Beginning with The Jazz Singer (1927) and 42nd Street (1933), legendary Hollywood film producer Darryl F. Zanuck (1902-1979) revolutionized the movie musical, cementing its place in American popular culture. Zanuck, who got his start writing stories and scripts in the silent film era, worked his way to becoming a top production executive at Warner Bros. in the later 1920s and early 1930s. Leaving that studio in 1933, he and industry executive Joseph Schenck formed Twentieth Century Pictures, an independent Hollywood motion picture production company. In 1935, Zanuck merged his Twentieth Century Pictures with the ailing Fox Film Corporation, resulting in the combined Twentieth Century-Fox, which instantly became a new major Hollywood film entity. The Golden Age Musicals of Darryl F. Zanuck: The Gentleman Preferred Blondes is the first book devoted to the musicals that Zanuck produced at these three studios. The volume spotlights how he placed his personal imprint on the genre and how-especially at Twentieth Century-Fox-he nurtured and showcased several blonde female stars who headlined the studio's musicals-including Shirley Temple, Alice Faye, Betty Grable, Vivian Blaine, June Haver, Marilyn Monroe, and Sheree North. Building upon Bernard F. Dick's previous work in That Was Entertainment: The Golden Age of the MGM Musical, this volume illustrates the richness of the American movie musical, tracing how these song-and-dance films fit within the career of Darryl F. Zanuck and within the timeline of Hollywood history.

Joanne Woodward is an American film, television and stage actress, television producer and director, stage director, and film director. She won the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance in The Three Faces of Eve and was nominated for Rachel, Rachel, Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams and Mr. & Mrs. Bridge. She also won the Best Actress Emmy Award for See How She Runs and Do You Remember Love. This book is the first to be solely devoted to Woodward's life and career, which were often overshadowed by the successes of her late husband, Paul Newman.

Anything But Dull: the Life and Art of Jeff Nuttall reveals the life lived and the art created by a visionary polymath whose generosity of spirit defined his character. From childhood traumas to revolutionary acts, through triumphs, defeats and resurrections Jeff Nuttall's story is told here for the first time in all its richness and singularity. Based on over eighty interviews and meticulous archive research Anything But Dull shows just what made Jeff Nuttall such pivotal, provocative and important figure in twentieth century life and culture.Performer, poet, artist, writer, musician, teacher, film actor, bon vivant and hell raiser. Throughout his life Jeff Nuttall was always getting into scrapes, provoking outrage, drinking, fighting, falling in and out of love. Those intense experiences became the inspiration for his art. Almost no form of creative expression was foreign to him and within these nothing was forbidden - except, of course, to be dull.

"I love everything about this hilarious book except the font size." -Jon Stewart Although his career as a bestselling author and on The Daily Show With Jon Stewart was founded on fake news and invented facts, in 2016 that routine didn't seem as funny to John Hodgman anymore. Everyone is doing it now. Disarmed of falsehood, he was left only with the awful truth: John Hodgman is an older white male monster with bad facial hair, wandering like a privileged Sasquatch through three wildernesses: the hills of Western Massachusetts where he spent much of his youth; the painful beaches of Maine that want to kill him (and some day will); and the metaphoric haunted forest of middle age that connects them. Vacationland collects these real life wanderings, and through them you learn of the horror of freshwater clams, the evolutionary purpose of the mustache, and which animals to keep as pets and which to kill with traps and poison. There is also some advice on how to react when the people of coastal Maine try to sacrifice you to their strange god. Though wildly, Hodgmaniacally funny as usual, it is also a poignant and sincere account of one human facing his forties, those years when men in particular must stop pretending to be the children of bright potential they were and settle into the failing bodies of the wiser, weird dads that they are.

This interdisciplinary book brings together essays that consider how the body enacts social and cultural rituals in relation to objects, spaces, and the everyday, and how these are questioned, explored, and problematised through, and translated into dance, art, and performance. The chapters are written by significant artists and scholars and consider practices from various locations, including Central and Western Europe, Mexico, and the United States. The authors build on dialogues between, for example, philosophy and museum studies, and memory studies and post-humanism, and engage with a wide range of theory from phenomenology to relational aesthetics to New Materialism. Thus this book represents a unique collection that together considers the continuum between everyday and cultural life, and how rituals and memories are inscribed onto our being. It will be of interest to scholars and practitioners, students and teachers, and particularly those who are curious about the intersections between arts disciplines.

Esteemed scholar and theater aficionado Marvin Carlson has seen an unsurpassed number of theatrical productions in his long and distinguished career. Ten Thousand Nights is a lively chronicle of a half-century of theatre-going, in which Carlson recalls one memorable production for each year from 1960 to 2010. These are not conventional reviews, but essays using each theater experience to provide an insight into the theater and theatre-going at a particular time. The range of performances covered is broad, from edgy experimental fare to mainstream musicals, most of them based in New York but with stops at major theater events in Paris, Berlin, Moscow, Milan, and elsewhere. The engagingly written pieces convey a vivid sense not only of each production but also of the particular venue, neighborhood, and cultural context, covering nearly all significant movements, theater artists, and groups of the late twentieth century.

Born Joan Lucille Olander in a small South Dakota town, Mamie Van Doren rose to ""Blonde Bombshell"" status in Hollywood when she signed with Universal Pictures in 1953, right on the heels of Marilyn Monroe. This comprehensive biography explores Van Doren's early life and career, spanning from her start as a bit player in Howard Hughes' Jet Pilot to her significant role as the last surviving member of Hollywood's famous ""Three M's"": Mamie Van Doren, Marilyn Monroe, and Jayne Mansfield. A complete filmography lists Van Doren's roles in film and television. Entries include a plot synopsis, cast and crew details, and in many instances recent and contemporary reviews.

The theater company Mabou Mines has for the past forty years created pathbreaking new theater by combining the latest concepts in music, visual arts, and technology with traditional forms of creative expression: puppetry, text, movement, theater design. From the beginning, the evanescence of performance and the dynamics of group work attracted the group. Most of their early pieces were never recorded, leaving little documentation of their foundational productions. "Mabou Mines: Making Avant-Garde Theater in the 1970s" provides this missing history, attempting to capture and describe the explorations of a group who set out to create indescribable performance. Iris Smith Fischer makes visible once again the celebrated company's least documented work, and offers accounts of the decisions and events that defined Mabou Mines' ideas and methods, particularly their creative collaborations with visual artists, musicians, writers, and dancers. Focusing on the heady days of the company's founding and first ten years, the book traces Mabou Mines' intellectual and artistic roots, frames them within the 1970s avant-garde, and outlines their significance in contemporary performance.

Richard Pryor was the king of stand-up comedy in the 1970s. Hollywood studios were eager to transfer Pryor's dynamic humor and personality from the stand-up stage to the big screen. Executives placed the vast resources of their studios at Pryor's disposal and gave the comedian the authority to develop his own projects. But, as it turned out, Pryor's film acting inspired far less acclaim than his stand-up performances. The comedian's reputation came to be greatly diminished by misfires like The Toy and Superman III. How did this happen? The book is designed to examine this matter in a comprehensive film-by-film analysis. Each chapter surveys an individual film by presenting development history, production notes, plot summary and critical analysis.

In his time theatre actor and manager Jack Langrishe (1825-1895) could claim to be as well known in the American frontier West as General Grant was in the East. He gained his fame providing welcome entertainment to prospectors and miners pursing gold and silver bonanzas in Colorado, Montana, South Dakota and Idaho. He led a life as thrilling as any drama he presented. He participated in the tumultuous life of mining camps as he followed the expanding American frontier from the old Northwest Territory to early Denver, Deadwood and Idaho's Coeur D'Alene. He survived the Chicago Fire of 1872 and crossed the same Indian territory at the time when Custer made his last stand. While best known as a gifted comic actor and producer of fine dramas, Langrishe also edited western newspapers, won election as an Idaho state senator and served as a justice of the peace. Here for the first time is the complete tale of Jack Langrishe, a major figure in the epic of the American frontier, how he gained and lost fortunes, left audiences weak with laughter and became recognized as the father of theatre in Colorado and Montana.

Thomas Kilroy's long and distinguished career is celebrated in this volume by new essays, panel discussions and an interview, reconsidering the work of one of Ireland's most intellectually ambitious and technically imaginative playwrights. Contributors are drawn from both the academic and theatrical spheres, and include Nicholas Grene, Wayne Jordan, Patrick Mason, Christopher Murray and Lynne Parker. This volume follows Kilroy's own practice of connecting the creative and the critical, and publishes for the first time an extract from his play "Blake". Illustrated with photographs from major productions, this book also reproduces previously unseen materials from the Thomas Kilroy Collection held in the James Hardiman Library, NUI Galway.

It-girl Betty White delivers a hilarious, slyly profound take on love, life, celebrity, and everything in between.
Drawing from a lifetime of lessons learned, seven-time Emmy winner Betty White's wit and wisdom take center stage as she tackles topics like friendship, romantic love, aging, television, fans, love for animals, and the brave new world of celebrity. "If You Ask Me" mixes her thoughtful observations with humorous stories from a seven- decade career in Hollywood. Longtime fans and new fans alike will relish Betty's candid take on everything from her rumored crush on Robert Redford (true) to her beauty regimen ("I have no idea what color my hair is and I never intend to find out") to the Facebook campaign that helped persuade her to host "Saturday Night Live" despite her having declined the hosting job three times already.
Featuring all-new material, with a focus on the past fifteen years of her life, "If You Ask Me" is funny, sweet, and to the point-just like Betty White.

With more than 130 films and a career spanning four decades, Klaus Kinski (1926-1991) was one of the most controversial actors of his generation. Known for his wild tantrums on set and his legendary collaborations with auteur Werner Herzog-Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1972), Nosferatu the Vampyre (1979) - Kinski's intense performances made him the darling of European arthouse and exploitation/horror cinema. A genius in front of the camera, he was capable of lighting up the most risible films. Yet behind his public persona lurked a depraved man who took his art to the darkest extremes. This first ever collection of essays focusing on Kinski examines his work in exploitation and art house films and spaghetti westerns, along with his performances in such cult classics as Doctor Zhivago (1965), Crawlspace (1986), Venus in Furs (1965), The Great Silence (1968), Android (1982) and his only directorial credit, Paganini (1989). More than 50 reviews of Kinski's films are included, along with exclusive interviews with filmmakers and actors who worked with him.

One of our most passionate and gifted actors, Al Pacino has been riveting audiences for decades with performances in everything from The Godfather to Angels in America to Danny Collins. He has also appeared on the stage, tackling such difficult roles as Richard III, King Herod and Shylock, along with parts in contemporary dramas like Glengarry Glen Ross. Pacino has also directed two documentaries and two feature films. Aspects of Pacino's private life and film choices can be controversial. Often accused of a lack of subtlety or of ""chewing the scenery,"" his mesmeric intensity galvanizes fans and divides critics, as do his Shakespearean interpretations. In its second edition, this book critically reevaluates his many onscreen and onstage roles. Pacino is an actor who cannot be ignored.

European stardom is very different from that of Hollywood, where the industry concentrates intensively on establishing and promoting major stars. This unique book sets out to highlight the career of Sophia Loren as a prime example of a highly original rise to fame in a European context. Pauline Small emphasizes that although primarily an Italian star, Loren's career crossed the boundaries of a shifting network of film-making ventures that spanned Italy, Hollywood and Europe.Loren was one of the leading figures in the 1950s whose professional achievements, Small argues, were undervalued and to a degree remain so. Using written and visual materials ranging from government archives to academic journals, from the popular press to her major films, Sophia Loren: Moulding the Star gives a fuller understanding of the forces, commercial, industrial and cultural, that combined to forge her enduring star status and the cult of a major film personality.

How does the moving, dancing body engage with the materials, textures, atmospheres, and affects of the sites through which we move and in which we live, work and play? How might embodied movement practice explore some of these relations and bring us closer to the complexities of sites and lived environments? This book brings together perspectives from site dance, phenomenology, and new materialism to explore and develop how 'site-based body practice' can be employed to explore synergies between material bodies and material sites. Employing practice-as-research strategies, scores, tasks and exercises the book presents a number of suggestions for engaging with sites through the moving body and offers critical reflection on the potential enmeshments and entanglements that emerge as a result. The theoretical discussions and practical explorations presented will appeal to researchers, movement practitioners, artists, academics and individuals interested in exploring their lived environments through the moving body and the entangled human-nonhuman relations that emerge as a result.

An authorized biography of prolife author and screen-writer Earl Hamner. Covers his career from earliest newspaper writing, to Hollywood, the Twilight Zone and The Waltons.

This edition, now available in paperback, constitutes an archive of source materials in the field of Elizabethan and Jacobean theatre. It is a collection of over one hundred wills left by those who participated in the life of the theatre - from actors and dramatists to carpenters and costumiers. The wills not only offer vital historical evidence but are also important human documents, testaments to the social, financial, religious and sentimental lives of Shakespeare's contemporaries. Of the wills reprinted here, one third were newly discovered, and many of the rest printed for the first time from the original wills, thus preserving the vacillations and abandoned intentions of the testators. -- .

On December 31, 1939, radio audiences nationwide listened as 17-year-old Josephine Owaissa Cottle, a Texas schoolgirl, won Gateway to Hollywood's new talent competition. Her prize: a movie contract at RKO, and a memorable stage name - "Gale Storm." Building on that opportunity, she became one of the nation's most beloved entertainers. Gale (1922-2009) appeared in thirty-five films, starred in two hit television series (My Little Margie and The Gale Storm Show: Oh! Susanna), and earned a gold record for her pop song "I Hear You Knockin'. This extensively researched survey of her life and career, featuring interviews with family, friends, and colleagues, offers previously unpublished details of her upbringing, personal joys and challenges, and later years out of the Hollywood spotlight. An annotated filmography encompasses Gale's time as a leading lady at the "Poverty Row" studio Monogram Pictures, roles in Westerns opposite stars like Roy Rogers and Audie Murphy, and appearances in classics such as It Happened on 5th Avenue. Her TV stardom is fully covered, with complete production histories and episode guides for her popular sitcoms. The result is a well-rounded portrait of a woman whose charisma and talent won the hearts of audiences from the 1940s to the present.

The popular screen and stage star Laurence Harvey (1928-1973) is best remembered for his stellar performance in the film The Manchurian Candidate a 20th century classic. Of his 50 films, Room At the Top not only brought sexual permissiveness to American and British screens and an Oscar nomination, but it also branded him a heartthrob sensation. For all his fame and fortune, Harvey's short life was riddled with controversy, demonized by critics, and fraught with tragedy. In this revealing biography by Harvey's sister-in-law, readers are provided a close-up view of his career, his three marriages and his longtime sexual affair with one of his male producers. It also details his battle with cancer and his failure to acknowledge its seriousness. Packed with personal anecdotes, more than twenty black and white photographs, and a filmography, Reach for the Top: The Turbulent Life of Laurence Harvey will fascinate film students, scholars, and fans of the actor.