Author: A. Wertheim
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9780230611368
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book maps the intriguing story about how the tycoons of the two most powerful circuits, Keith-Albee in the East and the Orpheum in the West, conspired to control the big time. Despite the battles between the performers and the circuit moguls, the vaudeville wars forged an electrifying entertainment that at its zenith brought joy to millions.

Author: Frank Rose
Publisher: Frank Rose
ISBN: 9780887308079
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 580

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Book Description
The story of the William Morris Agency is the stoyr of show business itself. Founded at the turn of the century, it stood as the premier agency in Hollywood for 80 years. With unvarnished descriptions of the board that runs William Morris and the needy and demanding stars they represent, The Agency is a compelling tale that lifts the curtain on the most intriguing business in Americ today. Photos.

Author: Derek Long
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477328963
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
A history of film distribution in the United States from the 1910s to the 1930s, concentrating on booking, circuiting, and packaging marketing practices. Told not as a “golden age” narrative of films, stars, or individual studios but as an economic history of the industry’s film distribution practices, Playing the Percentages is the story of how Hollywood’s vertically integrated studio system came to be. Studying the history of distribution during the growth of Hollywood, Derek Long makes a case for the domination of the studio system as the result of struggles over distribution practices. Through a combination of archival research, critical surveys of the film industry trade press, and economic analysis, Long uncovers a complex and ever-shifting system of wrangling between distributors and exhibitors. Challenging the overemphasis within scholarship on “block booking” as a monolithic distribution mode, and attending to distribution practices beyond simple circulation, Long highlights the crucial changes in film distribution brought about by live theater, the rise of features, and the transition to sound. Playing the Percentages is a comprehensive history of film distribution in the United States during the silent era that illustrates the importance of power struggles between distributors and exhibitors over booking, pricing, and playing time.

Author: Brooke L. Blower
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199322023
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 561

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Book Description
A vivid narrative of an ill-fated Pan American flight during World War II that captures the dramatic backstories of its passengers and, through them, the impact of Americans' global connections. On February 21, 1943, Pan American Airways' celebrated seaplane, the Yankee Clipper, took off from New York's Marine Air Terminal and island-hopped its way across the Atlantic Ocean. Arriving at Lisbon the following evening, it crashed in the Tagus River, killing twenty-four of its thirty-nine passengers and crew. Americans in a World at War traces the backstories of seven worldly Americans aboard that plane, their personal histories, their politics, and the paths that led them toward war. Combat soldiers made up only a small fraction of the millions of Americans, both in and out of uniform, who scattered across six continents during the Second World War. This book uncovers a surprising history of American noncombatants abroad in the years leading into the twentieth century's most consequential conflict. Long before GIs began storming beaches and liberating towns, Americans had forged extensive political, economic, and personal ties to other parts of the world. These deep and sometimes contradictory engagements, which preceded the bombing of Pearl Harbor, would shape and in turn be transformed by the US war effort. The intriguing biographies of the Yankee Clipper's passengers--among them an Olympic-athlete-turned-export salesman, a Broadway star, a swashbuckling pilot, and two entrepreneurs accused of trading with the enemy--upend conventional American narratives about World War II. As their travels take them from Ukraine, France, Spain, Panama, Cuba, and the Philippines to Java, India, Australia, Britain, Egypt, the Soviet Union, and the Belgian Congo, among other hot spots, their movements defy simple boundaries between home front and war front. Americans in a World at War offers fresh perspectives on a transformative period of US history and global connections during the "American Century."

Author: Andrew L. Erdman
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801465281
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
In her day, Eva Tanguay (1879–1947) was one of the most famous women in America. Widely known as the "I Don't Care Girl"—named after a song she popularized and her independent, even brazen persona—Tanguay established herself as a vaudeville and musical comedy star in 1901 with the New York City premiere of the show My Lady—and never looked back. Tanguay was, at the height of a long career that stretched until the early 1930s, a trend-setting performer who embodied the emerging ideal of the bold and sexual female entertainer. Whether suggestively singing songs with titles like "It's All Been Done Before But Not the Way I Do It" and "Go As Far As You Like" or wearing a daring dress made of pennies, she was a precursor to subsequent generations of performers, from Mae West to Madonna and Lady Gaga, who have been both idolized and condemned for simultaneously displaying and playing with blatant displays of female sexuality. In Queen of Vaudeville, Andrew L. Erdman tells Eva Tanguay's remarkable life story with verve. Born into the family of a country doctor in rural Quebec and raised in a New England mill town, Tanguay found a home on the vaudeville stage. Erdman follows the course of her life as she amasses fame and wealth, marries (and divorces) twice, engages in affairs closely followed in the press, declares herself a Christian Scientist, becomes one of the first celebrities to get plastic surgery, loses her fortune following the Wall Street Crash of 1929, and receives her last notice, an obituary in Variety. The arc of Tanguay's career follows the history of American popular culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Tanguay's appeal, so dependent on her physical presence and personal charisma, did not come across in the new media of radio and motion pictures. With nineteen rare or previously unpublished images, Queen of Vaudeville is a dynamic portrait of a dazzling and unjustly forgotten show business star.

Author: David Monod
Publisher: UNC Press Books
ISBN: 1469660563
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 286

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Book Description
Today, vaudeville is imagined as a parade of slapstick comedians, blackface shouters, coyly revealed knees, and second-rate acrobats. But vaudeville was also America's most popular commercial amusement from the mid-1890s to the First World War; at its peak, 5 million Americans attended vaudeville shows every week. Telling the story of this pioneering art form's rise and decline, David Monod looks through the apparent carnival of vaudeville performance and asks: what made the theater so popular and transformative? Although he acknowledges its quirkiness, Monod makes the case that vaudeville became so popular because it offered audiences a guide to a modern urban lifestyle. Vaudeville acts celebrated sharp city styles and denigrated old-fashioned habits, showcased new music and dance moves, and promulgated a deeply influential vernacular modernism. The variety show's off-the-rack trendiness perfectly suited an era when goods and services were becoming more affordable and the mass market promised to democratize style, offering a clear vision of how the quintessential twentieth-century citizen should look, talk, move, feel, and act.

Author: Robert Morris Seiler
Publisher: Athabasca University Press
ISBN: 1926836995
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 401

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Book Description
In this authoritative work, Seiler and Seiler argues that the establishment and development of moviegoing and movie exhibition in Prairie Canada is best understood in the context of changing late-nineteenth-century and early-twentieth-century social, economic, and technological developments. From the first entrepreneurs who attempted to lure customers in to movie exhibition halls, to the digital revolution and its impact on moviegoing, Reel Time highlights the pivotal role of amusement venues in shaping the leisure activities of working- and middle-class people across North America.

Author: Trav S.D.
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0865479585
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the heart of show business in the UnitedStates. This volume explores the many ways in which vaudeville's story is thestory of show business in America.

Author: Peter Decherney
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231159471
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 306

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Book Description
Beginning with Thomas Edison's aggressive copyright disputes and concluding with recent lawsuits against YouTube, Hollywood's Copyright Wars follows the struggle of the film, television, and digital media industries to influence and adapt to copyright law. Though much of Hollywood's engagement with the law occurs offstage, in the larger theater of copyright, many of Hollywood's most valued treasures, from Modern Times (1936) to Star Wars (1977), cannot be fully understood without appreciating their legal controversies. Peter Decherney shows that the history of intellectual property in Hollywood has not always mirrored the evolution of the law and recounts these extralegal solutions and their impact on American media and culture.

Author: Thomas A. Greenfield
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313342652
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 838

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Book Description
This is the most comprehensive and insightful reference available on Broadway theater as an American cultural phenomenon and an illuminator of American life. Broadway: An Encyclopedia of Theater and American Culture is the first major reference work to explore just how much the "Great White Way" illuminates our national character. In two volumes spanning the era from the mid-19th century to the present, it offers nearly 200 entries on a variety of topics, including spotlights on 30 landmark productions—from Shuffle Along to Oklahoma! to Oh Calcutta! to The Producers—that not only changed American theater but American culture as well. In addition, Broadway offers thirty extended thematic essays gauging the powerful impact of theater on American life, with entries on race relations, women in society, sexuality, film, media, technology, tourism, and off-Broadway and noncommercial theater. There are also 110 profile entries on key persons and institutions—from the famous to the infamous to the all but forgotten—whose unique careers and contributions impacted Broadway and its place in the American landscape.