Avant-Garde Cinema of the Seventies
The writing of any history of the avant-garde in the arts is an undertaking fraught with difficulties due to the esoteric nature of much experimental work. When th...
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Full-Length Programs:Fights, Passion Plays, and Travel
In the post-novelty period, exhibitors played a key creative role in the motion picture field. Their claims to authorship were indeed often merit...
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General Flimco and the Pushcart Peddlers
The unsteadiness of the pictures sent out by an American independent
manufacturer who makes a specialty of depicting Western scenes in the
wild woods of New J...
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Introduction: A Decade of Change
If, as Joan Didion has written, the deal is the true art form of
Hollywood, the masters of this art are the tax shelter specialists.
MARIE BRENNER, JOURNALIST, 1977
...
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Introduction: The Uncertainty of Sound
The serious problem of injecting sound into the now silent drama is in
the offing. What producers will do in this regard, of course, is an
unknown factor
MAURIC...
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Motion Picture Exhibition in 1970s America
On the surface, the exhibition side of the movie industry seemed stable during the 1970s. While the major Hollywood studios struggled to redefine themselves...
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Orders of Magnitude II: Costs, Agents, Stars
When you don't get participation, your front money naturally accelerates
.... The best participation is if you can get gross from every boxoffice
dollar T...
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Outside the Mainstream
Sound opened new possibilities for bringing previously unheard voices and languages to Hollywood. The precursor was definitely radio, which was broadcasting regional songs (for ...
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Selling Stars
The conversion to sound and the ordeal of the Depression left the star system firmly in the grip of the producers. As Alexander Walker put it, "the star system in the 1930s gradually too...
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Sound and Music
The Historical Primacy of Dialogue Sound
The coming of synchronous sound to the motion pictures in 1927 with THE JAZZ SINGER introduced a new aesthetic based on the relationship of the...
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Technological Innovation and Aesthetic Response
I like to compare this revolution [in cinematography] offast lenses
plus pushed developmnent to painting.... Impressionism also came out
of a technolog...
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The Transition to Story Films: 1903 1904
The American film industry was entering a new phase of rapid expansion by mid-to-late 1903, and a key factor in this revival was the popularity of story films....
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The Well-Tempered Sound Track, 1930-1931
In 1930 regular customers began attending movies less frequently and spending less money. The motion picture industry cut back on production budgets, furlough...
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Three Seasons: The Films of 1928-1931
If a revolution is a sudden event which throws over the past regime and substitutes a new oppositional rule, then the conversion to sound was certainly no revolut...
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Toward a History of Screen Practice
Starting points always present problems for the historian, perhaps because they imply a "before" as well as an "after." For the film historian, "the invention of ci...
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Presidential hopeful Mitt Romney says he won't be attending "September Dawn," a movie about the killing of 120 unarmed Arkansas pioneers by Mormon settlers in Utah in 1857.Romney's ancestors includ...
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Andrzej Wajda was honored Monday by the United States for films that chronicled the development of the Solidarity freedom movement.Wajda, who supported the pro-democracy movement that helped topple...
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LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - French architect Christian
de Portzamparc has been named to design the world's largest and
most ambitious museum dedicated to the history of film and the
Oscars, the Academ...
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An Oscars contingency plan that would include history, film clips and out-of-the-ordinary concepts for the awards show is in the works, academy president Sid Ganis told The Associated Press on Wedn...
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A contingency plan that would include history, film clips and out-of-the-ordinary concepts for the 80th annual Academy Awards show is in the works, academy president Sid Ganis told The Associated P...
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