Communication Studies
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British National Cinema (National Cinemas)
The first substantial overview of the British film industry with emphasis on its genres, stars, and socioeconomic context, British National Cinema by Sarah Street is an important title in Routledge’s new National Cinemas series. British National Cinema synthesizes years of scholarship on British film while incorporating the author’ fresh perspective and research. Street divides the study of British cinema into four sections: the relation between the film industry and government; specific film genres; movie stars; and experimental cinema. In addition, this beautifully illustrated volume includes over thirty stills from every sphere of British cinema. British National Cinema will be of great interest to film students and theorists as well as the general reader interested in the fascinating scope of British film.
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Very Naughty Boys: The Amazing True Story of Handmade Films
It all started when Beatle George Harrison stepped in to fund Life of Brian when Monty Python’s original backers pulled out. His company, HandMade films, went on to make some of the best British films of the 80s (Withnail and I, Time Bandits and Mona Lisa among them), but then things started to go wrong… This is the incredible and often hilarious insiders’ story of what happened…Read more
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Delivering Dreams: A Century of British Film Distribution
Film Distributors are the unsung heroes of cinema. Without them, the film industry would grind to a halt. Drawing on the archives of the Film Distributors Association (FDA), as well as on interviews with leading British distributors of today, Delivering Dreams tells the, largely unacknowledged, story of how films were, and are, brought to British cinema-goers. It profiles some of the most flamboyant and controversial figures involved in UK distribution over the last 100 years, ranging from the founders of huge companies to visionaries who have launched small art house labels. Geoffrey Macnab also explores how the sector has reacted to a rapidly changing market and technological environment, from the transition to sound in the late 1920s to the spectre of TV in the 1950s and the move to digital in the 2000s. Ranging from the films of Charlie Chaplin to The King s Speech, and published to coincide with the centenary of the FDA s creation in December 1915, this book highlights the crucial role that distributors have played in maintaining the solid foundations of the British film industry.Read more
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Arrows of Desire: Films of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger
Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger formed one of the greatest creative partnerships in the history of British cinema – The Archers. Their films were often controversial – Churchill tried to suppress the release of “The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp”. Later, “The Red Shoes” and “The Tales of Hoffman” startled and enchanted cinema audiences with their use of colour, form amd music. However, in the last ten years the magic, poetry and passion of their work has been acknowledged around the world and they are firmly in the pantheon of film masters. This book is a comprehensive analysis of their films and is a useful guide to their work.Read more
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Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down: How One Generation of British Actors Changed the World
Alan Bates, Michael Caine, Sean Connery, Tom Courtenay, Albert Finney, Richard Harris, Peter O’Toole, Robert Shaw and Terence Stamp: They are the most formidable acting generation ever to tread the boards or stare into a camera, whose anti-establishment attitude changed the cultural landscape of Britain.
This was a new breed, many culled from the working class industrial towns of Britain, and nothing like them has been seen before or since. Their raw earthy brilliance brought realism to a whole range of groundbreaking theatre from John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger to Joan Littlewood and Harold Pinter and the creation of the National Theatre. And they ripped apart the staid, middle-class British film industry with kitchen-sink classics like Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, This Sporting Life, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, A Kind of Loving and Billy Liar before turning their sights on international stardom: Connery with James Bond, O’Toole as Lawrence of Arabia, Finney with Tom Jones and Caine in Zulu.
Don’t Let the Bastards Grind You Down brings alive the trail-blazing period of theatre and film from 1956-1964 through the vibrant energy and exploits of this revolutionary generation of stars who bulldozed over austerity Britain and paved the way for the swinging 60s. What Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders Raging Bulls did for American cinema writing so Don’t Let the Bastards will do for the British cinema.
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Directory of World Cinema: Britain (Directory of World Cinema Series Book 14)
Bringing to mind rockers and royals, Buckingham Palace and the Scottish Highlands, Britain holds a special interest for international audiences who have flocked in recent years to quality exports like Fish Tank, Trainspotting and The King’s Speech. A series of essays and articles exploring the definitive films of Great Britain, this addition to Intellect’s Directory of World Cinema series turns the focus on England together with Northern Ireland, Scotland and Wales.
With a focus on the most cerebral and critically important films to have come out of Britain, this volume explores the diversity of genres found throughout British film, highlighting important regional variations that reflect the distinctive cultures of the countries involved. Within these genres, Emma Bell and Neil Mitchell have curated a rich collection of films for review – from Hitchcock’s spy thriller The 39 Steps to Emeric Pressburger’s art classic The Red Shoes to the gritty but heartfelt This is England. Interspersed throughout the book are critical essays by leading experts in the field providing insight into shifting notions of Britishness, important industry developments and the endurance of the British film industry. For those up on their Brit film facts and seeking to test their expertise, the book concludes with a series of trivia questions.
A user-friendly look at the cultural and artistic significance of British cinema from the silent era to the present, Directory of World Cinema: Britain will be an essential companion to the country’s bright and resurgent film industry.
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Keeping the British End Up: Four Decades of Saucy Cinema
This deluxe, expanded new full colour edition includes an updated filmography and previously unpublished interview material and stills. In this title, Simon Sheridan traces the history of the British sex film from its beginnings in coy nudist camp films such as Some Like It Cool (directed by Michael Winner in 1960) through the boom years of the Confessions films to its demise in the early 1980s.Read more
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The Art of Invective: Selected Non-Fiction 1953-94: Selected Non-Fiction 1953-1994
Dennis Potter (1935-94) was Britain’s leading television dramatist for almost thirty years and remains an inspiration to today’s programme makers, as a result of such ground-breaking work as Pennies from Heaven, Blue Remembered Hills and The Singing Detective. But he also engaged with his audience through reviews, journalism, interviews, broadcasts and speeches. The Art of Invective, the first collection of its kind, brings together some of his finest non-fiction work. Published to mark 80 years since Potter’s birth, this book includes his merciless television columns, penetrating literary criticism and angry writings on class and politics, as well as his sketches for Sixties satire shows including That Was the Week That Was. From Frost-Nixon to Coronation Street, David Hare to Doctor Who, Orwell to Emu, this collection shows Potter’s distinctive voice at its entertaining, thought-provoking and uncompromising best.Read more
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Vision on: Film, Television and the Arts in Britain (Nonfictions)
Vision On narrates the turbulent yet distinguished history of one of the fundamental pillars of British broadcasting–the arts. This volume chronicles the years of dynamic and often controversial collaboration between broadcasters and the Arts Council, a key player in bringing art films to the wider public audience. Beginning with the earliest TV documentaries, the arts became central to the remit of public broadcasters, and by the 1980s Channel 4 and the Arts Council were boldly redefining the relationship of the arts and the media by commissioning and airing exclusive and innovative films. With detailed discussion of the cultural role of television programmes such as Civilisation (1966) and Arena (1974 onwards), close analysis of over 25 films and exclusive access to the Arts Council’s collection of the 450 films supported between 1953 and 1999, this volume illuminates the vanguard role the arts have played in the proud history of British public broadcasting, and attempts to locate the place of arts broadcasting in today’s multi-channel, multi-media world.Read more
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The Encyclopedia of British Film: Fourth Edition
With well over 6,300 articles, including over 500 new entries, this fourth edition of The Encyclopedia of British Film is a fully updated invaluable reference guide to the British film industry. It is the most authoritative volume yet, stretching from the inception of the industry to the present day, with detailed listings of the producers, directors, actors and studios behind a century or so of great British cinema.
Brian McFarlane’s meticulously researched guide is the definitive companion for anyone interested in the world of film. Previous editions have sold many thousands of copies and this fourth edition will be an essential work of reference for enthusiasts interested in the history of British cinema, and for universities and libraries.
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All of Me: My Extraordinary Life – The Most Recent Autobiography by Barbara Windsor
THE HEART-WARMING AUTOBIOGRAPHY BY BARBARA WINDSOR CHRONICLING HER EARLY CHILDHOOD IN LONDON’S EAST END TO RECEIVING A DBE IN 2000
‘A whopping, no-holds-barred rollercoaster of a book’ Mail on Sunday
`Barbara Windsor emerges from these pages as a personality both strong and sunny’ Sunday Telegraph
Born in the East End of London just before the war, Barbara Windsor made her first stage appearance at the age of 13. From her early roles as the original Carry On dolly bird to her longest role as Peggy Mitchell in the award-winning BBC drama EastEnders, her spectacular success in theatre, film and TV has made her a British icon – the Cockney kid with a dazzling smile and talent to match.
Here, for the first time, she talks in depth about the people and events that have shaped her career: her lonely childhood, her doomed marriage to Ronnie Knight, her legendary affairs, how she never let her fans down whatever her personal anguish. This is the heart-warming story of a courageous woman and consummate performer who has always made sure the show goes on.
‘By living up to its title alone it makes a nonsense of every other showbiz bleat ‘n’ brag ever put to paper’ Julie Burchill
‘Infinitely more interesting than the sentimental schmaltz we have read about her before’ Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph
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Subterranean Cities: The World beneath Paris and London, 1800–1945
The underground has been a dominant image of modern life since the late eighteenth century. A site of crisis, fascination, and hidden truth, the underground is a space at once more immediate and more threatening than the ordinary world above. In Subterranean Cities, David L. Pike explores the representation of underground space in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a period during which technology and heavy industry transformed urban life.The metropolis had long been considered a moral underworld of iniquity and dissolution. As the complex drainage systems, underground railways, utility tunnels, and storage vaults of the modern cityscape superseded the countryside of caverns and mines as the principal location of actual subterranean spaces, ancient and modern converged in a mythic space that was nevertheless rooted in the everyday life of the contemporary city. Writers and artists from Felix Nadar and Charles Baudelaire to Charles Dickens and Alice Meynell, Gustave Doré and Victor Hugo, George Gissing and Emile Zola, and Jules Verne and H. G. Wells integrated images of the urban underworld into their portrayals of the anatomy of modern society. Illustrated with photographs, movie stills, prints, engravings, paintings, cartoons, maps, and drawings of actual and imagined urban spaces, Subterranean Cities documents the emergence of a novel space in the subterranean obsessions and anxieties within nineteenth-century urban culture. Chapters on the subways, sewers, and cemeteries of Paris and London provide a detailed analysis of these competing centers of urban modernity. A concluding chapter considers the enduring influence of these spaces on urban culture at the turn of the twenty-first century.
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Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling
In this official centennial history of the greatest studio in Hollywood, unforgettable stars, untold stories, and rare images from the Warner Bros. vault bring a century of entertainment to vivid life.
The history of Warner Bros. is not just the tale of a legendary film studio and its stars, but of classic Hollywood itself, as well as a portrait of America in the last century. It’s a family story of Polish-Jewish immigrants-the brothers Warner-who took advantage of new opportunities in the burgeoning film industry at a time when four mavericks could invent ways of operating, of warding off government regulation, and of keeping audiences coming back for more during some of the nation’s darkest days.
Innovation was key to their early success. Four years after its founding, the studio revolutionized moviemaking by introducing sound in The Jazz Singer (1927). Stars and stories gave Warner Bros. its distinct identity as the studio where tough guys like Humphrey Bogart and strong women like Bette Davis kept people on the edge of their seats. Over the years, these acclaimed actors and countless others made magic on WB’s soundstages and were responsible for such diverse classics as Casablanca, A Streetcar Named Desire, A Star Is Born, Bonnie & Clyde, Malcolm X, Caddyshack, Purple Rain, and hundreds more.It’s the studio that put noir in film with The Maltese Falcon and other classics of the genre, where the iconic Looney Tunes were unleashed on animation, and the studio that took an unpopular stance at the start of World War II by producing anti-Nazi films. Counter-culture hits like A Clockwork Orange and The Exorcist carried the studio through the 1970s and ’80s. Franchise phenomena like Harry Potter, the DC universe, and more continue to shape a cinematic vision and longevity that is unparalleled in the annals of film history. These stories and more are chronicled in this comprehensive and stunning volume.
Copyright © 2023 Warner Bros. Entertainment Inc.
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£28.30£33.30Warner Bros.: 100 Years of Storytelling
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1971: 100 Films from Cinema’s Greatest Year
1971 was a great year for cinema. Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Dario Argento, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg and Steven Spielberg, among many others, were behind the camera, while the stars were also out in force. Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Sean Connery, Faye Dunaway, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Vanessa Redgrave all featured in films released in 1971.
The remarkable artistic flowering that came from the ‘New Hollywood’ of the ’70s was just beginning, while the old guard was fading away and the new guard was taking over. With a decline in box office attendances by the end of the ’60s, along with a genuine inability to come up with a reliable barometer of box office success, studio heads gave unprecedented freedom to young filmmakers to lead the way.
Featuring interviews with cast and crew members, bestselling author Robert Sellers explores this landmark year in Hollywood and in Britain, when this new age was at its freshest, and where the transfer of power was felt most exhilaratingly.
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£16.40£19.001971: 100 Films from Cinema’s Greatest Year
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The Shepperton Story
This exhaustive and affectionate history is crammed with information and rare pictures from the famous Shepperton Studios. From assistants to directors, producers, stars, prop men, production managers and studio executives, the author has interviewed over 200 industry people and has painstakingly researched the history of the studio site from its first recorded use in the Doomsday Book through its redevelopment as one of Britain’s first major film studios in 1932. The studio has housed classic movies featuring comedy great Will Hay, to blood-churning horrors starring Todd Slaughter through the studio’s covert use during the Second World War as a camouflage manufacturing plant and on to its reopening with great classics such as The Third Man, The Tales Of Hoffman, Dr Strangelove and I’m All Right Jack, and on to modern greats such as Flash Gordon, Alien, Robin Hood: Prince Of Thieves, The Crying Game, Chaplin, Gladiator, Troy, Batman Begins, The Da Vinci Code and The Golden Compass. This is their story.
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£20.10£23.80The Shepperton Story
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The UK Film Finance Handbook: How to Fund Your Film
The reader – from beginner making their first short film, through to experienced producer packagin an international multi-million pound co-production – is guided through the entire process of raising finance, in a book packed with interviews, case studies, expert tips and details of more than 200 funds.The UK Film Funding Guide 2003/04 was originally published by Shooting People and went on to sell almost 4,000 copies amongst the UKÂ’s guerilla filmmaking scene. This second edition – the UK Film Finance Handbook 2005/06 – from the same authors, is published by Netribution and has been fully revised, updated and expanded.
• All forms of production finance fully explained – including the new UK 20% tax credit
• International and co-production incentives for over 20 countries
• 101 tips and tricks from low-budget filmmakers for more affordable films
• Directory comprising over 400 film contacts across all sectors
• Top level interviews including UK Film Council execs, the head of BBC Films and Nik Powell, co-founder of Virgin and one of the UK’s most seasoned producers.Read more
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Irish cinema in the twenty-first century
An accessible, comprehensive overview of contemporary Irish cinema, this book is intended for use as a third-level textbook and is designed to appeal to academics in the areas of film studies and Irish studies. Responding to changes in the Irish production environment, it includes chapters on new Irish genres such as creative documentary, animation and horror. It discusses shifting representations of the countryside and the city, always with a strong concern for gender representations, and looks athow Irish historical events, from the Civil War to the Troubles, and the treatment of the traumatic narrative of clerical sexual abuse have been portrayed in recent films. It covers works by established auteurs such as Neil Jordan and Jim Sheridan, as well as new arrivals, including the Academy Award-winning Lenny Abrahamson.Read more
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The Complete Film Production Handbook (American Film Market Presents)
The Complete Film Production Handbook is a comprehensive step-by-step guide covering the essentials of the business, from checklists and sample pre-production and post production schedules to contracts and company policies relating to insurance, talent management, and even customs and immigration details. The book contains all of the many necessary forms including SAG, DGA, and WGA forms, together with standard production forms, deal memos, and release forms which are found both in the book and on companion CD.This book provides producers and production managers with both a quick reference and refresher and an easy means of training their production staff on the day to day procedures needed to keep their production running smoothly. It provides film students with an in-depth look at what must be considered and accomplished before a single camera can roll and a more comprehensive understanding of the logistics that are required to complete and deliver a finished picture. First time independent filmmakers will find this the most comprehensive and helpful resource guide available.
The third edition includes substantial updates throughout. New chapters examine such topics as:
Basic accounting procedures
Production team members and their responsibilities
Working with vendors–negotiating deals. Saving money
Working with extras
Foreign locations–Work visas, shipping and customsRead more
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Producing Bollywood: Inside the Contemporary Hindi Film Industry
Producing Bollywood offers an unprecedented look inside the social and professional worlds of the Mumbai-based Hindi film industry and explains how it became “Bollywood,” the global film phenomenon and potent symbol of India as a rising economic powerhouse. In this rich and entertaining ethnography Tejaswini Ganti examines the changes in Hindi film production from the 1990s until 2010, locating them in Hindi filmmakers’ efforts to accrue symbolic capital, social respectability, and professional distinction, and to manage the commercial uncertainties of filmmaking. These efforts have been enabled by the neoliberal restructuring of the Indian state and economy since 1991. This restructuring has dramatically altered the country’s media landscape, which quickly expanded to include satellite television and multiplex theaters. Ganti contends that the Hindi film industry’s metamorphosis into Bollywood would not have been possible without the rise of neoliberal economic ideals in India. By describing dramatic transformations in the Hindi film industry’s production culture, daily practices, and filmmaking ideologies during a decade of tremendous social and economic change in India, Ganti offers valuable new insights into the effects of neoliberalism on cultural production in a postcolonial setting.Read more
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The Egos Have Landed: Rise and Fall of Palace Pictures
This work provides an insight into the rise and fall of Palace Pictures, one of the movie phenomena of the last decade. It is the story of two mavericks, Steve Woolley and Nick Powell, who through a combination of brash marketing tactics and inspired risk-taking, fought to produce and distribute films during a period when the world had written off the British film industry as dead and buried. Containing stories about Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Bob Hoskins, David Bowie, Miranda Richardson, John Hurt, Neil Jordan, Richard Branson and many other celebrities, it gives the inside story on the company whose films include “Absolute Beginners”, “The Company of Wolves”, “Mona Lisa”, “Scandal” and “The Crying Game”.Read more
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Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: The Inside Story of HandMade Films
In 1978, George Harrison, the Monty Python team and American businessman Denis O’Brien formed HandMade films, which was responsible for such classics as “Monty Python’s Life of Brian”, “Time Bandits”, “The Long Good Friday”, “A Private Function”, “Mona Lisa” and “Withnail and I”. This book looks at the life and times of this film company. Robert Sellars has secured detailed and exclusive interviews with such diverse artists as Alan Bennett, John Cleese, Sean Connery and Richard E. Grant.Read more
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All Our Yesterdays: 90 Years of British Cinema (British Film Institute)
All Our Yesterdays looks at the British film industry from its troubled relations with the state; the links with theater, literature, music hall and broadcasting; to mainstream and independent cinema, genres, directors, stars and individual films. It provides a fresh, wide-ranging and often provocative account of British cinema.Read more
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Gaslight Melodrama
Guy Barefoot explores Hollywood’s fascination in the 1940s, with late Victorian or Edwardian settings. All of the films studied are crime melodramas – films that feature a narrative pattern of sensation and reparation, and that involve crime, investigation and identification.Read more
£28.70Gaslight Melodrama
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Michael Balcon: The Pursuit of British Cinema
, 128 pages, illustrated throughout with monochrome photographs, Michael Powell’s personal copy, DEDICATED by Bill Johnson ( an American Architect and trustee of Museum of Modern Art) and others to Michael Powell.Read more
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Witness – The Making Of Schindler’s List
This is not just another movie. We have a responsibility toward the world
remembering the Holocaust. It is a film about conscience’
Steven Spielberg
When Schindler’s List was released in 1993 it was acclaimed as both a motion picture masterpiece and a reaffirmation of the human spirit. In 1994 it had twelve Academy Award Nominations and won in seven categories including Best Picture and Best Director. This book is the moving story of how Steven Spielberg spent ten years bringing Thomas Keneally’s winning novel Schindler’s Ark to the screen. Written by Franciszek Palowski – guide, interpreter and consultant on the 1989 Booker Prize movie from Spielberg’s first research visit to Poland in 1992 – it is part diary, part chronicle of the massive undertaking in bringing the story to the screen, and part witness to the responsibility of telling the traumatic stories of the Schindler jews who are still alive today. The author acted as coordinator of the 1300 Schindler jews who travelled from all over the world to participate in re-telling the wartime events. Leopold Pfefferberg (now Page) who first inspired Thomas Keneally to write Schindler’s story supplied the photographs which served as a model for re-creating the past and many are reproduced in this book for the first time.
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The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History Of The Porn Film Indust ry
A raucous and revealing oral history of the birth of the adult film industry, The Other Hollywood peels back the candy coating to let the true story be told — by the stars, movie makers, and other industry players who lived it. And what a story it is: Through hundreds of original interviews, contemporary newspaper accounts, police reports, court testimony, and more, Legs McNeil and coauthors Jennifer Osborne and Peter Pavia trace today’s billion-dollar industry from its makeshift, mob-connected origins to the Internet age. Along the way we encounter porn stars such as Linda Lovelace, John Holmes, Traci Lords, and Savannah — along with countless mainstream stars, politicians, FBI agents, and more.
Epic, hilarious, and moving, The Other Hollywood contributes to the porn industry the one thing missing in all previous accounts: a vivid, tragicomic, irresistible humanity.
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Elstree Studios: A Celebration of Film and Television
Elstree Studios is a lavish tribute to ninety years of film and television production. These renowned film studios have been home to some of the most successful and enduring film and television programmes produced in the UK, from Star Wars, Indiana Jones and The Avengers to The King’s Speech and TV shows such as Strictly Come Dancing and Big Brother.
With contributions from actors, directors and behind-the-scenes personnel, this book traces the studios’ history, from humble beginnings, through the golden age of film, tough times and the threat of closure to becoming London’s go-to film and television studio today. This fascinating history is lavishly illustrated with over 250 photographs and film stills.
Published in association with the studios, this is a celebration of world-class film and TV, and provides an intriguing insight into the past glories and hurdles faced by Elstree Studios and the film and television industry, looking forward to an exciting future.
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Blockbusters: Why Big Hits – and Big Risks – are the Future of the Entertainment Business
What is behind the phenomenal success of entertainment businesses such as Warner Bros., Marvel Enterprises and Manchester United – along with such stars as Jay-Z and Lady Gaga? Which strategies give leaders in film, television, music, publishing, and sports an edge over their rivals?
Anita Elberse, Harvard Business School’s expert on the entertainment industry, has done pioneering research on the worlds of media and sports for more than a decade. Now, in this groundbreaking book, she explains a powerful truth about the fiercely competitive world of entertainment: building a business around blockbuster products – the movies, television shows, songs and books that are hugely expensive to produce and market – is the surest path to long-term success. Along the way, she reveals why entertainment executives often spend outrageous amounts of money in search of the next blockbuster, why superstars are paid unimaginable sums and how digital technologies are transforming the entertainment landscape.
Full of inside stories emerging from her unprecedented access to some of the world’s most successful entertainment brands, Blockbusters is destined to become required reading for anyone seeking to understand how the entertainment industry really works – and how to navigate today’s high-stakes business world at large.
‘Convincing . . . Elberse’s Blockbusters builds on her already impressive academic résumé to create an accessible and entertaining book.’ Financial Times
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£12.20£14.20 -
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex, Drugs and Rock ‘n’ Roll Generation saved Hollywood
Based on hundreds of interviews with the directors, as well as producers, stars, studio executives, spouses and girlfriends, this is the full story of the crazy world the directors ruled. Never before have so many celebrities talked so frankly about one another and the drugs, sex, and money that made so many of them crash and burn.Read more
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Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
In this engaging and readable book, Peter Decherney tells the story of Hollywood, from its nineteenth-century origins to the emergence of internet media empires. He recounts how the studio system rose out of the ashes of Thomas Edison’s trust to create the handful of companies that have dominated global screens and imaginations for more than 100 years. Throughout, he reveals that the elements we take to be a natural part of the Hollywood experience–stars, genre-driven storytelling, blockbuster franchises, etc.–are really the product of cultural, political, and commercial forces.In many ways, Hollywood has remained the same for over a century. It has always been a global industry based in the U.S., and its storytelling has always unfolded across media, adapting plays, book, and comics and spinning off product tie-ins, television series, and social media campaigns. But major events have also continually remade Hollywood. The studios have weathered wars, disruptive new technologies, and competition by adopting a strategy of risk management and assimilation. This book explores the challenges of new technologies, including sound, home video, and computer graphics. And it examines Hollywood’s responses to World War II, independent film movements, and regulations imposed by Washington.
Hollywood: A Very Short Introduction is filled with discussions of well-known movies, stars, and directors, encapsulating the past century of research on Hollywood while adding many original insights and stories. It is the perfect introduction for readers who want to better understand the history and functioning of our screen-saturated world.
ABOUT THE SERIES:
The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.Read more
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Experiencing Cinema: Participatory Film Cultures, Immersive Media and the Experience Economy
Film is often conceived as a medium that is watched rather than experienced. Existing studies of film audiences, and of media reception more broadly, have revealed the complexity of viewing practices and cultures surrounding cinema-going and its exhibition spaces. Experiencing Cinema offers the first in-depth study of participant engagement with a range of experiential media forms derived from cinema culture. From sing-a-long screenings to theatrical extravaganzas, a broad spectrum of alternative film-going practices and immersive spaces are explored and analysed in this original audience study.Moving from intimate community gatherings to blockbuster urban venues, from isolated farmhouses to Olympic stadia, Experiencing Cinema considers the lure and value of these popular events. Often attracting a diverse, intergenerational range of participants, from early-adopter urban hipsters to DIY rural communities, the growing demand for participatory cinema within the contemporary marketplace is analysed alongside broader debates circulating around the move away from traditional tiered seating and increased audience mobility and the de-centring of the film text.
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The End of Japanese Cinema: Industrial Genres, National Times, and Media Ecologies (Studies of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute)
In The End of Japanese Cinema Alexander Zahlten moves film theory beyond the confines of film itself, attending to the emergence of new kinds of aesthetics, politics, temporalities, and understandings of film and media. He traces the evolution of a new media ecology through deep historical analyses of the Japanese film industry from the 1960s to the 2000s. Zahlten focuses on three popular industrial genres: Pink Film (independently distributed softcore pornographic films), Kadokawa (big-budget productions as part of a transmedia strategy), and V-Cinema (direct-to-video films). He examines the conditions of these films’ production to demonstrate how the media industry itself becomes part of the politics of the media text and to highlight the complex negotiation between media and politics, culture, and identity in Japan. Zahlten points to a different history of film, one in which a once-powerful film industry transformed into becoming only one component within a complex media-mix ecology. In so doing, Zahlten opens new paths for uncovering similar broad processes in other large media societies.A Study of the Weatherhead East Asian Institute, Columbia University
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A Short Guide to Writing About Film (The Short Guide Series)
Both an introduction to film study and a practical writing guide, this brief text introduces students to film terms and the major film theories to enable them to write more critically. With numerous student and professional examples along the way, this engaging and practical guide progresses from taking notes and writing first drafts to creating polished essays and comprehensive research projects. Moving from movie reviews to theoretical and critical essays, the text demonstrates how an analysis of a film becomes more subtle and rigorous as part of a compositional process.
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The Undeclared War: Struggle for Control of the World’s Film Industry
An account of the way in which Hollywood has achieved almost total sovereignty over the world’s movies. It tells of a battle which has seen Hollywood establish itself as a global cultural and economic force, and in the process, devastate the national industries of many other countries.Read more
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The British Horror Film from the Silent to the Multiplex: From the Silents to the Multiplex
When Hammer Films broke box office records in 1957 with `The Curse of Frankenstein’, the company not only resurrected the gothic horror film, but also created a particularly British-flavoured form of horror that swept the world. `The British Horror Film from the Silent to the Multiplex’ is your guide to the films, actors, and filmmakers who have thrilled and terrified generations of movie fans. In just one book, you will find the literary and cinematic roots of the genre to the British films made by film legends such as Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff, Hammer’s accomplishments starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, and the post-Hammer horrors such as Peter Walker’s `Frightmare’ and huge British-made successes such as `Alien’ and the zombie craze of the twenty-first century. Featuring the history, the films, the stars, the directors, and the studios in one fascinating, fun, and fact-filled volume, whether you are an absolute beginner or a seasoned gore-hound, this volume covers everything you ever wanted to know about the British horror movie, but were too bone-chillingly afraid to ask.Read more
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Searching for Stars: Stardom and Screen Acting in British Cinema (Rethinking British Cinema S.)
Explores the reasons behind British cinema’s failure to create its own stars. The text looks at the way theatre and music hall spawned their stars, and asks why so many of them found the transition to film so awkward. It compares the British star system with that of Hollywood. What sort of contracts were British stars offered? How much were they paid? Who dealt with their publicity? How did Britsh fans regard them? There are essays on key figures (Novello, Fields, Formby, Dors, Bogarde, Mason, Matthews), and assessment of how British stars fared in Hollywood, an analysis of the effects of class and regional prejudice on attempts at British star-making, and a survey of the British comedy tradition, and some of the questions about how genre affected the star system.Read more
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Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us
‘At a time when fluff and gossip reign supreme, Hanna Flint’s work is consistently insightful, informative and engaging all at once. I always finish reading it feeling just a tad bit smarter.’ Candice Frederick, Huffington Post‘One of the smartest pop culture commentators out there.’ Toby Moses, Guardian
The leading film critic of her generation offers an eloquent, insightful and humorous reflection on the screen’s representation of women and ethnic minorities, revealing how cinema has been the key to understanding herself, her body image and her ambitions as well as the world we live in.
A staunch feminist of mixed-race heritage, Hanna has succeeded in an industry not designed for people like her. She interweaves anecdotes from familial and personal experiences – from episodes of messy sex and introspection to the time when actor Vincent D’Onofrio tweeted that Hanna Flint sounded ‘like a secret agent’ – to offer a critical eye on the screen’s representation of women and ethnic minorities. Divided into sections ‘Origin Story’, ‘Coming of Age’, ‘Adult Material’, ‘Workplace Drama’ and ‘Strong Female Character’, the book ponders how the creative industries could better reflect our multicultural society.
Warm, funny and engaging and full of film-infused lessons, Strong Female Character will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and seeks to help us better see ourselves in our own eyes rather than letting others decide who and what we can be.
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£11.90£12.30Strong Female Character: What Movies Teach Us
£11.90£12.30 -
Making Movies Without Losing Money: Practical Lessons in Film Finance
This book is about the practical realities of the film market today and how to make a film while minimizing financial risk. Film is a risky investment and securing that investment is a huge challenge. The best way to get investors is to do everything possible to make the film without losing money.
Featuring interviews with film industry veterans – sales agents, producers, distributors, directors, film investors, film authors and accountants – Daniel Harlow explores some of the biggest obstacles to making a commercially successful film and offers best practice advice on making a good film, that will also be a commercial success. The book explores key topics such as smart financing, casting to add value, understanding the film supply chain, the importance of genre, picking the right producer, negotiating pre-sales and much more. By learning how to break even, this book provides invaluable insight into the film industry that will help filmmakers build a real, continuing career.
A vital resource for filmmakers serious about sustaining a career in the 21st century film industry.
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Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood
Between 1931 and 2000, India’s popular cinema steadily overcame Hollywood domination. Bollywood, the film industry centered in Mumbai, became nothing less than a global cultural juggernaut. But Bollywood is merely one part of the country’s prolific, multilingual cinema. Unruly Cinema looks at the complex series of events that allowed the entire Indian film industry to defy attempts to control, reform, and refine it in the twentieth century and beyond.Rini Bhattacharya Mehta considers four aspects of Indian cinema’s complicated history. She begins with the industry’s surprising, market-driven triumph over imports from Hollywood and elsewhere in the 1930s. From there she explores how the nationalist social melodrama outwitted the government with its 1950s cinematic lyrical manifestoes. In the 1970s, an action cinema centered on the angry young male co-opted the voice of the oppressed. Finally, Mehta examines Indian film’s discovery of the global neoliberal aesthetic that encouraged the emergence of Bollywood.
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£19.20£20.90Unruly Cinema: History, Politics, and Bollywood
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How Star Wars Conquered the Universe: The Past, Present, and Future of a Multibillion Dollar Franchise
Why do most people know what an Ewok is, even if they haven’t seen Return of the Jedi? How have Star Wars action figures come to outnumber human beings? How did ‘Jedi’ become an officially recognised religion? When did the films’ merchandising revenue manage to rival the GDP of a small country?
Tracing the birth, death and rebirth of the epic universe built by George Lucas and hundreds of writers, artists, producers, and marketers, Chris Taylor jousts with modern-day Jedi, tinkers with droid builders, and gets inside Boba Fett’s helmet, all to find out how STAR WARS has attracted and inspired so many fans for so long.
‘It’s impossible to imagine a Star Wars fan who wouldn’t love this book. There are plenty of books about Star Wars, but very few of them are essential reading. This one goes directly to the top of the pile’ Booklist (starred review).
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£8.70£9.50
