Showman of the Screen

Showman of the Screen PDF Author: A. T. McKenna
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813168724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: A. T. McKenna
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813168724
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book

Book Description
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 PDF Author: Anthony T. McKenna
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780813168814
Category : Motion picture producers and directors
Languages : en
Pages :

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Book Description
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.

"TV" Tommy Ivo

Author: Tom Cotter
Publisher: Motorbooks
ISBN: 1610601270
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 243

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Book Description
2011 International Automotive Media Gold Award Winner In the early 1960s, Tommy Ivo had the world in the palm of his hands. Still a young man, he was already a star of television and film with a promising Hollywood future ahead of him. Then his producers told him he had to quit drag racing. He quit the entertainment industry instead. This is the official story of Ivo’s incredible life and racing career. Readers will follow “TV” Tommy as he becomes the most ambitious drag racer in the nation, building his own cars in the garage behind his Burbank home; becoming the first driver to pilot his dragsters to 170, 175, and 180 miles per hour and towing his cars to match races at small-town drag strips across the United States. Always the showman, Ivo pioneered promotional techniques that are today taken for granted. In this regard especially, his impact on the sport cannot be understated, and his legacy is detailed in this incredible bio of one of drag racing’s most irrepressible characters.

Edward Dmytryk

Edward Dmytryk PDF Author: Fintan McDonagh
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476643148
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
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 PDF Author: Ariel Rogers
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231548036
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 382

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Book Description
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.

American Showman

American Showman PDF Author: Ross Melnick
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 023150425X
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 581

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Book Description
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.

Sufi Literature and the Journey to Immortality

Sufi Literature and the Journey to Immortality PDF Author: A. E. I. Falconar
Publisher: Motilal Banarsidass Publ.
ISBN: 9788120806566
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 446

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Book Description
Many Sufi books are written by academics from a technical standpoint; this one however is different. It is written by a mystic who has been inspired since a boy by his love of poetry which has made his life a search for beauty; this dearch culminating in his long study of Sufi Mysticism considered by him to be the acme of all mystic poetry. This book has in it many inspiring passages both poetry and prose. Short biographies are included with examples of the work of the main Sufi Mystics as well as brief commentaries for the reader who will also gain on overall knowledge of Sufi Literature.

Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China

Early Film Culture in Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China PDF Author: Emilie Yueh-yu Yeh
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472901028
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 365

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Book Description
This volume features new work on cinema in early twentieth-century Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Republican China. Looking beyond relatively well-studied cities like Shanghai, these essays foreground cinema’s relationship with imperialism and colonialism and emphasize the rapid development of cinema as a sociocultural institution. These essays examine where films were screened; how cinema-going as a social activity adapted from and integrated with existing social norms and practices; the extent to which Cantonese opera and other regional performance traditions were models for the development of cinematic conventions; the role foreign films played in the development of cinema as an industry in the Republican era; and much more.

Performing New Media, 1890–1915

Performing New Media, 1890–1915 PDF Author: Kaveh Askari
Publisher: Indiana University Press
ISBN: 0861969103
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Essays examining the effects of media innovations in cinema at the turn of the twentieth century affected performances on screen, as well as beside it. In the years before the First World War, showmen, entrepreneurs, educators, and scientists used magic lanterns and cinematographs in many contexts and many venues. To employ these silent screen technologies to deliver diverse and complex programs usually demanded audio accompaniment, creating a performance of both sound and image. These shows might include live music, song, lectures, narration, and synchronized sound effects provided by any available party—projectionist, local talent, accompanist or backstage crew—and would often borrow techniques from shadow plays and tableaux vivants. The performances were not immune to the influence of social and cultural forces, such as censorship or reform movements. This collection of essays considers the ways in which different visual practices carried out at the turn of the twentieth century shaped performances on and beside the screen.

Divine Inspirations

Divine Inspirations PDF Author: David Harnish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 9780199793099
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 408

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Book Description
Divine Inspirations: Music and Islam in Indonesia brings together the work of 11 international scholars into an unprecedented volume focused on religion and performance in a nation celebrated for its extraordinary arts, religious diversity, and natural beauty. The resulting collection provides a panoramic view of Indonesia's Islamic arts in a variety of settings and communities. Together the authors address how history, politics, spirituality, and gender are expressed through performance and how Indonesian Islamic culture intersects with the ideology and practice of nationalism. Unique and engaging, Divine Inspirations will fascinate readers interested in Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Islam, world religions, global discourse, and music, arts and ritual.