William Heads to Hollywood

William Heads to Hollywood PDF Author: Helen Hancocks
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763689130
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Someone has stolen the golden Cuckoo statues from the famous Cuckoo film studios and the awards ceremony is in two days time. Only William is debonair enough to schmooze the stars and learn who the culprit is. But every cat has his own feline fatale to contend with, and our hero is no exception.

William Heads to Hollywood

William Heads to Hollywood PDF Author: Helen Hancocks
Publisher: Candlewick Press
ISBN: 0763689130
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 33

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Book Description
Someone has stolen the golden Cuckoo statues from the famous Cuckoo film studios and the awards ceremony is in two days time. Only William is debonair enough to schmooze the stars and learn who the culprit is. But every cat has his own feline fatale to contend with, and our hero is no exception.

William Wyler

William Wyler PDF Author: Gabriel Miller
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813142105
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 520

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Book Description
During his forty-five-year career, William Wyler (1902--1981) pushed the boundaries of filmmaking with his gripping storylines and innovative depth-of-field cinematography. With a body of work that includes such memorable classics as Jezebel (1938), Mrs. Miniver (1942), Ben-Hur (1959), and Funny Girl (1968), Wyler is the most nominated director in the history of the Academy Awards and bears the distinction of having won an Oscar for Best Director on three occasions. Both Bette Davis and Lillian Hellman considered him America's finest director, and Sir Laurence Olivier said he learned more about film acting from Wyler than from anyone else. In William Wyler, Gabriel Miller explores the career of one of Hollywood's most unique and influential directors, examining the evolution of his cinematic style. Wyler's films feature nuanced shots and multifaceted narratives that reflect his preoccupation with realism and story construction. The director's later works were deeply influenced by his time in the army air force during World War II, and the disconnect between the idealized version of the postwar experience and reality became a central theme of Wyler's masterpiece, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946). None of Wyler's contemporaries approached his scope: he made successful and seminal films in practically every genre, including social drama, melodrama, and comedy. Yet, despite overwhelming critical acclaim and popularity, Wyler's work has never been extensively studied. This long-overdue book offers a comprehensive assessment of the director, his work, and his films' influence.

Wild Bill Wellman

Wild Bill Wellman PDF Author: William Wellman, Jr.
Publisher: Pantheon
ISBN: 1101870281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 657

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Book Description
The extraordinary life—the first—of the legendary, undercelebrated Hollywood director known in his day as “Wild Bill” (and he was!) Wellman, whose eighty-two movies (six of them uncredited), many of them iconic; many of them sharp, cold, brutal; others poetic, moving; all of them a lesson in close-up art, ranged from adventure and gangster pictures to comedies, aviation, romances, westerns, and searing social dramas. Among his iconic pictures: the pioneering World War I epic Wings (winner of the first Academy Award for best picture), Public Enemy (the toughest gangster picture of them all), Nothing Sacred, the original A Star Is Born, Beggars of Life, The Call of the Wild, The Ox-Bow Incident, Battleground, The High and the Mighty... David O. Selznick called him “one of the motion pictures’ greatest craftsmen.” Robert Redford described him as “feisty, independent, self-taught, and self-made. He stood his ground and fought his battles for artistic integrity, never wavering, always clear in his film sense.” Wellman directed Hollywood’s biggest stars for three decades, including Clark Gable, Gary Cooper, Barbara Stanwyck, John Wayne, Lauren Bacall, and Clint Eastwood. It was said he directed “like a general trying to break out of a beachhead.” He made pictures with such noted producers as Darryl F. Zanuck, Nunnally Johnson, Jesse Lasky, and David O. Selznick. Here is a revealing, boisterous portrait of the handsome, tough-talking, hard-drinking, uncompromising maverick (he called himself a “crazy bastard”)—juvenile delinquent; professional ice-hockey player as a kid; World War I flying ace at twenty-one in the Lafayette Flying Corps (the Lafayette Escadrille), crashing more than six planes (“We only had four instruments, none of which worked. And no parachutes . . . Greatest goddamn acrobatics you ever saw in your life”)—whose own life story was more adventurous and more unpredictable than anything in the movies. Wellman was a wing-walking stunt pilot in barnstorming air shows, recipient of the Croix de Guerre with two Gold Palm Leaves and five United States citations; a bad actor but good studio messenger at Goldwyn Pictures who worked his way up from assistant cutter; married to five women, among them Marjorie Crawford, aviatrix and polo player; silent picture star Helene Chadwick; and Dorothy Coonan, Busby Berkeley dancer, actress, and mother of his seven children. Irene Mayer Selznick, daughter of Louis B. Mayer, called Wellman “a terror, a shoot-up-the-town fellow, trying to be a great big masculine I-don’t-know-what. David had a real weakness for him. I didn’t share it.” Yet she believed enough in Wellman’s vision and cowritten script about Hollywood to persuade her husband to produce A Star Is Born, which Wellman directed. After he took over directing Tarzan Escapes at MGM, Wellman went to Louis B. Mayer and asked to make another Tarzan picture on his own. “What are you talking about? It’s beneath your dignity,” said Mayer. “To hell with that,” said Wellman, “I haven’t got any dignity.” Now William Wellman, Jr., drawing on his father’s unpublished letters, diaries, and unfinished memoir, gives us the first full portrait of the man—boy, flyer, husband, father, director, artist. Here is a portrait of a profoundly American spirit and visionary, a man’s man who was able to put into cinematic storytelling the most subtle and fulsome of feeling, a man feared, respected, and loved.

Reforming Hollywood

Reforming Hollywood PDF Author: William D. Romanowski
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199942587
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
Religious Communication Association's Book of the Year Hollywood and Christianity often seem to be at war. Indeed, there is a long list of movies that have attracted religious condemnation, from Gone with the Wind with its notorious "damn," to The Life of Brian and The Last Temptation of Christ. But the reality, writes William Romanowski, has been far more complicated--and remarkable. In Reforming Hollywood, Romanowski, a leading historian of popular culture, explores the long and varied efforts of Protestants to influence the film industry. He shows how a broad spectrum of religious forces have played a role in Hollywood, from Presbyterians and Episcopalians to fundamentalists and evangelicals. Drawing on personal interviews and previously untouched sources, he describes how mainline church leaders lobbied filmmakers to promote the nation's moral health and, perhaps surprisingly, how they have by and large opposed government censorship, preferring instead self-regulation by both the industry and individual conscience. "It is this human choice," noted one Protestant leader, "that is the basis of our religion." Tensions with Catholics, too, have loomed large--many Protestant clergy feared the influence of the Legion of Decency more than Hollywood's corrupting power. Romanowski shows that the rise of the evangelical movement in the 1970s radically altered the picture, in contradictory ways. Even as born-again clergy denounced "Hollywood elites," major studios noted the emergence of a lucrative evangelical market. 20th Century-Fox formed FoxFaith to go after the "Passion dollar," and Disney took on evangelical Philip Anschutz as a partner to bring The Chronicles of Narnia to the big screen. William Romanowski is an award-winning commentator on the intersection of religion and popular culture. Reforming Hollywood is his most revealing, provocative, and groundbreaking work on this vital area of American society.

Edith Head's Hollywood

Edith Head's Hollywood PDF Author: Edith Head
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781883318895
Category : Fashion designers
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Celebrating a quarter of a century since its initial release, this vintage fashion must-have is now re-issued with an expanded photo section featuring the best work of the world's most famous costume designer. Through six decades of Hollywood fashion, Edith Head dressed the screen's best stars, including Grace Kelly and Elvis Presley. With a foreword be the legendary Bette Davis.

Dressing Marilyn

Dressing Marilyn PDF Author: Andrew Hansford
Publisher: Applause Theatre & Cinema
ISBN: 9781557838469
Category : Costume design
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"Follows one of the best costume designers of all time and his most famous client, includes original sketches, rare costume test shots, dress patterns, photographs, and never-before-seen extracts from interviews"--OCLC

Moneywood

Moneywood PDF Author: William Stadiem
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
ISBN: 1250014077
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 334

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Book Description
As wild and sexy and over the top as the decade it brings to life, author, William Stadiem, tells the inside story of Hollywood producers in the 80s. From hits like Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun and Batman to flops like Heaven's Gate, Howard the Duck and Leonard Part 6, Hollywood was never more excessive than it was in the 1980s. In this, the Moneywood era, the purse strings were not controlled by reasonably consenting adults but by pop culture cowboys who couldn't balance their own checkbooks. What they could do was sweet talk the talent, seduce the starlets, snowball the Japanese and slither out of Dodge when the low grosses trickled in. Their out of control lifestyles and know-nothing, raging narcissistic personalities make the original brutal studio heads like Sam Goldwyn and Jack Warner seem like Oxford dons. Yet, for all their flops, these Scoundrels of Spago turned Hollywood into a Big Business that was catnip to Wall Street. They were The Producers, and they were way beyond anything Mel Brooks could dream up. The Moneywood cast of characters includes: -Simpson and Bruckheimer; Guber and Peters; Eisner/Katzenberg/Ovitz: An unusual fresh take on the usual subjects. -Ray Stark, the wizard of Holmby Hills, the most powerful producer of the 80s. -Mario Kassar and Andy Vajna, the Rambo boys, who went from making wigs to making blockbusters. -Menahem Golan-Yoram Globus, the Israeli schlockmeisters who proved that every star had a price. -David Begelman, the embezzler, gambler and sex addict who was rewarded for his sins by getting to run both Columbia and MGM. -Roland Betts, the aristocratic Silver Screen Partners founder and former Yale frat-mate of George W. Bush who was a master at playing the Reagan White House card. -Giancarlo Parretti, the Italian cannery worker who bought MGM, with a little help from his (Sicilian) friends. -David Puttnam The high-toned English advertising whiz who was supposed to raise the Hollywood bar, but ended up barred from Hollywood. Moneywood is the ultimate expose of the real hit men of Hollywood's go-go decade.

Laird Cregar

Laird Cregar PDF Author: Gregory William Mank
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 1476628440
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 329

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Book Description
 In 1944, Laird Cregar played Jack the Ripper in The Lodger, giving one of the most haunting performances in Hollywood history. It was the climax of a strange celebrity that saw the young American actor—who stood 6’ 3” and weighed more than 300 pounds—earn distinction as a portrayer of psychopaths and villains. Determined to break free of this typecasting, he desperately desired to become “a beautiful man,” embarking on an extreme diet that killed him at 31. This first biography of Cregar tells the heartbreaking story of the brilliant but doomed actor. Appendices cover his film, theatre, and radio work. Many never before published photographs are included.

William and the Missing Masterpiece

William and the Missing Masterpiece PDF Author: Helen Hancocks
Publisher: Templar Publishing
ISBN: 1783707003
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 34

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Book Description
Handsome cat William finds himself at the centre of mysterious case when famous masterpiece The Mona Cheesa is stolen from a Parisian gallery. Who could be responsible for the theft? Can William put the mysterious clues together in time? Fans of Helen Hancocks' Penguin in Peril won't be disappointed with this hilarious tale of cat and mouse.

A Life in Movies

A Life in Movies PDF Author: Irwin Winkler
Publisher: Abrams
ISBN: 1683355288
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
“A lively memoir . . . a first-hand work of cinema history . . . the testament of a pivotal figure in American moviemaking.” —Martin Scorsese The list of films Irwin Winkler has produced in his more-than-fifty-year career is extraordinary: Rocky, Goodfellas, Raging Bull, De-Lovely, The Right Stuff, Creed, and The Irishman. His films have been nominated for fifty-two Academy Awards, including five movies for Best Picture, and have won twelve. In A Life in Movies, his charming and insightful memoir, Winkler tells the stories of his career through his many films as a producer and then as a writer and director, charting the changes in Hollywood over the past decades. Winkler started in the famous William Morris mailroom and made his first film—starring Elvis—in the last days of the old studio system. Beginning in the late 1960s, and then for decades to come, he produced a string of provocative and influential films, making him one of the most critically lauded, prolific, and commercially successful producers of his era. This is an engrossing and candid book, a beguiling exploration of what it means to be a producer, including purchasing rights, developing scripts, casting actors, managing directors, editing film, and winning awards. Filled with tales of legendary and beloved films, as well as some not-so-legendary and forgotten ones, A Life in Movies takes readers behind the scenes and into the history of Hollywood. “Charming and anecdote packed . . . popcorn for movie nerds.” —Newsweek “A deftly written recollection of an eventful and happy life in a precarious and, frankly, insane business; a remarkably clear-eyed look behind the scenes of moviemaking.” —Kevin Kline