Film and Media Studies

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  Take It from the Big Mouth: The Life of Martha Raye

  "She was one of the world's four best comediennes," said Milton Berle, "but she lived a life of personal disaster." Martha Raye sang, danced, and joked her way into the spotlight of the entertainment world with a career that spanned seven decades and encompassed everything from vaudeville to television commercials to entertaining U.S. troops.

  Take It from the Big Mouth, the first full-fledged biography of the multi-talented performer, explores Raye's life and career with candor and insight. Raye got her big break when she caught the attention of a film director as she kidded with audience members Joe E. Lewis ...Read More

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  Movies about the Movies: Hollywood Reflected

  Hundreds of Hollywood-on-Hollywood movies can be found throughout the history of American cinema, from the days of silents to the present. They include films from genres as far ranging as musical, film noir, melodrama, comedy, and action-adventure. Such movies seduce us with the promise of revealing the reality behind the camera. But, as part of the very industry they supposedly critique, they cannot take us behind the scenes in any true sense. Through close analysis of fifteen critically acclaimed films, Christopher Ames reveals how the idea of Hollywood is constructed and constructs itself. Films discussed: What Price Hollywood? (1952) A ...Read More

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  City of Dreams: The Making and Remaking of Universal Pictures

  Horror films. Deanna Durbin musicals. Francis the talking mule. Ma and Pa Kettle. Ross Hunter weepies. Theme parks. ET. Apollo 13. These are only a few of the many faces of Universal Pictures.

  In February 1906 Carl Laemmle, German immigrant and former clothing store manager, opened his first nickelodeon in Chicago. He quickly moved from exhibition to distribution and to film production. A master of publicity and promotions, within ten years “Uncle Carl” had moved his entire operation to southern California, founded a city, and established Universal Pictures as one of the major Hollywood studios.

  In time Universal found its ...Read More

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  Consuming Pleasures: Active Audiences and Serial Fictions from Dickens to Soap Opera

  “To be continued . . . Whether these words fall at a season-ending episode of Star Trek or a TV commercial flirtation between coffee-loving neighbors, true fans find them impossible to resist. Ever since the 1830s, when Charles Dickens’s Pickwick Papers enticed a mass market for fiction, the serial has been a popular means of snaring avid audiences. Jennifer Hayward establishes serial fiction as a distinct genre—one defined by the activities of its audience rather than by the formal qualities of the text. Ranging from installment novels, mysteries, and detective fiction of the 1800s to the television and movie series, ...Read More

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  Documenting Ourselves: Film, Video, and Culture

  Since Robert Flaherty's landmark film Nanook of the North (1922) arguments have raged over whether or not film records of people and traditions can ever be "authentic." And yet never before has a single volume combined documentary, ethnographic, and folkloristic filmmaking to explore this controversy.

  What happens when we turn the camera on ourselves? This question has long plagued documentary filmmakers concerned with issues of reflexivity, subject participation, and self-consciousness. Documenting Ourselves includes interviews with filmmakers Les Blank, Pat Ferrero, Jorge Preloran, Bill Ferris, and others, who discuss the ways their own productions and subjects have influenced them. Sharon Sherman ...Read More

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  Alfred Hitchcock: The Legacy of Victorianism

  This provocative study traces Alfred Hitchcock's long directorial career from Victorianism to postmodernism. Paula Cohen considers a sampling of Hitchcock's best films—Shadow of a Doubt, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho—as well as some of his more uneven ones—Rope, The Wrong Man, Topaz—and makes connections between his evolution as a filmmaker and trends in the larger society.

  Drawing on a number of methodologies including feminism, psychoanalysis, and family systems, the author provides an insightful look at the paradox of a Victorian-style gentleman who evolved into one of the leading masters of the modern medium of film. Cohen sees Hitchcock's films as developing, ...Read More

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  The Merchant Prince of Poverty Row: Harry Cohn of Columbia Pictures

  Ben Hecht called him “White Fang,” and director Charles Vidor took him to court for verbal abuse. The image of Harry Cohn as vulgarian is such a part of Hollywood lore that it is hard to believe there were other Harry Cohns: the only studio president who was also head of production; the ex-song plugger who scrutinized scripts and grilled writers at story conferences; a man who could look at actresses as either “broads” or goddesses. Drawing on personal interviews as well as previously unstudied source material (conference notes, memos, and especially the teletypes between Harry and his brother Jack), ...Read More

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  Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio

  The recent $3.4 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony Corporation focused attention on a studio that had survived one of Hollywood’s worst scandals under David Begelman, as well as ownership by Coca-Cola and David Puttnam’s misguided attempt to bring back the studio’s glory days. Columbia Pictures traces Columbia’s history from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company (nicknamed “Corned Beef and Cabbage”) through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and concludes with a vivid portrait of today’s corporate Hollywood, with its investment bankers, entertainment lawyers, agents, and financiers.

  Bernard F. Dick’s highly readable studio chronicle is ...Read More

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  Radical Innocence: A Critical Study of the Hollywood Ten

  On October 30, 1947, the House Committee on Un-American Activities concluded the first round of hearings on the allege Communist infiltration of the motion picture industry. Hollywood was ordered to “clean its own house,” and ten witnesses who had refused to answer questions about their membership in the Screen Writers Guild and the Communist party eventually received contempt citations. By 1950 the Hollywood Ten, as they quickly became known, were serving prison sentences ranging from six months to a year. Since that time the group, which included writers, directors, and a producer, have been either dismissed as industry hacks or ...Read More

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  Hollywood As Historian: American Film in a Cultural Context

  Motion picture images have influenced the American mind since the earliest days of film, and many thoughtful people are becoming ever more concerned about that influence, as about the pervasive influence of television. In eras of economic instability and international conflict, the film industry has not hesitated to use motion pictures for definite propaganda purposes. During less troubled times, the American citizen’s ability to deal with political and social issues has been enhanced or thwarted by images absorbed in the nation’s theatres. Hollywood As Historian tracks the interaction of Americans with important motion picture productions. Considered are such topics as ...Read More