Iranian cinema is today widely recognized not merely as a distinctive national cinema, but as one of the most innovative in the world. Established masters like Abbas Kiarostami and Mohsen Makhmalbaf have been joined by newcomers like Samira Makhmalbaf, Majid Majidi, Ja'far Qobadi and Bahman Qobadi, all directors whose films are screened to increasing acclaim in international festivals. This international stature both fascinates Western observers and appears paradoxical in line with perceptions of Iran as anti-modern. The largely Iranian contributors to this book look in depth at how Iranian cinema became a true 'world cinema'. From a range of perspectives, they explore cinema's development in post Revolution Iran and its place in Iranian culture.

Hollywood is currently one of the largest and most profitable sectors of the U.S. economy. In just a few decades, it has transformed itself from a dying company town into a merchandising emporium of movies, games, and licensed characters. It is quickly moving even further into cyberspace, virtual reality, and digital imaging. Aida Hozic writes of these enormous changes in the film industry from a novel perspective: by tracing shifts in spatial organization of film production from the enclosed worlds of old Hollywood studios through globally dispersed location shooting to digital production and distribution.

Hozic's fascinating tale of latter-day capitalism suggests that the physical reorganization of production across the American economy, but in Hollywood in particular alters material and conceptual boundaries between work and leisure, public and private, reality and fantasy. Particular economic regimes and forms of spatial organization have specific moral implications, and so the story of Hollywood's cultural production is partly a story of censorship and moral surveillance. Hozic's account of industrial change in Hollywood, and of its attempts at moral control over the production of fantasy, is an illuminating confrontation with the peculiar nature of Hollywood's political authority and of its complex power."

" The new edition of this seminal work takes the story of the Production Code and motion picture censorship into the present, including the creation of the PG-13 and NC-17 ratings in the 1990s.

Still the most comprehensive analysis of the subject to have appeared in English, Magical Reels charts the development of Latin American film industries in a world increasingly dominated by the advanced technology and massive distribution budgets of the North American mainstream. John King sets up a historical framework to unfold the overlapping histories of cinema in the continent: the itinerant film-makers of the silent era who projected their films in cafes and village halls, the inventive use of vernacular music and local comedy in early sound pictures, the "golden age" of 1940s Mexican cinema, and the "new cinema"-oppositional cinema made "with an idea in the head and a camera in the hand"-of the late 1950s and beyond. A country-by-country account of this new wave allows detailed discussion of, for instance, Peronist cinema in Argentina, 1960s' revolutionary film-making in Cuba, state-sponsored cinema in 1970s' Brazil and Venezuela, and the struggle for democratization in Chile in the 1980s. A new chapter written for this edition examines Latin American cinema of the 1990s, raising issues such as globalization, new cinema audiences, film funding and distribution.

An Essential Guide to Landing -- and Keeping -- Your first Hollywood Job

A position as an assistant to a producer, agent, director, studio executive, or star can be the path to a fabulous career -- or a one-way ticket to hell. How can the aspiring Hollywood assistant quickly learn the inside track to success while avoiding the land mines? It's All Your Fault is the answer. Written by two former Hollywood assistants who've been there and done that, It's All Your Fault is bursting with hard-earned advice, from figuring out who's who and who isn't to sex, drugs, and other work-related issues. Filled with outrageous anecdotes and countless celebrity stories, It's All Your Fault proves an indispensable addition to the nightstand of every wannabe Hollywood mover and shaker.

The reviewer of the Boston Globe said point blank: "Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top." As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) until the 1990s, Lew Wasserman was the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His career spanned the entire history of the movies, from the silent era to the present, and he was guru to Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, and to a new generation of filmmakers beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. For more than four years, Dennis McDougal interviewed over 350 people who knew the man with the giant dark horn-rimmed glasses-colleagues, relatives, rivals-and drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents to produce this extraordinary and first-ever portrait of a legend and his times, a book that the New York Times Book Review called "thoroughly reported and engrossing" and that the Daily News called, simply, "a bombshell."

While most people associate Japanese film with modern directors like Akira Kurosawa, Japan's cinema has a rich tradition going back to the silent era. Japan's "pure film movement" of the 1910s is widely held to mark the birth of film theory as we know it and is a touchstone for historians of early cinema. Yet this work has been difficult to access because so few prints have been preserved.

Joanne Bernardi offers the first book-length study of this important era, recovering a body of lost film and establishing its significance in the development of Japanese cinema. Building on a wealth of original-language sources -- much of it translated here for the first time -- she examines how the movement challenged the industry's dependence on pre-existing stage repertories, preference for lecturers over intertitles, and the use of female impersonators.

Bernardi provides in-depth analysis of key scripts -- The Glory of Life, A Father's Tears, Amateur Club, and The Lust of the White Serpent -- and includes translations in an appendix. These films offer case studies for understanding the craft of screenwriting during the silent era and shed light on such issues as genre, authorship and control, and gender representation.

Writing in Light helps fill important gaps in the history of Japanese silent cinema. By identifying points at which "pure film" discourse merges with changing international trends and attitudes toward film, it offers an important resource for film, literary, and cultural historians.

This work breaks down the film industry and lists exactly what it takes to crack into each market (except acting). It offers advice from industry insiders: screenwriters; directors; and production designers.

Johnny Depp. Marilyn Monroe. Marlon Brando. Leonardo DiCaprio. Woody Allen. Shanron Stone. What do all of these actors have in common? They're outrageous, receive huge salaries, have enormous agos, and have way too much spare time. Their out-of-control lifestyles prove that, as one Hollywood observer noted, "Hollywood is a trip through a sewer in a glass-bottomed boat."
You'll learn which director was furious when he was misquoted as saying, "Actors are cattle." He clamed he had really said, "Actors should be treated as cattle."
You'll discover that Bruce Wilis ordered the final scenes in Striking Distance to be re-shot at a cost of over $750,000 because the original shots exposed his toupee.
You'll find that Melanie Griffith explained her ignorance of the Nazi holocaust by saying, "I don't know why I didn't know. Maybe I missed school that day...I'm not stupid."
Whether you're a fan of Hugh Grant, Dennis Hopper, or Whoopi Goldberg, you'll learn about all of the embarrassing moments in your favorite star's life. From young actors like Ben Affleck and Cameron Diaz to screen legends like Frank Sinatra and Judy Garland, "Movie Stars Do the Dumbest Things" is proof that actors are more childish and impulsive than you've ever imagined.

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.

"A wide-ranging inquiry into an important area of contemporary scholarly interest, and also an engaging, well written and intelligently conceived collection." -Eric Smoodin, author of Animating Culture: Hollywood Cartoons From the Sound Era

Despite the success of Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, and their Looney cohorts, Warner Bros. animation worked in the shadow of Disney for many years. The past ten years have seen a resurgence in Warner Bros. animation as they produce new Bugs Bunny cartoons and theatrical features like Space Jam as well as television shows like Tiny Toon Adventures and Animaniacs. While Disney's animation plays it safe and mirrors traditional cinema stories, Warner Bros. is known for a more original and even anarchistic style of narration, a willingness to take risks in story construction, a fearlessness in crossing gender lines with its characters, and a freedom in breaking boundaries. This collection of essays looks at the history of Warner Bros. animation, compares and contrasts the two studios, charts the rise and fall of creativity and daring at Warner's, and analyzes the ways in which the studio was for a time transgressive in its treatment of class, race, and gender. It reveals how safety and commercialization have, in the end, triumphed at Warner Bros. just as they much earlier conquered Disney.

The book also discusses fan parodies of Warner Bros. animation on the Internet today, the Bugs Bunny cross-dressing cartoons, cartoons that were censored by the studio, and the merchandising and licensing strategies of the Warner Bros. studio stores. Contributors are Donald Crafton, Ben Fraser, Michael Frierson, Norman M. Klein, Terry Lindvall, Bill Mikulak, Barry Putterman, Kevin S. Sandler, Hank Sartin, Linda Simensky, Kirsten Moana Thompson, Gene Walz, and Timothy R. White.

Mix one American director with a German producer on a period extravaganza, set the locations in Italy and Spain and start the cameras rolling without enough money to do the job. Then sit back and watch disaster strike. That is the scenario Andrew Yule has painstakiingly reconstructed. The more problems and reverses, the greater our interest: costly postponements, overwhelming language difficulties, elephants and tigers turning on their trainers, illnesses, sets not being ready, special effects breaking down and cameo stars (from Marlon Brando to Sean Connery) backing out of the project. You name it, Andrew Yule reports it!

John W. Cones, whose real goal is to stimulate a long-term film industry reform movement, shows how the financial control of the film industry in the hands of the major studios and distributors actually translates into creative control of the industry.

Cones discusses the pros and cons of the debate relating to the industry's so-called net profit problem and the way in which the distribution deal plays an integral part in that problem. He then breaks down five major film finance/distribution scenarios, explaining various distribution deals and suggesting ways of negotiating distribution.

Critically examining the specific terms of the distribution deal itself, Cones covers gross receipts exclusions, distributor fees, and distribution expenses. He also investigates the various forms of interest, issues of production costs, matters of creative control, and general contractual provisions.

For handy reference, Cones includes an extensive checklist for negotiating any feature film distribution deal. The list deals with distribution fees, distribution expenses, interest, production costs, creative control issues, general contractual provisions, distributor commitments, and the limits of negotiating. His nine appendixes present a "Motion Picture Industry Overview," "Profit Participation Audit Firms," "ADI (Top 50) Market Rankings," an "AFMA Member List, 1992-1993," a "Production-Financing/Distribution Agreement," a "Negative Pickup Distribution Agreement," a "Distribution Rights Acquisition Agreement," a "Distribution Agreement (Rent-a-Distributor Deal)," and a "Foreign Distribution Agreement."

Cones wrote this book for independent producers, executive and associate producers and their representatives, directors, actors, screenwriters, members of talent guilds, distributors, and entertainment, antitrust, and securities attorneys. Securities issuers and dealers, investment bankers, and money finders, investors, and financiers of every sort also will be interested. In addition, Cones suggests and hopes that the book will interest "Congress, their research staff, government regulators at the Internal Revenue Service, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, and law enforcement officials such as the Los Angeles District Attorney and the U.S. Justice Department."

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!

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.

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.

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

Independent director and screenwriter John Andrew Gallagher, interviews 21 filmmakers on the craft of motion picture directing. Francois Truffaut, the late great French director, as well as Michael Cimino, Ulu Grosbard, Dennis Hopper, Alan Parker, Susan Seidelman, Joan Micklin Silver and many others reveal behind-the-scenes anecdotes about well known films and stars.

The big gamblers who spend millions per film as well as the colorful low-budget kings provide an intriguing look at the mechanics of filmmaking. Choosing and preparing the screenplay, working with actors and crew, dealing with the distributor, and advice to young filmmakers--all are covered in this book's illuminating interviews. Serious students of cinema, filmmakers, movie buffs, and people fascinated by film will find Film Directors on in this book's illuminating interviews.

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"

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.

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.

What has brought about the transformation of the British film industry over the last few decades, to the beginnings of what is arguably a new golden era? In the mid-1980s the industry was in a parlous state. The number of films produced in the UK was tiny. Cinema attendance had dipped to an all-time low, cinema buildings were in a state of disrepair and home video had yet to flourish. Since then, while many business challenges - especially for independent producers and distributors - remain, the industry overall has developed beyond recognition. In recent years, as British films have won Oscars, Cannes Palms and Venice Golden Lions, releases such as Love Actually, Billy Elliot, Skyfall, Paddington and the Harry Potter series have found enormous commercial as well as critical success. The UK industry has encouraged, and benefitted from, a huge amount of inward investment, much of it from the Hollywood studios, but also from the National Lottery via the UK Film Council and BFI. This book portrays the visionaries and officials who were at the helm as a digital media revolution began to reshape the industry. Through vivid accounts based on first-hand interviews of what was happening behind the scenes, film commentator and critic Geoffrey Macnab provides in-depth analysis of how and why the British film industry has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.

This is a moving, star-filled account of one of Hollywood's true golden ages as told by a man in the middle of it all. Walter Mirisch's company has produced some of the most entertaining and enduring classics in film history, including ""West Side Story"", ""Some Like It Hot"", ""In the Heat of the Night"", and ""The Magnificent Seven"". His work has led to 87 Academy Award nominations and 28 Oscars. Richly illustrated with rare photographs from his personal collection, ""I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History"" reveals Mirisch's own experience of Hollywood in its golden days and also tells the stories of the stars - emerging and established - who appeared in his films, including Natalie Wood, John Wayne, Peter Sellers, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, and many others.With hard-won insight and gentle humor, Mirisch recounts how he witnessed the end of the studio system, the development of independent production, and the rise and fall of some of Hollywood's most gifted (and notorious) cultural icons. A producer with a passion for creative excellence, he offers insights into his innovative filmmaking process, revealing a rare ingenuity for placating the demands of auteur directors, weak-kneed studio executives, and troubled screen sirens.From his early start as a movie theater usher to the presentation of such masterpieces as ""The Apartment"", ""Fiddler on the Roof"", and ""The Great Escape"", Mirisch tells the inspiring life story of his rise to the highest echelon of the American film industry. This book assures Mirisch's legacy - as Elmore Leonard puts it - as ""one of the good guys.

A New York Times bestseller, now updated with an afterword and exclusive new material From the #1 bestselling author behind acclaimed oral histories of Saturday Night Live and ESPN comes "the most hotly anticipated book [in decades]" (Variety): James Andrew Miller's irresistible insider chronicle of the modern entertainment industry, told through the epic story of Creative Artists Agency (CAA)-the ultimate power player that has represented the world's biggest stars and shaped the landscape of film, television, comedy, music, and sports. Started in 1975, when five bright and brash upstarts left creaky William Morris to form their own innovative talent agency, CAA would come to revolutionize Hollywood, representing everyone from Tom Cruise, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, and Steven Spielberg to Jennifer Lawrence, J.J. Abrams, Will Smith, and Brad Pitt. Over the next decades its tentacles would spread aggressively into sports, advertising, and digital media. Powerhouse is the fascinating, no-holds-barred saga of that ascent. Drawing on unprecedented and exclusive access to the men and women who built and battled with CAA-including co-founders Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer and rivals like Ari Emanuel of William Morris Endeavor-as well as the stars themselves, Miller spins a unique and unforgettable tale of brilliance, ambition, betrayal, and outrageous success.

When the Fox Film Corporation merged with Twentieth Century Pictures in 1935, the company posed little threat to industry juggernauts such as Paramount and MGM. In the years that followed however, guided by executives Darryl F. Zanuck and Spyros Skouras, it soon emerged as one of the most important studios. Though working from separate offices in New York and Los Angeles and often of two different minds, the two men navigated Twentieth Century-Fox through the trials of the World War II boom, the birth of television, the Hollywood Blacklist, and more to an era of exceptional success, which included what was then the highest grossing movie of all time, The Sound of Music. Twentieth Century-Fox is a comprehensive examination of the studio's transformation during the Zanuck-Skouras era. Instead of limiting his scope to the Hollywood production studio, Lev also delves into the corporate strategies, distribution models, government relations, and technological innovations that were the responsibilities of the New York headquarters. Moving chronologically, he examines the corporate history before analyzing individual films produced by Twentieth Century-Fox during that period. Drawn largely from original archival research, Twentieth Century-Fox offers not only enlightening analyses and new insights into the films and the history of the company, but also affords the reader a unique perspective from which to view the evolution of the entire film industry.