From getting the necessary training and understanding the intricate responsibilities of everyone behind or in front of the camera to getting your first break and avoiding career-specific pitfalls, All You Need to Know About the Movie and TV Business leads you topic by topic through

* A breakdown of job descriptions, from casting directors and key grips to stunt coordinators and film editors
* What kinds of deals actors, directors, writers, and producers make when they start out and when they hit the top
* How to protect and sell your creative work
* How movie deals are put together at studios and by independents
* The nuts and bolts of a boilerplate contract
* The notorious and mysterious world of profit participations, with a detailed explanation of why there's never any profit "net profit" deals

The entertainment industry can be an exciting, challenging landscape to negotiate. Having some valuable insight into how to make the most of your career in the movie or TV business can put you on the surest path to success.

At a time when the studio system is making a stunning comeback, film historian Thomas Schatz provides an indispensable account of Hollywood's traditional blend of business and art. Highly acclaimed, from Variety to the New York Times, this book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and reveals instead the genius of a system of collaboration and conflict. Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making - and unmaking - of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel. Richly illustrated and highly readable, the Genius of the System gives the definitive view of the workings of the Old Hollywood and the foundations of the New.

Renowned psychotherapist and career counselor Linda Buzzell is the expert in knowing how to create and develop a career in Hollywood. With this book, she shows you how to look at your personality, your strengths, your weaknesses, your special skills, and your talents in order to target your personal goals and maximize your career success. She then explains all the jobs in Hollywood and how to find them, get them, and advance through each stage in your career.

How To Make It in Hollywood includes everything you need to know about agents, managers, lawyers, the casting couch, chutzpah, schmoozing, networking, Godfather Calls, rhino skin, Power Rolodexes, handling rejection, constant unemployment, and keeping yourself on the track to your dreams when real life keeps telling you to give it all up and move back to Cincinnati!

One of the most significant contributors to the early years of the motion picture industry, Harold Lloyd was also a shrewd businessman and became the wealthiest man in Hollywood at the peak of his career. Perhaps more than any other major star of the silent era, his characters mirrored his times and captivated his contemporaries. His experiments with camera placement and motion were vital to the evolution of filmmaking techniques. This book includes a short biography of Lloyd and detailed information about all of his performances. The biography overviews his childhood, his adolescent stage career, his work in silent and talking pictures, his family life, and the work of his major contemporaries. A chapter on his film work includes entries for all of his shorts and features, including cameo roles and newsreels. Other chapters describe Lloyd's radio and television work, sheet music and recordings inspired by his films, and his many awards and honors. An annotated bibliography cites books, magazines, newspapers, oral histories, and interviews. Eleven photographs illustrate his work.

Paolo Cherchi Usai provides a comprehensive introduction to the study, research and preservation of silent cinema from its heyday in the early 20th century to its present day flourishing. He traces the history of the moving image in its formative years, from Edison's and Lumiere's first experiments to the dawn of 'talkies'; provides a clear guide to the basics of silent film technology; introduces the technical and creative roles involved in its production, and presents silent cinema as a performance event, rather than a passive viewing experience. This new, greatly expanded edition takes the reader on a new journey, exploring silent cinema in the broader context of technology, culture, and society, from the invention of celluloid film and its related machinery to film studios, laboratories, theatres and audiences. Among the people involved in the creation of a new art form were filmmakers, actors and writers, but also engineers, entrepreneurs, and projectionists. Their collective efforts, and the struggle to preserve their creative work by archives and museums, are interwoven in a compelling story covering three centuries of media history, from the magic lantern to the reinvention of silent cinema in digital form. The new edition also includes comprehensive resource information for the study, research, preservation and exhibition of silent cinema.

Following the release of Ridley Scott's Gladiator in 2000 the ancient world epic has experienced a revival in studio and audience interest. Building on existing scholarship on the Cold War epics of the 1950s-60s, including Ben-Hur, Spartacus and The Robe, this original study explores the current cycle of ancient world epics in cinema within the social and political climate created by September 11th 2001. Examining films produced against the backdrop of the War on Terror and subsequent invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, this book assesses the relationship between mainstream cinema and American society through depictions of the ancient world, conflict and faith. Davies explores how these films evoke depictions of the Second World War, the Vietnam War and the Western in portraying warfare in the ancient world, as well as discussing the influence of genre hybridisation, narration and reception theory. He questions the extent to which ancient world epics utilise allegory, analogy and allusion to parallel past and present in an industry often dictated by market forces. Featuring analysis of Alexander, Troy, 300, Centurion, The Eagle, The Passion of the Christ and more, this book offers new insight on the continued evolution of the ancient world epic in cinema.

After World War II, as cultural and industry changes were reshaping Hollywood, movie studios shifted some production activities overseas, capitalizing on frozen foreign earnings, cheap labor, and appealing locations. Hollywood unions called the phenomenon "runaway" production to underscore the outsourcing of employment opportunities. Examining this period of transition from the late 1940s to the early 1960s, Runaway Hollywood shows how film companies exported production around the world and the effect this conversion had on industry practices and visual style. In this fascinating account, Daniel Steinhart uses an array of historical materials to trace the industry's creation of a more international production operation that merged filmmaking practices from Hollywood and abroad to produce movies with a greater global scope.

This witty and fascinating study reminds us that there was animation before Disney: about thirty years of creativity and experimentation flourishing in such extraordinary work as "Girdie the Dinosaur" and "Felix the Cat." "Before Mickey," the first and only in-depth history of animation from 1898-1928, includes accounts of mechanical ingenuity, marketing and art. Crafton is equally adept at explaining techniques of sketching and camera work, evoking characteristic styles of such pioneering animators as Winsor McCay and Ladislas Starevitch, placing work in its social and economic context, and unraveling the aesthetic impact of specific cartoons.
""Before Mickey"'s scholarship is quite lively and its descriptions are evocative and often funny. The history of animation coexisted with that of live-action film but has never been given as much attention."--Tim Hunter, "New York Times"

From Double Indemnity to The Godfather, the stories behind some of the greatest films ever made pale beside the story of the studio that made them. In the golden age of Hollywood, Paramount was one of the Big Five studios. Gulf + Western's 1966 takeover of the studio signaled the end of one era and heralded the arrival of a new way of doing business in Hollywood. Bernard Dick reconstructs the battle that culminated in the reduction of the studio to a mere corporate commodity. He then traces Paramount's devolution from free-standing studio to subsidiary - first of Gulf + Western, then Paramount Communications, and currently Viacom-CBS. Dick portrays the new Paramount as a paradigm of today's Hollywood, where the only real art is the art of the deal. Former merchandising executives find themselves in charge of production, on the assumption that anyone who can sell a movie can make one. CEOs exit in disgrace from one studio only to emerge in triumph at another. Corporate raiders vie for power and control through the buying and selling of film libraries, studio property, television stations, book publishers, and more. The history of Paramount is filled with larger-than-life people, including Billy Wilder, Adolph Zukor, Sumner Redstone, Sherry Lansing, Barry Diller, Michael Eisner, Jeffrey Katzenberg, and more.

Indian cinema is the only body of world cinema that depicts courtesans as important characters. In early films courtesan characters transmitted Indian classical dance, music and aesthetics to large audiences. They represent the nation's past, tracing their heritage to the fourth-century Kamasutra and to nineteenth-century courtly cultures, but they are also the first group of modern women in Hindi films. They are working professionals living on their own or in matrilineal families. Like male protagonists, they travel widely and develop networks of friends and chosen kin. They have relations with men outside marriage and become single mothers. Courtesan films are heroine-oriented and almost every major female actor has played this role. Challenging received wisdom, Vanita demonstrates that a larger number of courtesans in Bombay cinema are Hindu and indeterminate than are Muslim, and that films depict their culture as hybrid Hindu-Muslim, not Islamicate. Courtesans speak in the ambiguous voice of the modern nation, inviting spectators to seize pleasure here and now but also to search for the meaning of life. Vanita's groundbreaking study of courtesans and courtesan imagery in 235 films brings fresh evidence to show that the courtesan figure shapes the modern Indian erotic, political and religious imagination.

From the 1970s onward, "exploitation cinema" as a concept has circulated inside and outside of East Asian nations and cultures in terms of aesthetics and marketing. However, crucial questions about how global networks of production and circulation alter the identity of an East Asian film as "mainstream" or as "exploitation" have yet to be addressed in a comprehensive way. Exploiting East Asian Cinemas serves as the first authoritative guide to the various ways in which contemporary cinema from and about East Asia has trafficked across the somewhat-elusive line between mainstream and exploitation. Focusing on networks of circulation, distribution, and reception, this collection treats the exploitation cinemas of East Asia as mobile texts produced, consumed, and in many ways re-appropriated across national (and hemispheric) boundaries. As the processes of globalization have decoupled products from their nations of origin, transnational taste cultures have declared certain works as "art" or "trash," regardless of how those works are received within their native locales. By charting the routes of circulation of notable films from Japan, China, and South Korea, this anthology contributes to transnationally-accepted formulations of what constitutes "East Asian exploitation cinema."

Richard Vaughn's account of the development of the American movie rating system situates contemporary cinema within the turbulent context of the history of censorship, America's cultural wars, and the impact of new technologies that have transformed entertainment. Based on the private papers and oral history of Richard D. Heffner, who headed MPAA's Classification and Rating Administration for two decades, from 1974 to 1994, it chronicles the often tense working relationship between Heffner and Jack Valenti, the long-standing currently 83 year old President and Chief Executive of the Motion Picture Association of America. It also documents the sometimes bruising encounters Heffner had with such Hollywood heavyweights as Clint Eastwood, Oliver Stone, Michael Douglas, George C. Scott, Lew Wasserman, Arthur Krim, Jerry Weintraub, and many others. Heffner's memoirs reveal the conflicted behind-the-scenes history of the American movie rating system from the perspective of a man once called "the least-known most powerful person in Hollywood." Stephen Vaughn has taught the history of communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, since 1981. His previous books include Ronald Reagan in Hollywood: Movies and Politics (1994), The Vital Past: Writings on the Uses of History (1985), and Holding Fast the Inner Lines: Democracy, Nationalism and the Committee on Public Information (1980). He is General Editor of a three-volume Encyclopedia of American Journalism, and has published a two-volume annotated bibliography in electronic format.

The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as 'Hollywood's greatest year', saw the release of such memorable films as "Gone with the Wind", "The Wizard of Oz", and "Stagecoach". It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series "History of the American Cinema", Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.

Going beyond a discussion of political architecture, Walled Life investigates the mediation of material and imagined border walls through cinema and art practices. The book reads political walls as more than physical obstruction, instead treating the wall as an affective screen, capable of negotiating the messy feelings, personal conflicts, and haunting legacies that make up “walled life� as an evolving signpost in the current global border regime. By exploring the wall as an emotional and visceral presence, the book shows that if we read political walls as forms of affective media, they become legible not simply as shields, impositions, or monuments, but as projective surfaces that negotiate the interaction of psychological barriers with political structures through cinema, art, and, of course, the wall itself. Drawing on the Berlin Wall, the West Bank Separation barrier, and the U.S.-Mexico border, Walled Life discovers each wall through the films and artworks it has inspired, examining a wide array of graffiti, murals, art installations, movies, photography, and paintings. Remediating the silent barriers, we erect between, and often within ourselves, these interventions tell us about the political fantasies and traumatic histories that undergird the politics of walls as they rework the affective settings of political boundaries.

Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood explores when, how, and why the industry accepted women as filmmakers in the 1910s and why, by the 1920s, those opportunities had disappeared. In looking at the issue in terms of workplace, Karen Ward Mahar not only unravels the mystery of the disappearing female filmmaker but uncovers the complicated relationships among gender, work culture, and business within modern industrial organizations.

"With meticulous scholarship and fluid writing, Mahar tells the story of this golden era of female filmmaking... Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood is not to be missed." -- Women's Review of Books

"A scrupulously researched and argued analysis of how and why women made great professional and artistic gains in the U.S. film industry from 1906 to the mid-1920s and why they lost most of that ground until the late twentieth century." -- Journal of American History

"Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood offers convincing evidence of how economic forces shaped women's access to film production and presents a complex and engaging story of the women who took advantage of those opportunities." -- Business History Review

"Mahar views the business of making movies from the inside out, focusing on questions about changing industrial models and work conventions. At her best, she shows how the industry's shifting business history impacted women's opportunities, recasting current understanding about the American film industry's development." -- Reviews in American History

Karen Ward Mahar is an associate professor of history at Siena College, New York.

Hollywood's Film Wars with France examines how Hollywood was able to establish a permanent dominance over the French market for motion pictures by using monopolistic trade practices and diplomatic pressure. Hollywood's Film Wars with France examines how Hollywood was able to establish a permanent dominance over the French market for motion pictures. This history of American film policy towards France is documented by a wealthof diplomatic correspondence, which reveals that American exports were promoted through close collaboration between the State Department, the United States Embassy in France, the Department of Commerce, and the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America [MPPDA]. It is based on hitherto unstudied documents from these institutions. While European film production was at a standstill after World War I, Hollywood companies flooded the European marketwith hundreds of films at very low prices. Hollywood's dominant position should not be considered as solely the result of successful collaboration between corporate capitalism and the federal government in Washington, but also asthe failure of the French government to provide proper assistance to its film industry. The support French film producers obtained from their government did not begin to compare with the whole-hearted support Hollywood received from the MPPDA. This book shows how Hollywood has upheld its dominant position in France by using monopolistic trade practices and diplomatic pressure. Hollywood's prominence must be considered the result of manipulations of the international political economy involving the interplay of economics and politics in the world arena. Jens Ulff-Moller is in the Department of Film and Media Studies at the University of Copenhagen.

Started in Shanghai in the 1920s, the legendary Shaw Brothers Studio began to dominate the worldwide Chinese film market after moving its production facilities to Hong Kong in 1957. Drawing together scholars from such diverse disciplines as history, cultural geography, and film studies, "China Forever" addresses how the Shaw Brothers raised the production standards of Hong Kong cinema, created a pan-Chinese cinema culture and distribution network, helped globalize Chinese-language cinema, and appealed to the cultural nationalism of the Chinese who found themselves displaced and unsettled in many parts of the world during the twentieth century. Contributors are Timothy P. Barnard, Cheng Pei-pei, Ramona Curry, Poshek Fu, Lane J. Harris, Law Kar, Sundiata Keita Cha-Jua, Lilly Kong, Siu Leung Li, Paul G. Pickowicz, Fanon Che Wilkins, Wong Ain-ling, and Sai-shing Yung.

Today, in a world of smartphones, tablets, and computers, screens are a pervasive part of daily life. Yet a multiplicity of screens has been integral to the media landscape since cinema's golden age. In On the Screen, Ariel Rogers rethinks the history of moving images by exploring how experiments with screen technologies in and around the 1930s changed the way films were produced, exhibited, and experienced. Marshalling extensive archival research, Rogers reveals the role screens played at the height of the era of "classical" Hollywood cinema. She shows how filmmakers, technicians, architects, and exhibitors employed a variety of screens within diverse spaces, including studio soundstages, theaters, homes, stores, and train stations. Far from inert, screens served as means of structuring mediated space and time, contributing to the transformations of modern culture. On the Screen demonstrates how particular approaches to the use of screens traversed production and exhibition, theatrical and extratheatrical practice, mainstream and avant-garde modes, and even cinema and television. Rogers's history challenges conventional narratives about the novelty of the twenty-first-century multiscreen environment, showing how attention to the variety of historical screen practices opens up new ways to understand contemporary media.

Deriving its name from its American equivalent, Bollywood is the highly successful Indian movie industry predominantly based in Bombay and Madras. Every day more than 14 million people go to the cinema across India to watch films produced by this massive and powerful industry. In India, movies are not just a form of entertainment but practically a religion. Streets in major Indian cities are lined with colourful posters of Indian movies and their stars. Movie stars are treated like demi-gods, no match even for American standards of celebrity obsession. More than any other cultural or political institution of the twentieth century, the cinema has captured the hearts and minds of India's growing population of almost one billion, even against the stark backdrop of the vast country's struggle with poverty and hunger and often tense Muslim-Hindu relations. The experience of actually going to the movies in India is as much a part of the Bollywood phenomenon as are the stars themselves and Bollywood Dreams documents this important aspect of understanding the important role Bollywood plays in contemporary Indian culture. "Going to the cinema" Torgovnik says, "is about going to see the actors larger-than-life. It is about living the glamorous life for a few hours and leaving your daily hardships behind." Once inside the movie theatres, the audience can expect at least three hours of entertainment, including several song and dance numbers, love scenes, action sequences and most surely a happy ending. Each film includes the necessary ingredients for success: action, violence, music, dance, romance and morals. The themes of the movies are often social issues such as communalism, ethnicity, religion and caste, and the movie theatres themselves are often full of lively interaction between viewer and star. Cheers and boos pervade the atmosphere: the audience becomes a part of the film and, likewise, the film becomes a part of them. Bollywood Dreams begins with a vignette of the touring caravans that bring Bollywood on the big screen to India's villages in portable tents. We then follow the Indian film from its creation on the movie set, to the larger-than-life stars, directors and character actors, to the editing chamber, to the city streets where ubiquitous promotional posters abound and, finally, to the multitude of movie theatres that abound in India.

This book explores the challenges facing women from their mid-forties as they attempt to build/maintain careers in the screen industries. Essays are concerned with the intersection of gender and age on screen and behind the camera and how that can create a 'double jeopardy'. Existing research in this area has been primarily directed to onscreen representation. Female actors, with notable exceptions, struggle to get screen time and expansive roles as they age. Behind the camera, women 45+ also face challenges and roadblocks; to date, less attention has been directed to this group. The cross-cultural research in this collection offers an analysis of representation, on and off screen, touching on film, television, streaming services and film festivals. It includes an exploration of gendered ageism, age bias and stereotyping. It also highlights the achievements of mature female practitioners who, in their work and working lives, embody a resistance to restrictive cultural discourses about ageing women.

When the 2016 Oscar acting nominations all went to whites for the second consecutive year, #OscarsSoWhite became a trending topic. Yet these enduring racial biases afflict not only the Academy Awards, but also Hollywood as a whole. Why do actors of color, despite exhibiting talent and bankability, continue to lag behind white actors in presence and prominence? Reel Inequality examines the structural barriers minority actors face in Hollywood, while shedding light on how they survive in a racist industry. The book charts how white male gatekeepers dominate Hollywood, breeding a culture of ethnocentric storytelling and casting. Nancy Wang Yuen interviewed nearly a hundred working actors and drew on published interviews with celebrities, such as Viola Davis, Chris Rock, Gina Rodriguez, Oscar Isaac, Lucy Liu, and Ken Jeong, to explore how racial stereotypes categorize and constrain actors. Their stories reveal the day-to-day racism actors of color experience in talent agents' offices, at auditions, and on sets. Yuen also exposes sexist hiring and programming practices, highlighting the structural inequalities that actors of color, particularly women, continue to face in Hollywood. This book not only conveys the harsh realities of racial inequality in Hollywood, but also provides vital insights from actors who have succeeded on their own terms, whether by sidestepping the system or subverting it from within. Considering how their struggles impact real-world attitudes about race and diversity, Reel Inequality follows actors of color as they suffer, strive, and thrive in Hollywood.

Blaise Cendrars, one of twentieth-century France's most gifted men of letters, came to Hollywood in 1936 for the newspaper "Paris-Soir". Already a well-known poet, Cendrars was a celebrity journalist whose perceptive dispatches from the American dream factory captivated millions. These articles were later published as "Hollywood: Mecca of the Movies", which has since appeared in many languages. Remarkably, this is its first translation into English. Hollywood in 1936 was crowded with stars, moguls, directors, scouts, and script girls. Though no stranger to filmmaking (he had worked with director Abel Gance), Cendrars was spurned by the industry greats with whom he sought to hobnob. His response was to invent a wildly funny Hollywood of his own, embellishing his adventures and mixing them with black humor, star anecdotes, and wry social commentary. Part diary, part tall tale, this book records Cendrars' experiences on Hollywood's streets and at its studios and hottest clubs. His impressions of the town's drifters, star-crazed sailors, and undiscovered talent are recounted in a personal, conversational style that anticipates the 'new journalism' of writers such as Tom Wolfe. Perfectly complemented by his friend Jean Guerin's witty drawings, and following the tradition of European travel writing, Cendrars' 'little book about Hollywood' offers an astute, entertaining look at 1930s America as reflected in its unique movie mecca.

The annual Beijing Film Academy Yearbook highlights the best academic debates, discussions and research from the previous year, as previously published in the highly prestigious Journal of Beijing Film Academy. This volume brings together specially selected articles, appearing for the first time in English, to bridge the gap in cross-cultural research in cinema and media studies. The book is the latest in the Intellect China Library series to produce work by Chinese scholars that have not previously been available to English language academia. Covering the subjects of film studies, visual arts, performing arts, media and cultural studies, the series aims to foster intellectual debate and to promote closer cross-cultural intellectual exchanges by introducing important works of Chinese scholarship to readers.

" ... a modern mythography, a study of contemporary Hollywood filmsbased on the tools offered by feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxist cultural theory, anddeconstruction." -- Village Voice

"Solidly thought-out observationof the films of the 70's and 80's that comment on the system." --Audience

..". intelligent, open advocacy. Its responsiblearrangement of carefully described cultural materials will challenge students andinstructors alike." -- Teaching Philosophy

Camera Politica is acomprehensive study of Hollywood film during a period of tremendous change inAmerican history, a period that witnessed the end of the American empire, crises inthe economy, a failure of political leadership, loss at war, and the rise of theRight.