170 Years of Show Business

170 Years of Show Business PDF Author: Kate Mostel
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
From the Peter Neil Isaacs collection.

170 Years of Show Business

170 Years of Show Business PDF Author: Kate Mostel
Publisher: Random House (NY)
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 234

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Book Description
From the Peter Neil Isaacs collection.

The Un-Americans

The Un-Americans PDF Author: Joseph Litvak
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 0822390841
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

Unfriendly Witnesses

Unfriendly Witnesses PDF Author: Milly S. Barranger
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809328765
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
Unfriendly Witnesses: Gender, Theater, and Film in the McCarthy Era examines the experiences of seven prominent women of stage and screen whose lives and careers were damaged by the McCarthy-era “witch hunts” for Communists and Communist sympathizers in the entertainment industry: Judy Holliday, Anne Revere, Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker, Margaret Webster, Mady Christians, and Kim Hunter. The effects on women of the anti-Communist crusades that swept the nation between 1947 and 1962 have been largely overlooked by cultural critics and historians, who have instead focused their attention on the men of the period. Author Milly S. Barranger looks at the gender issues inherent in the investigations and at the destructive impact the investigations had on the lives and careers of these seven women—and on American film and theater and culture in general. Issues of gender and politics surface in the women’s testimony before the committeemen, labeled “unfriendly” because the women refused to name names. Unfriendly Witnesses redresses the absence of women’s histories during this era of modern political history and identifies the enduring strains of McCarthyism in postmillennial America. Barranger recreates the congressional and state hearings that addressed the alleged Communist influence in the entertainment industry and examines in detail the cases of these seven women, including the appearance of actress Judy Holliday before the committee of Senator Pat McCarran, who aimed to limit the immigration of Eastern Europeans; actress Anne Revere and playwright Lillian Hellman, appearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, sought the protections of the Fifth Amendment with different outcomes; of writer Dorothy Parker, who testified before a New York state legislative committee investigating contributions to “front” groups; and of director Margaret Webster, before Senator Joseph McCarthy’s subcommittee, whose aim was the indictment of Senator J. William Fulbright and the U.S. State Department. None escaped subsequent blacklisting, denial of employment, and notations in FBI files that they were threats to national security. Unfriendly Witnesses is enhanced by nine illustrations and extensive excerpts from Red Channels: The Report of Communist Influence in Radio and Television, originally published in 1950 at the height of the Red Scare, and which listed 151 allegedly subversive writers, directors, and performers. Barranger includes the complete entries from Red Channels for the seven women she discusses, which include the “subversive” affiliations that prompted the women’s interrogation by the government.

Those Wonderful, Terrible Years

Those Wonderful, Terrible Years PDF Author: Rita Morley Harvey
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 9780809320226
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description
A biography of the "glamour boy" of the trade union movement in broadcasting. Heller and his actor colleagues Philip Loeb, Sam Jaffe, and Albert Dekker were instrumental in the formation and growth of the American Federation of Radio Artists and its later incarnation, the American Federation of Radio and Television Artists. They encountered resistance from Senator Joseph McCarthy and the radical right. Includes bandw photos. Paper edition (unseen), $19.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

The Ladies of the Corridor

The Ladies of the Corridor PDF Author: Dorothy Parker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0143105310
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 145

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Book Description
The blackly comic play about the oppressed lives of women in 1950s New York One of literature's leading humorists, Dorothy Parker drew from the dark side of her imagination to pen The Ladies of the Corridor, a searing drama about women living on their own in a New York residence hotel. Loosely based on Parker's life, and co-written with famed Hollywood playwright Arnaud d'Usseau, The Ladies of the Corridor exposes the limitations of a woman's life in a drama teeming with Parker's signature wit. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Funniest People in Books and Music

The Funniest People in Books and Music PDF Author: David Bruce
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 0595378986
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 135

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Book Description
"The Funniest People Who Write Books and Make Music" contains such anecdotes as these: When Peg Bracken started writing, she would often type the first page of a famous short story for inspiration. Often, she discovered that the page did not look as impressive typed on a sheet of paper as it did printed on a page in a book, so sometimes she would imitate her English professor and write on the sheet of paper: 'You can do better than this, Mr. Faulkner." Andri Previn played jazz with a couple of American-African musicians. Afterwards, he went into a diner, where two white men asked him, 'Why the hell don't you play with your own kind?" Mr. Previn replied, 'To tell you the truth, I wanted to, but I couldn't find two other Jews who swing." Soccer and Cup Final day are important in England. Once, the noted conductor Sir Thomas Beecham held a rehearsal on Cup Final day. The rehearsal had been going on for only a short time when a giant television was delivered to the rehearsal area. Sir Thomas then said, 'Now, gentlemen, let's get down to the most important business of the day-watching the match."

The Funniest People in Comedy and Relationships: 500 Anecdotes

The Funniest People in Comedy and Relationships: 500 Anecdotes PDF Author: David Bruce
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1847287808
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
This book contains such anecdotes as these: 1) In his Answer Man column, film critic Roger Ebert answered a question by Matt Sandler about who was the world's most beautiful woman by saying that she was Indian actress Aishwarya Rai. In a later Answer Man column, a reader stated that Mr. Ebert should have answered the question by saying, "My wife." However, Mr. Ebert had a good reason for not answering the question that way: "Matt Sandler asked about women, not goddesses." 2) To advertise its Razzles candy, Mars Candy decided to use a Cleveland, Ohio, show in which comedian Ron Sweed, aka The Ghoul, hosted several mostly bad horror movies. The Ghoul criticized the candy for weeks, and the more he criticized it, the more its sales went up. In gratitude, Mars Candy delivered a case of Razzles to The Ghoul. The case of candy remained on the set of The Ghoul's show for year--unopened.

To Broadway, To Life!

To Broadway, To Life! PDF Author: Philip Lambert
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199781036
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 381

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Book Description
To Broadway, To Life! The Musical Theater of Bock and Harnick is the first complete book about these creative figures, one of Broadway's most important songwriting teams. The book draws from personal interviews with Bock and Harnick themselves to offer an in-depth exploration their shows, including Fiddler on the Roof, She Loves Me, and Fiorello!, and their greater place in musical theater history.

Dance with Demons

Dance with Demons PDF Author: Greg Lawrence
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101204060
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 791

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Book Description
The first biography of the celebrated Broadway and Hollywood choreographer and director—a complex man of extraordinary genius and overwhelming demons. His work on such legendary shows as The King and I, West Side Story, Gypsy, Funny Girl, and Fiddler on the Roof made him one of the most influential and creative forces in the history of American theater. His collaborators, friends, and enemies were among the greatest celebrities of stage and screen, including Barbra Streisand, Bette Davis, Stephen Sondheim, Natalie Wood, Montgomery Clift, and Mary Martin. His brilliant contribution to the American Ballet Theater and the New York City Ballet established him as one of the century’s great choreographic masters of the form. But in 1998, Jerome Robbins died a haunted man. All of his life, he was tortured by private demons: his conflicted feelings about his bisexuality and his Judaism; his bitter relationship with his parents; his betrayals of others during the McCarthy hearings; and a demanding perfectionism that bordered on the sadistic. Now, this groundbreaking biography, based on hundreds of interviews with friends, family, and colleagues, provides the first complete portrait of the man and the artist—a harrowing, heartbreaking, and triumphant work as complicated and fascinating as the legend himself.

Growing Up Bank Street

Growing Up Bank Street PDF Author: Donna Florio
Publisher: NYU Press
ISBN: 1479803235
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
A vivid memoir of life in one of New York City’s most dynamic neighborhoods Growing Up Bank Street is an evocative, tender account of life in Greenwich Village, on a unique street that offered warmth, support, and inspiration to an adventurous and openhearted young girl. Bank Street, a short strip of elegant brownstones and humble tenements in Greenwich Village, can trace its lineage back to the yellow fever epidemics of colonial New York. In the middle of the last century, it became home to a cast of extraordinary characters whose stories intertwine in this spirited narrative. Growing up, Donna Florio had flamboyant, opera performer parents and even more free-spirited neighbors. As a child, she lived among beatniks, artists, rock musicians, social visionaries, movie stars, and gritty blue-collar workers, who imparted to her their irrepressibly eccentric life rules. The real-life Auntie Mame taught her that she is a divine flame from the universe. John Lennon, who lived down the street, was gracious when she dumped water on his head. Sex Pistols star Sid Vicious lived in the apartment next door, and his heroin overdose death came as a wake-up call during her wild twenties. An elderly Broadway dancer led by brave example as Donna helped him comfort dying Villagers in the terrifying early days of AIDS, and a reclusive writer gave her a path back from the brink when, as a witness to the attacks of 9/11, her world collapsed. These vibrant vignettes weave together a colorful coming of age tale against the backdrop of a historic, iconoclastic street whose residents have been at the heart of the American story. As Greenwich Village gentrifies and the hallmarks of its colorful past disappear, Growing Up Bank Street gives the reader a captivating glimpse of the thriving culture that once filled its storied streets.