offers a sober assessment of his contributions to world cinema. It also illuminates Levine's peculiar talent for movie- and self-promotion, as well as his extraordinary career in the motion picture business.

Showman of the Screen
Showman of the Screen

Author: A. T. McKenna

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-11-01

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0813168724

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Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905--1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers. Alternately respected and reviled, this master of movie promotion was responsible for bringing films as varied as Godzilla: King of the Monsters! (1956), Hercules (1958), The Graduate (1967), The Lion in Winter (1968), and A Bridge Too Far (1977) to American audiences . In the first biography of this controversial pioneer, A. T. McKenna traces Levine's rise as an influential packager of popular culture. He explores the mogul's pivotal role in many significant industry innovations from the 1950s to the 1970s, examining his use of saturation release tactics and bombastic advertising campaigns. Levine was also a trailblazer in promoting European art house cinema in the 1960s. He made Federico Fellini's 81⁄2 (1963) a hit in America, feuded with Jean-Luc Godard over their production of Contempt (1963), and campaigned aggressively for Sophia Loren to become the first actress to win an Oscar for a foreign language performance for her role in Two Women (1960). Despite his significant accomplishments and prominent role in shaping film distribution and promotion in the post-studio era, Levine is largely overlooked today. McKenna's in-depth biography corrects misunderstandings and misinformation about this colorful figure, and offers a sober assessment of his contributions to world cinema. It also illuminates Levine's peculiar talent for movie- and self-promotion, as well as his extraordinary career in the motion picture business.

Showman of the Screen
Showman of the Screen

Author: Anthony T. McKenna

Publisher:

Published: 2016

Total Pages:

ISBN-13: 9780813168814

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Short, immaculately dressed, and shockingly foul-mouthed, Joseph E. Levine (1905-1987) was larger than life. He rose from poverty in Boston's West End to become one of postwar Hollywood's most prolific independent promoters, distributors, and producers. In the first biography of this controversial pioneer, A.T. McKenna traces Levine's rise as an influential packager of popular culture.

Showman
Showman

Author: David Thomson

Publisher:

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 792

ISBN-13: 9780233987910

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The authorized biography of this Hollywood producer, who made REBECCA and GONE WITH THE WIND, looking at his career from his swift rise to prominence to the collapse of his empire.

Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen
Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen

Author: Sandra K. Sagala

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-08-13

Total Pages: 231

ISBN-13: 0806151404

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For more than thirty years, William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody entertained audiences across the United States and Europe with his Wild West show. Scores of books have been written about Cody’s fabled career as a showman, but his involvement in the film industry—following the dissolution of his traveling show—is less well known. In Buffalo Bill on the Silver Screen, Sandra K. Sagala chronicles the fascinating story of Cody’s venture into filmmaking during the early cinema period. In 1894 Thomas Edison invited Cody to bring some of the Wild West performers to the inventor’s kinetoscope studio. From then on, as Sagala reveals, Cody was frequently in the camera’s eye, eager to participate in the newest and most popular phenomenon of the era: the motion picture. In 1910, promoter Pliny Craft produced The Life of Buffalo Bill, a film in which Cody played his own persona. After his Wild West show disbanded, Cody fully embraced the film business, seeing the technology as a way to recoup his financial losses and as a new vehicle for preserving America’s history and his own legacy for future generations. Because he had participated as a scout in some of the battles and skirmishes between the U.S. Army and Plains Indians, Cody wanted to make a film that captured these historical events. Unfortunately for Cody, The Indian Wars (1913) was not a financial success, and only three minutes of footage have survived. Long after his death, Cody’s legacy lives on through the many movies that have featured his character. Sagala provides a useful appendix listing all of these films, as well as those for which Cody himself took an active role as director, producer, or actor. Published on the eve of the centennial anniversary of The Indian Wars, this engaging book offers readers new insights into the legendary figure’s life and career and explores his lasting image in film.

The Art and Making of The Greatest Showman
The Art and Making of The Greatest Showman

Author: Signe Bergstrom

Publisher: Weldon Owen

Published: 2017-12-12

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781681883731

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The glorious world of P.T. Barnum and the holiday movie The Greatest Showman come to life in this lavish art book. Featuring unit photography and concept art of stars Hugh Jackman, Zac Ephron, Michelle Williams, and Zendaya as well as behind-the-scenes tales of the film’s making. Lyrics to the movie musical’s showstopping tunes, by the song-writing team behind La-La Land. Foreword by Director Michael Gracey.

American Showman
American Showman

Author: Ross Melnick

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2012-05-01

Total Pages: 581

ISBN-13: 023150425X

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Samuel "Roxy" Rothafel (1882–1936) built an influential and prolific career as film exhibitor, stage producer, radio broadcaster, musical arranger, theater manager, war propagandist, and international celebrity. He helped engineer the integration of film, music, and live performance in silent film exhibition; scored early Fox Movietone films such as Sunrise (1927); pioneered the convergence of film, broadcasting, and music publishing and recording in the 1920s; and helped movies and moviegoing become the dominant form of mass entertainment between the world wars. The first book devoted to Rothafel's multifaceted career, American Showman examines his role as the key purveyor of a new film exhibition aesthetic that appropriated legitimate theater, opera, ballet, and classical music to attract multi-class audiences. Roxy scored motion pictures, produced enormous stage shows, managed many of New York's most important movie houses, directed and/or edited propaganda films for the American war effort, produced short and feature-length films, exhibited foreign, documentary, independent, and avant-garde motion pictures, and expanded the conception of mainstream, commercial cinema. He was also one of the chief creators of the radio variety program, pioneering radio broadcasting, promotions, and tours. The producers and promoters of distinct themes and styles, showmen like Roxy profoundly remade the moviegoing experience, turning the deluxe motion picture theater into a venue for exhibiting and producing live and recorded entertainment. Roxy's interest in media convergence also reflects a larger moment in which the entertainment industry began to create brands and franchises, exploit them through content release "events," and give rise to feature films, soundtracks, broadcasts, live performances, and related consumer products. Regularly cited as one of the twelve most important figures in the film and radio industries, Roxy was instrumental to the development of film exhibition and commercial broadcasting, musical accompaniment, and a new, convergent entertainment industry.

Edward Dmytryk
Edward Dmytryk

Author: Fintan McDonagh

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2021-07-21

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 1476643148

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Edward Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" jailed for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Finding himself blacklisted after his prison sentence and unable to operate under a pseudonym, he took the step of testifying and naming names to the Committee. His career resumed to considerable commercial success, but also to prolonged and bitter criticism from the left and persistent mistrust from the right. Acknowledged as one of the key figures in the development of the film noir genre, having directed one of its first films, Murder, My Sweet, Dmytryk has otherwise frequently been sidelined in critical studies because of the controversy. This book is the first to critically evaluate each of the dozens of films he made between the 1930s and the 1970s including The Young Lions, Crossfire and The Caine Mutiny, among many others.

On the Screen
On the Screen

Author: Ariel Rogers

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2019-07-30

Total Pages: 382

ISBN-13: 0231548036

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Today, in a world of smartphones, tablets, and computers, screens are a pervasive part of daily life. Yet a multiplicity of screens has been integral to the media landscape since cinema’s golden age. In On the Screen, Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. Marshalling extensive archival research, Rogers reveals the role screens played at the height of the era of “classical” Hollywood cinema. She shows how filmmakers, technicians, architects, and exhibitors employed a variety of screens within diverse spaces, including studio soundstages, theaters, homes, stores, and train stations. Far from inert, screens served as means of structuring mediated space and time, contributing to the transformations of modern culture. On the Screen demonstrates how particular approaches to the use of screens traversed production and exhibition, theatrical and extratheatrical practice, mainstream and avant-garde modes, and even cinema and television. Rogers’s history challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment, showing how attention to the variety of historical screen practices opens up new ways to understand contemporary media.

The Epic Films of Samuel Bronston
The Epic Films of Samuel Bronston

Author: Mel Martin

Publisher:

Published: 2008-03

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781593931292

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Samuel Bronston produced some of the greatest and most remembered epic films of the sixties. El Cid, King of Kings, Fall of the Roman Empire, John Paul Jones, and Circus World. With a literal 'cast of thousands', and the biggest and most historically accurate sets ever built, the films have become legendary. The Magnificent Showman tells the stories behind the making of these memorable films, and explores the ambitious and quixotic man who brought them into being. This is the story of the film making empire Bronston created in Spain, hiring reknowned Directors like Nicholas Ray and Anthony Mann, and attracting first rate talent like Charlton Heston, Christopher Plummer, Stephen Boyd, Ava Gardner, Sophia Loren, James Mason, Alec Guinness, Rita Hayworth, David Niven, John Wayne and others. In many way, the drama off screen was as exciting as the action in front of the cameras. This book highlights the behind the scenes drama and conflict as Bronston struggled to bring these great stories to the big screen, and documents the extravagance that led to tremendous success, and then colossal failure as the Bronston empire collapsed in a series of legal battles and bankruptcies. Creating an amazing 6 major films in 6 years, Samuel Bronston left a legacy of artistic quality and innovation that are fondly remembered to this day. Films will never again be made in the way Bronston made them. Then, and now, Samuel Bronston remains The Magnificent Showman.