The Pulitzer Prizing-winning author Studs Terkel is layed bare in an autobiography of modern times - the stirring story of a man whose life has been so vivid that its telling mirrors the events of a century. From Mahalia Jackson to Bertrand Russell, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Frederico Fellini, Studs has met them all and captured their voices for us. With the addition of a marvelous new postscript, Talking to Myself is as enjoyable now as when it was first published--a work that is as unusual as it is compelling.

When media coverage of courtroom trials came under intense fire in the aftermath of the infamous New Jersey v. Hauptmann lawsuit (a.k.a. The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case,) a new era of fictionalized courtroom programming was ushered in to satiate the public's appetite for legal drama. This book is an alphabetical listing of the nearly 200 'courtroom', 'lawyer' and 'judge' shows telecast in the U.S. from 1948 through 2008, complete with cast and production credits, airdates, detailed synopses and background information. Included are such familiar titles as ""Perry Mason"", ""Divorce Court"", ""Judge Judy"", ""LA Law"", and ""The Practice"", along with such obscure series as ""They Stand Accused"", ""The Verdict is Yours Sam Benedict"", ""Trials of O'Brien"", and ""The Law and Mr. Jones"". The book includes an introductory overview of 'law'-oriented radio and TV broadcasts from the 1920s to the present, including actual courtroom coverage (or lack of same during those years in which cameras and microphones were forbidden in the courtroom) and historical events within TV's factual and fictional treatment of the legal system. Also included in the introduction is an analysis of the rise and fall of cable's Court TV channel.

Not every presidential visit to the theater is as famous as Lincoln's last night at Ford's, but American presidents attended the theater long before and long after that ill-fated night. As a young man in 1751, George Washington saw his first play, The London Merchant, during a visit to Barbados. John Quincy Adams understood theater well enough to publish dramatic critiques. William McKinley, on the other hand, avoided theatrical performances while in office, on professional as well as moral grounds. Dwight Eisenhower used drama as a vehicle for political propaganda. Richard Nixon took a more personal view of theater, having met his wife at a community theater audition.Surveying 255 years, this volume examines presidential theater-going as it reflects shifting popular tastes in America. To this end, it provides a chronology of theater attendance throughout the lives of all 43 American presidents. Defining theater as a live dramatic performance (including opera but excluding ballet), the book details the attendance habits and theatrical tastes of each chief executive as well as the ways in which his choices reflected the mores and tastes of his contemporary American public. An afterword provides a summary of presidential theater-going preferences.

On Friday, May 18, 1934, radio columns in the New York press announced that Bert Parks of CBS would be 'relinquishing his status as N.Y.'s youngest Network Staff Announcer to the newly appointed George Ansbro on the NBC Announcing Staff'. Ansbro's successful audition led to a career that included work on ""Young Widder Brown, Manhattan Maharajah and Dr. I.Q.,"" the television show from which the book's title line is taken. Fifty-five years after his broadcast beginning, he was hailed as a pioneer who in terms of service held the honor of being the oldest employee of any network. From his role as an NBC page in 1931 to his career as a network announcer, Ansbro recalls an era that includes a who's who of early radio and Hollywood stars, and a transition from what was known as the Blue Network and its beginnings at Rockefeller Center to the massive radio and television organization now known as ABC. Along with such names as Howard Cosell, Bob Hope, and Mary Pickford, Ansbro helped shape the modern entertainment world.

This collection of 14 essays explores drama from around the world that depicts the United States and Americans. From Eighteenth Century German dramas about Native Americans through post-Revolutionary War British plays, to the theaters of contemporary Japan, Mexico, Serbia, Ireland, Ghana and other nations, the contributors consider conflicting representations of Americans. Sometimes flattering, often critical, and occasionally insulting, these various international views highlight perceptions of America abroad and how they influence the world's stages.

Many early radio stars, writers, and producers later migrated to television, but the crossover left the ""American Radio Archives"" with a treasure trove of television documents. The collected scripts span more than 40 years of American television history, from live broadcasts of the 1940s to the late 1980s. They also cover the entire spectrum of television entertainment programming, including comedies, soap operas, dramas, crime and westerns. The archives of this title cover nearly 1,200 programs represented by over 6,000 individual scripts. It includes an index of actors, crew, titles and production companies, as well as a glossary of industry terms and 38 photographs.

Occurring alongside the Women's Rights, Gay Rights, Civil Rights, and other identity movements of the 1960s, the Vietnam War was part of an era that rescripted gender and other social identity roles for many, if not most, Americans. This book examines the ways in which the war and its accompanying movements greatly altered traditional American conceptions of masculinity, looking particularly at discourses ranging from fictional narratives to memoirs, films, and military recruiting advertisements. Analysis of two canonical fiction texts - John Del Vecchio's ""The 13th Valley"" and Bobbie Ann Mason's ""In Country"" - illustrates the interrelatedness of race, sexuality, disability and masculinity, an approach appearing in no other book-length study. Finally, the book illustrates how, decades later, the masculine anxieties of the Vietnam era are still evident in discourses ranging from the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to recent presidential campaigns.

In Stalinist Russia, the idealized Soviet man projected an image of strength, virility, and unyielding drive in his desire to build a powerful socialist state. In monuments, posters, and other tools of cultural production, he became the demigod of Communist ideology. But beneath the surface of this fantasy, between the lines of texts and in film, lurked another figure: the wounded body of the heroic invalid, an inversion of Stalin's New Man.In ""How the Soviet Man Was Unmade"", Lilya Kaganovsky exposes the paradox behind the myth of the indestructible Stalinist-era male. In her analysis of social-realist literature and cinema, she examines the recurring theme of the mutilated male body, which appears with startling frequency. Kaganovsky views this representation as a thinly veiled statement about the emasculated male condition during the Stalinist era. Because the communist state was ""full of heroes,"" a man could only truly distinguish himself and attain hero status through bodily sacrifice - yet in his wounding, he was forever reminded that he would be limited in what he could achieve, and was expected to remain in a state of continued subservience to Stalin and the party.Kaganovsky provides an insightful reevaluation of classic works of the period, including the novels of Nikolai Ostrovskii (""How Steel Was Tempered"") and Boris Polevoi (""A Story About a Real Man""), and films such as Ivan Pyr'ev's ""The Party Card"", Eduard Pentslin's ""The Fighter Pilots"", and Mikhail Chiaureli's ""The Fall of Berlin"", among others. The symbolism of wounding and dismemberment in these works acts as a fissure in the facade of Stalinist cultural production through which we can view the consequences of historic and political trauma.

In this work, first-hand accounts and original interviews illuminate how the father-son relationship thrives because of baseball, and, sometimes, in spite of it. Each of these men bears a legendary name in baseball broadcasting - Caray, Brennaman, Buck and Kalas - and some can count four generations of men whose voices defined a team. All of the sons relate how their fathers' names opened doors for them but concurrently raised expectations of how they should perform, and all relate how they learned from their fathers' (and grandfathers') triumphs and mistakes. Throughout the work, a clear picture of baseball as a generational bridge emerges. It includes a foreword by Chip Caray, speeches by Joe Buck about his father Jack, and articles by Skip Caray, Chip Caray and Marty Brennaman.

This detailed study of the career of Anthony Mann argues Mann's prominence and influence alongside contemporaries like John Ford. Mann (1906-1967), who was active in Hollywood and Europe, directed or produced more than 40 films, including ""The Fall of the Roman Empire"" and ""God's Little Acre"". He was best known for his film noir and westerns and his work starring Jimmy Stewart, but Mann later moved into Cold War and epic films. The book features a filmography and 50 movie stills and photographs.

Cinema is ideally suited to render the fantastic world of ESP and other psychic or paranormal abilities tangible to an audience. A technique as simple as a voice-over can simulate mental telepathy, while unusual lighting, set design, or creative digital manipulation can conjure clairvoyant visions, precognition, or even psychokinesis. This book explores the depiction of paranormal powers in fiction films, examining how popular films like ""Star Wars"", ""Independence Day"", ""The Green Mile"", and dozens of others both reflect and influence the way modern society perceives the notion of psychic abilities. The psychic theme is explored in nearly 100 films from a variety of genres including drama, comedy, horror, science fiction, crime melodrama, and children's films, providing a concise review of the history and concepts of mainstream cinematic parapsychology.

This book demonstrates how horror films of the 1930s and 1940s reflected specific events and personalities of the era, most notably the Great Depression and World War II. Beginning with ""Dracula"" and ""Frankenstein"" (1931), it relates the many ways that horror films and society intersected: Franklin D. Roosevelt's skepticism toward conventional wisdom and the public's distrust of experts was mirrored in ""Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"" and ""Murders in the Rue Morgue""; the freaks in Tod Browning's 1932 film of the same name revolted against the powerful people of the circus, much like the Bonus Army protested the sufferings of the Depression; King Kong's rampage on New York personified the anti - New York sentiment in the nation at large; Lon Chaney Jr.'s ""Wolf Man"" symbolized the experience of his creator, Curt Siodmak, as a Jewish refugee from Nazi Germany.

In his Nobel speech, entitled Art, Truth and Politics, Harold Pinter explained how he was fighting against the «tapestry of lies». It is indeed those daily lies, lies of love or of state, that are exposed in this book, which emphasises his political agenda. In March 2007, the University of Lyon (Jean Moulin) and the ENS LSH organised VIVA PINTER, a tribute to his work centred on a key notion for the city of Lyon, the Spirit of Resistance. Pinter combined a concise, fragmented and syllogistic style with a keen perception of the metaphors of our time. The most specific instrument of this great humanist lay in his representation of power games. In this volume, scholars, stage-directors and lawyers tell us how his work is highly meaningful for them. Golden Palm winners Volker Schlöndorff and Jerry Schatzberg, film and theatre director David Jones, and BBC radio producer Barbara Bray share with us the memory of how they worked with Pinter on his major plays and films.

While its obvious purpose is to make people laugh, film and television comedy is much more than that. From the birth of motion pictures until today, comedies have reflected and reinforced the evolving cultural milieu which defined American society. This book analyzes the evolution of film and television comedy from the advent of talking motion pictures in the 1930s through the present, defining five separate and distinct periods of this evolution and revealing how each period has been characterized by a dominant trend in film and television comedy. Chapter One examines the period spanning 1934 to 1942, an era defined by screwball comedies that deflected public attention from the grim realities of the Great Depression. Chapter Two deals with the period form 1940 to 1951 and the emergence of suspense comedy, which, like the concurrent film noir, reflected a yet darker social outlook in light of America's involvement in World War II. Chapter Three examines the battle-of-the-sexes comedy, extremely popular throughout the 1950s, looking at ""I Love Lucy"", ""The Honeymooners"", and other husband-and-wife sitcoms that seemingly reinforced post-war sexism. Chapter Four details the shift from the outlandish physical and exaggerated comedy of the 1950s to more realistic characters and plotlines, especially ""The Dick Van Dyke Show"" and its semi-autobiographical reflection of creator Carl Reiner's early years in show business. Chapter Five explores the resurrection of suspense comedy since the 1970s and 1980s, particularly the era's wildly popular 'dumb cop' or 'dumb spy' movie series like ""The Pink Panther"" and ""The Naked Gun"", along with 21st century remakes such as 2006's ""The Pink Panther"" and 2008's ""Get Smart"".

The state of Wisconsin is unique in the number of historic movie theatres that remain standing today. Many are still open, bringing a sense of history, giving modern moviegoers an experience that simply can't be replicated by multiplexes and mall theatres. This book provides a reference guide to Wisconsin's historic movie theatres, from those built as opera houses, auditoriums, and community halls in the mid - 19th century to the ornate 'movie palaces' of the 1930s and, finally, the quickly and cheaply constructed postwar theatres constructed in the 1950s. More than 900 Wisconsin theatres are arranged alphabetically by town in entries that provide the theatre's name(s), location, number of seats, and opening and closing dates. A historical overview including information specific to each town or county provides a more complete snapshot of the communities which supported these historic theatres and were in turn affected by them. The book includes more than 400 photographs which demonstrate the different styles of theatres still standing throughout the state, including both original and present-day views of the theatres listed.

The topos of memory has played a significant role in anime over the course of its evolution as an art form and as a popular form of entertainment. Anime's handling of memory is multifaceted, bringing it into collusion with diverse symbolic motifs, narrative themes, and aesthetic issues. This study aims to provide a detailed analysis of a range of anime titles wherein different aspects of this cultural phenomenon are articulated. It explores anime films and series which exemplify the distinctive signatures placed by particular directors or studios on the treatment of memory, while also highlighting the prominence of memory in anime with reference to specific philosophical, artistic, and historical contexts.

The early history of American settlement, pioneering, and independence is marked by fascinating characters and events who are often shrouded in legend. Through the eye of the movie camera, filmmakers have sought to capture these characters and to penetrate the mists of time. Films and television programs have been based on figures as diverse as Daniel Boone, Francis Marion, and Pocohantas, and events as disparate as the disappearance of the Lost Colony of Roanoke, the Boston Tea Party, and the French and Indian War. This comprehensive filmography provides production information and commentary on all films and television episodes set during the years between the first settlements in the future United States and the fledgling country's War of 1812 with Britain. Films are arranged alphabetically, and a detailed introduction provides a thorough overview of the period, with references to films chronicling specific events. Photographs accompany many of the entries. Helpful for those interested in either film or in this particular period in history, the text is thoroughly indexed.

By the end of its five-year run on television, ""The Muppet Show"" had transformed its motley cast of characters from mere fistfuls of felt to true multi-media celebrities. Sophisticated and highly individuated, each of the Muppets nonetheless embodied a conventional character type from classic television comedy. Kermit, the manager of the show, functioned as straight man to the majority of the show's jokes. Miss Piggy, the resident diva, evolved from first season chorus girl to full-fledged megastar. From The Costello to Kermit's Abbot, Fozzie peddled his vaudevillian shtick to a tough audience, but his genuine sweetness made him lovable even when his jokes were terrible. Intended for both scholarly and general audiences, these essays represent the work and ideas of a global community of scholars and Muppet enthusiasts, providing a unique perspective on just how Kermit and the rest of the frogs, dogs, bears, and chickens became cultural icons with influences reaching far beyond the world of 1970s television comedy.

The silent-film era was known in part for its cliffhanger serials and air of suspense that kept audiences returning to theaters week after week. Icons such as Douglas Fairbanks, Laurel and Hardy, Lon Chaney and Harry Houdini were among those who graced the dark and shadowy screen. This encyclopedic guide to silent films with mystery and detective content lists over 1,500 titles in one of entertainment's most popular and enduring genres. While most of the examined films are from North America, mystery films from around the world are included.

Talk radio can be one of the most effective ways of promoting a new book, business, product, or personal story. It's fast, it's easy, and, for the most part, it's free. But for all of talk radio's benefits, there is one significant challenge facing prospective talk radio guests: trying to get on the show. While smaller, terrestrial radio stations are more likely to accept and respond to guests' requests, these stations are also far more likely to have websites that are poorly designed or infrequently maintained. More often than not, these sites contain little information regarding guest criteria or procedures, and many don't even specify whether or not the show welcomes guests at all.This book seeks to bridge the gap between show hosts and prospective guests, providing a reference guide to roughly 700 talk radio shows from the U.S. and around the world. Based on interviews and submissions from the radio hosts themselves, it provides readers with all of the information they will need before contacting a talk radio program, including show titles, descriptions, themes, guest criteria, hosts' biographies, host-preferred contact information, and helpful tips on how to best pitch your ideas to the shows' hosts or producers. Entries are organized under categories of show themes, including Religion, Travel, Addiction and Recovery, Sports, Entertainment, and many more. The book also includes information on many of ""Talkers Magazine's"" Top 250 Radio Talk Shows, interview tips for radio guests, and tips for conducting a radio interview over the phone.

In the modern film making world, the term 'low-budget' can refer to anything from a $10 million indie flick to a student film produced on borrowed equipment with little to no money at all. Similarly, low budget filmmakers can range from seasoned auteurs attempting to shed the shackles of major studio control to novice talents trying to break into the industry. Designed for would-be filmmakers of all ages and experience levels, this book explains how to make a good, as well as commercially successful, low-budget movie in the current climate of mainstream, multi-million dollar Hollywood films. The purpose is not only to show low-budget filmmakers how to get movies made and distributed, but also how to maximize a film's potential for significant profit. Written in practical, understandable terms, the book covers everything from commercially viable genres to the most efficient film and video formats, along with tips on hiring stars, pursuing investors, distributing and marketing a film, and keeping track of expenses.

Text & Presentation is an annual publication devoted to all aspects of theatre scholarship. It represents a selection of the best research presented at the international, interdisciplinary Comparative Drama Conference.

This anthology includes papers from the 32nd annual conference held in Los Angeles, California. Topics covered include masculinity in the plays of Tennessee Williams and Frederico Garcia Lorca; Moliere's revolutionary dramaturgy; motherhood in Medea; Electronovision and Richard Burton's Hamlet; and Jose Carrasquillo's all-nude production of Macbeth, among many others.

This volume introduces ways to use film to ease the difficulty of introducing complex literary theories to students. By coupling works of literature with attendant films the author provides instructors with accessible avenues for encouraging classroom discussion. Literary theories covered include psychoanalytic criticism (""The Awakening"" and film adaptations ""The End of August"" and ""Grand Isle""), cultural criticism (""A Streetcar Named Desire"" and the film adaptation of the same name), and thematic criticism (""Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood"" and the film adaptation ""Splendor in the Grass""). The work then offers a survey of the image patterns into which film adaptation theories can be grouped and how these theories relate to literary theory.

Lengthy biographies are provided for 28 of the most prominent trendsetting morning men, including Gene Rayburn, Buffalo Bob Smith, Wolfman Jack, Don Imus, and Howard Stern. The focus is on their careers and their contributions to radio. These are followed by brief concise biographies of more than 200 lesser known morning personalities.

On March 12, 1993, Lillian Gish's memorial service was attended by a host of celebrities whose lives had been touched by her long and remarkable career. From her first film, ""An Unseen Enemy"" (1912), to her last, ""The Whales of August"" (1987), Lillian Gish personified film.With a theatrical career spanning nearly 100 years, Gish saw motion pictures evolve from flickers to blockbusters. Almost always playing someone who needed to be rescued or protected, her trademark delicacy and vulnerability were, however, only part of her persona. She was a strong and complex woman whose painful childhood taught her frugality, love for her mother and her sister, Dorothy, and a distrust of men. In this, her most complete biography, the author, who was her friend, chronicles the hardships, heartaches, and fierce determination that shaped her from her days as a fatherless child to those as head of her family, and on to a time when she became nearly a legend. Featuring rare photographs and intimate recollections of Lillian, Dorothy, and other important figures, the biography is helpful in understanding film history as well as one of its most beautiful and important figures.