More than 5,000 film festivals take place globally and many of these have only been established in the last two decades. International Film Festivals collects the leading scholarship on this increasingly prominent phenomenon from both historical and contemporary perspectives, using diverse methods including archival research, interviews and surveys and drawing widely from fields like sociology, urban studies and film criticism to patent technology and history. With contributors from across the world and covering the major festivals - Cannes, Venice, Toronto, Berlin - as well as niche, genre and online film festivals, this book is an authoritative and exemplary guide to the evolution of these key sites for film distribution, exhibition and reception. Chapters unravel topics such as the relationship between corporations and festivals, the soft power function they can perform for their host nations and the changing identities of audiences on arrival at, and during exploration of, a given festival venue. Tricia Jenkins' edited volume reconceives the film festival for the global, digital age whilst drawing out its historic importance and ultimately makes a major intervention in film festival studies as well as film and cultural studies more widely.

Neil Archer's original study makes a timely and politically-engaged intervention in debates about national cinema and national identity. Structured around key examples of 'culturally English cinema' in the years up to and following the UK's 2016 vote to leave the European Union, Cinema and Brexit looks to make sense of the peculiarities and paradoxes marking this era of filmmaking. At the same time as providing a contextual and analytical reading of 21st century filmmaking in Britain, Archer raises critical questions about popular national cinema, and how Brexit has cast both light and shadow over this body of films. Central to Archer's argument is the idea that Brexit represents not just a critical moment in how we will understand future film production, but also in how we will understand production of the recent past. Using as a point of departure the London Olympics opening ceremony of 2012, Cinema and Brexit considers the tensions inherent in a wide range of films, including Skyfall (2012), Dunkirk (2017), Their Finest (2017), Darkest Hour (2017), The Crown (Netflix, 2016), Paddington (2014), Paddington 2 (2017), Never Let Me Go (2011), Absolutely Fabulous: The Movie (2016), The Trip (2010), The Inbetweeners Movie (2011), Mr. Bean's Holiday (2007), The World's End (2013), Sightseers (2012), One Day (2011), Attack the Block (2011), King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (2017) and The Kid Who Would be King (2019). Archer examines the complex national narratives and representations these films expound, situating his analyses within the broader commercial contexts of film production beyond Hollywood, highlighting the negotiations or contradictions at play between the industrial imperatives of contemporary films and the varied circumstances in which they are made. Considering some of the ways a popular and globally-minded English cinema is finding means to work alongside and through the contexts of Brexit, he questions what are the stakes for, and possibilities of, a global 'culturally English cinema' in 2019 and beyond.

Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2018 Cartoons in Hard Times provides a comprehensive analysis of the short subject animation released by the Walt Disney and Warner Brothers from 1932 and 1945, one of the most turbulent periods in Unites States history. Through a combination of content analysis, historical understanding and archival research, this book sheds new light on a hitherto unexplored area of animation, suggesting the ways in which Disney and Warner Brothers animation engaged with historical, social, economic and political changes in this era. The book also traces the development of animation into a medium fit for propaganda in 1941 and the changes in characters, tone, music and narrative that took place to facilitate this transition. Animation transformed in this era from a medium of entertainment, to a socio-political commentator before finally undertaking government sponsored propaganda during the Second World War.

Drawing on a wide range of archival sources, Andrew Shail traces the emergence of film stardom in Europe and North America in the early 20th century. Modifying and supplementing Richard deCordova's account of the birth of the US star system, Shail describes the complex set of economic circumstances that led film studios and actors to consent to the adoption of a star system. He then explores the film industry's turn, from 1908, to making character-based series films. He details how these characters both prefigured and precipitated the star system, demonstrating that series characters and the 'firmament' of film stars are functionally equivalent, and shows how openly fictional characters still provide the model for 'real' film stars.

Money is Hollywood's great theme-but money laundered into something else, something more. Money can be given a particular occasion and career, as box office receipts, casino winnings, tax credits, stock prices, lotteries, inheritances. Or money can become number, and numbers can be anything: pixels, batting averages, votes, likes. Through explorations of all these and more, J.D. Connor's Hollywood Math and Aftermath provides a stimulating and original take on "the equation of pictures," the relationship between Hollywood and economics since the 1970s. Touched off by an engagement with the work of Gilles Deleuze, Connor demonstrates the centrality of the economic image to Hollywood narrative. More than just a thematic study, this is a conceptual history of the industry that stretches from the dawn of the neoclassical era through the Great Recession and beyond. Along the way, Connor explores new concepts for cinema studies: precession and recession, pervasion and staking, ostension and deritualization. Enlivened by a wealth of case studies-from The Big Short and The Wolf of Wall Street to Equity and Blackhat, from Moneyball to 12 Years a Slave, Titanic to Lost, The Exorcist to WALLE, Deja Vu to Upstream Color, Contagion to The Untouchables, Ferris Bueller to Pacific Rim, The Avengers to The Village-Hollywood Math and Aftermath is a bravura portrait of the industry coming to terms with its own numerical underpinnings.

Bollywood in Britain provides the most extensive survey to date of the various manifestations and facets of the Bollywood phenomenon in Britain. The book analyzes the role of Hindi films in the British film market, it shows how audiences engage with Bollywood cinema and it discusses the ways the image of Bollywood in Britain has been shaped. In contrast to most of the existing books on the subject, which tend to approach Bollywood as something that is made by Asians for Asians, the book also focuses on how Bollywood has been adapted for non-Asian Britons. An analysis of Bollywood as an unofficial brand is combined with in-depth readings of texts like film reviews, the TV show Bollywood Star (2004) and novels and plays with references to the Bombay film industry. On this basis Bollywood in Britain demonstrates that the presentation of Bollywood for British mainstream culture oscillates between moments of approximation and distancing, with a clear dominance of the latter. Despite its alleged transculturality, Bollywood in Britain thus emerges as a phenomenon of difference, distance and Othering.

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.

From early twentieth-century stag films to 1960s sexploitation pictures to the boom in 1970s "porno chic," adult cinema's vintage forms are now being reappraised by a new generation of historians, fans, preservationists, and home video entrepreneurs-all of whom depend on and help shape the archive of film history. But what is the present-day allure of these artifacts that have since become eroticized more for their "pastness" than the explicit acts they show? And what are the political implications of recovering these rare but still-visceral films from a less "enlightened," pre-feminist past? Drawing on media industry analysis, archival theory, and interviews with adult video personnel, David Church argues that vintage pornography retains its retrospective fascination precisely because these culturally denigrated texts have been so poorly preserved on political and aesthetic grounds. Through these films' ongoing moves from cultural emergence to concealment to rediscovery, the archive itself performs a "striptease," permitting tangible contact with these corporeally stimulating forms at a moment when the overall physicality of media objects is undergoing rapid transformation. Disposable Passions explores the historiographic lessons that vintage pornography can teach us about which materials our society chooses to keep, and how a long-neglected genre is primed for serious rediscovery as more than mere autoerotic fodder.

Histories of women in Hollywood usually recount the contributions of female directors, screenwriters, designers, actresses, and other creative personnel whose names loom large in the credits. Yet, from its inception, the American film industry relied on the labor of thousands more women, workers whose vital contributions often went unrecognized. Never Done introduces generations of women who worked behind the scenes in the film industry - from the employees' wives who hand-colored the Edison Company's films frame-by-frame, to the female immigrants who toiled in MGM's backrooms to produce beautifully beaded and embroidered costumes. Challenging the dismissive characterization of these women as merely menial workers, media historian Erin Hill shows how their labor was essential to the industry and required considerable technical and interpersonal skills. Sketching a history of how Hollywood came to define certain occupations as lower-paid ""women's work"" or ""feminized labor,"" Hill also reveals how enterprising women eventually gained a foothold in more prestigious divisions like casting and publicity. Poring through rare archives and integrating the firsthand accounts of women employed in the film industry, the book gives a voice to women whose work was indispensable yet largely invisible. As it traces this long history of women in Hollywood, Never Done reveals the persistence of sexist assumptions that, even today, leave women in the media industry underpraised and underpaid.

Visions of Development examines the Indian state's postcolonial development ideology between Independence in 1947 and the Emergency of 1975- 77. Sutoris pioneers a novel methodology for the study of development thought and its cinematic representations, analysing films made by the Films Division of India, 1948-75. By comparing these documentaries to late-colonial films on 'progress,' his book highlights continuities with and departures from colonial notions of development in modern India. It is the first scholarly volume to be published on the history of Indian documentary film. Of the approximately 250 documentaries analysed by Peter Sutoris, many of which have never been discussed in the existing literature, most are concerned with economic planning and industrialisation, large dams, family planning, schemes aimed at the integration of tribal peoples (Adivasis) into society, and civic education. Films Division has made all films analysed in this volume available for free online streaming, which will be accessible through their site as well as a companion website released on publication of the book.

At free ebook version of this title is available through Luminos, University of California Press' new open access publishing program. Precarious Creativity examines the seismic changes confronting media workers in an age of globalization and corporate conglomeration. This pathbreaking anthology peeks behind the hype and supposed glamor of screen media industries to reveal the intensifying pressures and challenges confronting actors, editors, electricians, and others. The authors take on pressing conceptual and methodological issues while also providing insightful case studies of workplace dynamics regarding creativity, collaboration, exploitation, and cultural difference. Furthermore, it examines working conditions and organizing efforts on all six continents, offering broad-ranging and comprehensive analysis of contemporary screen media labor in such places as Lagos, Prague, Hollywood, and Hyderabad. The collection also examines labor conditions across a range of job categories that includes, for example, visual effects, production services, and adult entertainment. With contributions from such leading scholars as John Caldwell, Vicki Mayer, Herman Gray, and Tejaswini Ganti, Precarious Creativity offers timely critiques of media globalization while also intervening in broader debates about labor, creativity, and precarity.

Founded in 1966 at McMaster University by avant-garde filmmaker John Hofsess and future frat-comedy innovator Ivan Reitman, the McMaster Film Board was a milestone in the development of Canada's commercial and experimental film communities. McMaster's student film society quickly became the site of art filmmaking and an incubator for some of the country's most famous commercial talent - as the well as the birthplace of the first Canadian film to lead to obscenity charges, Hofsess's Columbus of Sex. In Hamilton Babylon, Stephen Broomer traces the history of the MFB from its birth as an organization for producing and exhibiting avant-garde films, through its transformation into a commercial-industrial enterprise, and into its final decline as a show business management style suppressed many of its voices. The first book to highlight the work of Hofsess, an innovative filmmaker whose critical role in the MFB has been almost entirely eclipsed by Reitman's legend, Hamilton Babylon is a fascinating study of the tension between art and business in the growth of the Canadian film industry.

Starting with 1964's Goldfinger, every James Bond film has followed the same ritual, and so has its audience: after an exciting action sequence the screen goes black and the viewer spends three long minutes absorbing abstract opening credits and a song that sounds like it wants to return to 1964. In The James Bond SongsR authors Adrian Daub and Charles Kronengold use the genre to trace not only a changing cultural landscape, but also evolving conceptions of what a pop song is. They argue that the story of the Bond song is the story of the pop song more generally, and perhaps even the story of its end. Each chapter discusses a particular segment of the Bond canon and contextualizes it in its eras music and culture. But the book also asks how Bond and his music reflected and influenced our feelings about such topics as masculinity, race, money, and aging. Through these individual pieces the book presents the Bond song as the perfect anthem of late capitalism. The Bond songs want to talk about the fulfillment that comes from fast cars, shaken Martinis and mindless sex, but their unstable speakers, subjects, and addressees actually undercut the logic of the lifestyle James Bond is sworn to defend. The book is an invitation to think critically about pop music, about genre, and about the political aspects of popular culture in the twentieth century and beyond.

The Hindi film industry, among the most prolific in the world, has delighted audiences for decades with its colourful, exquisite and sometimes startling costumes. But are costumes more than just a source of pleasure? This book, the first in-depth exploration of Hindi film costume, contends that they are a unique source of knowledge about issues ranging from Indian taste and fashion to questions of identity, gender and work.Anthropological and film studies approaches combine to analyze costume as the outcome of production processes and as a cinematic device for conveying meaning. Chapters lead from the places where costume is planned and executed to explorations of characterization, the actor body, spectacles of fashion, to the imagining of historical or fantasy worlds through dress, to the power of stardom to launch clothing styles into the public domain. As well as charting the course of film costume as it parallels important trends in cultural history, the book considers the future of Hindi film costume, in the context of new strains of filmmaking that stress unvarnished realism."Fashioning Bollywood" will appeal to students and scholars of Indian culture, anthropology and fashion, as well as anyone who has seen and enjoyed Hindi films.

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.

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.

By meticulously compiling the details of how movies have been made and financed since the medium′s inception, chronicling their performances at the box office, and offering expert commentary about the most important trends of the last one hundred years, the authors of this book have given readers a singularly unique perspective on the film-making industry and a superlative blueprint for future successful filmmaking ventures.

Taking us decade by decade, this book focuses on the revenues, costs, production and distribution of 300 of the most critically and financially successful movies of all time from the business′s origins through 2005. Its numerous essays examine trends in war, noir, bio-drama, biblical, epic, musical, western, disaster, crime, and action adventure films, as well as the advent the summer movie, auteur filmmaking, and the revolutionary advances that have been made in film technology over time. Furthermore, its full complement of charts, graphs and diagrams presenting such things as salary histories, awards and honors, the number of principal photography days required, advertising expenditures, domestic versus overseas profits and more, also include conversions of past movie-making dollars into current dollar values for easy and relevant comparisons.

The ideal resource for filmmakers of every kind, this book evidences that blockbusters have not only been made on relatively low budgets before, but that they have been made time and time again through varying economic climates.

George Lucas′s Blockbusting is indispensible reading for all who love and contribute to the film business.

Is television dead? The classic television era of the 1950s and 1960s, characterized by limited choices of programs broadcast on over the air channels to families as if they were seated around a hearth - and to a nation as if gathered around a campfire - has indeed ended. That early stage of "sharedness" and "scarcity" gave way to the television of "plenty," when satellite and cable and competition reigned, choice was suddenly expanded, and every room in the home had its own television set. And now television offers infinite choices where we can view what we like; when we like; where we like; on a variety of screens, telephones, and Web sites. Some researchers assert that television is not dead but has merely moved from a "collectivist" to an "individualist" phase. Throughout the drastic evolution of this media, thousands of studies have examined the short-term effects of television, such as the evaluation of persuasion campaigns. Yet there is scant research on the overreaching sociological impacts of television and its centrality to Western culture over the past 60 years. This compelling volume of The ANNALS is the first collection of rigorous articles devoted to studying ways in which television has impacted our values, ideologies, institutions, social structure, and culture. Focusing on classic television, these leading experts in media studies delve into the effects on social institutions (namely family and politics) and its effects on values and everyday behavior. These seminal articles lay the groundwork for innovative studies of the numerous ways that television has impacted democracy; social integration (nation and family); trust and suspiciousness; materialism; and identity (social and physical). Students and researchers will find a wealth of inspiration for new research projects. It is a must-have resource for social scientists interested in media studies.

In Christianity, as with most religions, attaining holiness and a higher spirituality while simultaneously pursuing worldly ideals such as fame and fortune is nearly impossible. So, how do people pursuing careers in Hollywood's entertainment industry maintain their religious devotion without sacrificing their career goals? For some, the answer lies just two miles south of the historic center of Hollywood, California, at the Oasis Christian Center.In ""Hollywood Faith"", Gerardo Marti shows how a multiracial evangelical congregation of 2,000 people accommodates itself to the entertainment industry and draws in many striving to succeed in this harsh and irreverent business. Oasis strategically sanctifies ambition and negotiates social change by promoting a new religious identity as ""champion of life"" - an identity that provides people who face difficult career choices and failed opportunities a sense of empowerment and endurance.The first book to provide an in-depth look at religion among the ""creative class."" ""Hollywood Faith"" will fascinate those interested in the modern evangelical movement and anyone who wants to understand how religion adapts to social change.

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.

What is the work of film in the age of transnational production? To answer that question, Randall Halle focuses on the film industry of Germany, one of Europe's largest film markets and one of the world's largest film-producing nations. In the 1990s Germany experienced an extreme transition from a state-subsidized mode of film production that was free of anxious concerns about profit and audience entertainment to a mode dominated by private interest and big capital. At the same time, the European Union began actively drawing together the national markets of Germany and other European nations, sublating their individual significances into a synergistic whole. This book studies these changes broadly, but also focuses on the transformations in their particular national context. It balances film politics and film aesthetics, tracing transformations in financing along with analyses of particular films to describe the effects on the film object itself. Halle concludes that we witness currently the emergence of a new transnational aesthetic, a fundamental shift in cultural production with ramifications for communal identifications, state cohesion, and national economies.

Cinema was one of the Cold War's most powerful instruments of propaganda. Movies blended with literary, theatrical, musical and broadcast representations of the conflict to produce a richly textured Cold War culture. Now in paperback, this timely book fills a significant gap in the international story by uncovering British cinema's contribution to Cold War propaganda and to the development of a popular consensus on Cold War issues. Tony Shaw focuses on an age in which the 'first Cold War' dictated international (and to some extent domestic) politics. This era also marked the last phase of cinema's dominance as a mass entertainment form in Britain. Shaw explores the relationship between film-makers, censors and Whitehall, within the context of the film industry's economic imperatives and the British government's anti-Soviet and anti-Communist propaganda strategies. Drawing upon rich documentation, he demonstrates the degree of control exerted by the state over film output. Shaw analyses key films of the period, including High Treason, which put a British McCarthyism on celluloid; the fascinatingly ambiguous science fiction thriller The Quatermass Experiment; the dystopic The Damned, made by one of Hollywood's blacklisted directors, Joseph Losey; and the CIA-funded, animated version of George Orwell's novel "Animal Farm". The result is a deeply probing study of how Cold War issues were refracted through British films, compared with their imported American and East European counterparts, and how the British public received this 'war propaganda'.

Provides an up-to-date, insightful take on modern American cinema's relations with, and influence on Reagan's, Clinton's and both Bush's administrations. George W.Bush, Clinton and Ronald Reagan's relations are revealed with radical celebrities like Sean Penn, Tim Robbins, Susan Sarandon and Warren Beatty. It contains unique 'behind the scenes' stories and exclusive, revealing interviews with Hollywood celebrities. Described by Tony Garnett as 'an ambitious and refreshing book', "Hollywood's New Radicalism" is a timely and contentious account of the last twenty-five years of American cinema. Ben Dickenson tells the story of the corporate take-over of the movies in the 1970s, and the subsequent transformation of Hollywood into the dominant force in the global media industry. Writing from the intersection where politics, society and cinema meet, and using exclusive interviews with Hollywood personalities, he explores the radicalising effect of such changes on liberal filmmakers like Warren Beatty, Michael Moore and Sean Penn in the past decade. He demonstrates how left-wing messages smuggled their way into 1980s movies, found a fuller voice in independent American cinema during the 1990s and flirted with mainstream popularity at the start of the new millennium. Bringing the story up to and through the 2004 Presidential election, he reveals how important Hollywood figures have become key members of a vigorous left - wing opposition to George W. Bush's Presidency.

Amid the instability and violence of turn-of-the-century industrialization and urbanization Russians embraced a revolutionary art form to reflect the aspirations and motivations of a new class. In "The Magic Mirror" Denise Youngblood portrays a newly urbanized entrepreneurial middle class--not the revolutionaries or imperialists of historians--and the movies they made and paid to see. Upon those screens they saw their lives depicted in all their variety and uncertainty.
Youngblood provides a cultural angle into an era most often viewed through a revolutionary lens. Film and the film industry illuminates and reflects the popular attitudes of the time.
"The Magic Mirror" is a study of the ten years of native film production through the Revolutions of 1917, based almost exclusively on Russian language primary sources. Topics examined include the organization and evolution of the industry followed by description and analysis of genres, motifs, and themes as exemplified in 65 of the most important surviving films.

"If I had a talent for anything, it was a talent for knowing who was talented."

Mike Medavoy is a Hollywood rarity: a studio executive who, though never far from controversy, has remained well loved and respected through four decades of moviemaking. What further sets him apart is his role in bringing to the screen some of the most acclaimed Oscar-winning films of our time: Apocalypse Now, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Amadeus, The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia, and Sleepless in Seattle are just some of the projects he green-lighted at United Artists, Orion, TriStar, his own Phoenix Pictures.

"The ultimate lose-lose situation for a studio executive: to wind up with a commercial bomb and a bad movie."

Of course, there are the box office disasters, and the films, as Medavoy says, "for which I should be shot." They, too, have a place in his fascinating memoir -- a pull-no-punches account of financial and political maneuvering, and of working with the industry's brightest star power, including Steven Spielberg, Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, Kevin Costner, Robert De Niro, Jodie Foster, Sharon Stone, Michael Douglas, Meg Ryan, and countless others.

"Putting together the elements of a film is a succession of best guesses."

Medavoy speaks out on how movie studio buyouts have stymied the creative process and brought an end to the "hands-off" golden age of filmmaking. An eyewitness to Hollywood history in the making, he gives a powerful and poignant view of the past and future of a world he knows intimately.