Lauded by his peers, Van Heflin won a place in the hearts of cinemagoers with his portrayal of a resolute homesteader in George Stevens' timeless classic Shane. But there was far more to this superlative actor than one role. He impressed in all genres and could convincingly portray every kind of character from a heel to a hero and each shade in between. This first full-length work about him provides a full commentary of all his films with insights into his life as a sailor and his stage career. The aim is to restore him to his rightful place among the gallery of stars of Hollywood's Golden Age to whose luster he added a stage craftsman's unique talent. He first caught the public attention as the sensitive drink-addicted friend of gangster Johnny Eager for which he won the Academy Award and contributed notable performances in a string of terrific noirs, dramas and westerns. He was especially memorable as the psychotic cop in Joseph Losey's masterpiece The Prowler but equally at home as the doubtful executive in Negulesco's smart satire Woman's World. A restless spirit whose heart never left the sea he learned early on about life and human motivations sailing the oceans of the world; this undoubtedly informed his natural acting instinct. A versatile risk-taking actor he was never concerned with popularity or comfortable with the trappings of stardom. However he brought to every role a rare emotional intensity which made all his portrayals real and ensured they should live for all time.

This book is a series of updates. For shows ofcourse. The Jimmy Fallon show to be exact. If I had a show at Mark Ridley's Comedy Club (which I feel I do), then I would gladly say some update. Though I'm tired. Real real tired. Is Jimmy tired I wonder to myself? I saw little bags under his eyes. I became fearful. Unfortnatly, I don't have any. Jack (my beau), my main squeeze has muscular ones. Woof! So ya, some of the update are of my poetry. Poetry that I could see Jhonny Depp singing as a song in a screenwritten play of Jack Doline. Could me, Jack Doline (my beau), Jhonny Depp and Jimmy get together in real life? Lets include another girl. Anne Bushek. Let us adapt like hooligans and meet at ROCK tomorrow at 12 to 2. If all are no shows lets just assume a quote to a rock conert. Nothing against mothers and families. "HAS ANYONE EVER BEEN RUDE TO YO MOTHA?"

"Peter Weir: Interviews" is the first volume of interviews to be published on the esteemed Australian director. Although Weir (b. 1944) has acquired a reputation of being guarded about his life and work, these interviews by archivists, journalists, historians, and colleagues reveal him to be a most amiable and forthcoming subject. He talks about the precious desperation of the art, the madness, the willingness to experiment in all his films; the adaptation process from novel to film, when he tells a scriptwriter, I'm going to eat your script; it's going to be part of my blood ; and his self-assessment as merely a jester, with cap and bells, going from court to court. He is encouraged, even provoked to tell his own story, from his childhood in a Sydney suburb in the 1950s, to his apprenticeship in the Australian television industry in the 1960s, his preparations to shoot his first features in the early 1970s, his international celebrity in Australia and Hollywood. An extensive new interview details his current plans for a new film.

Interviews discuss Weir's diverse and impressive range of work--his earlier films "Picnic at Hanging Rock," "The Last Wave," "Gallipoli," and "The Year of Living Dangerously," as well as Academy Award-nominated "Witness," "Dead Poets Society," "Green Card," "The Truman Show," and "Master and Commander." This book confirms that the trajectory of Weir's life and work parallels and embodies Australia's own quest to define and express a historical and cultural identity.

Fiery Temporalities in Theatre and Performance: The Initiation of History takes up the urgent need to think about temporality and its relationship to history in new ways, focusing on theatre and performance as mediums through which politically innovative temporalities, divorced from historical processionism and the future, are inaugurated. Wickstrom is guided by three temporal concepts: the new present, the penultimate, and kairos, as developed by Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, and Antonio Negri respectively. She works across a field of performance that includes play texts by Aime Cesaire and C.L.R. James, and performances from Ni'Ja Whitson to Cassils, the Gob Squad to William Kentridge and African colonial revolts, Hofesh Schechter to Forced Entertainment to Andrew Schneider and Omar Rajeh. Along the way she also engages with Walter Benjamin, black international and radical thought and performance, Bruno Latour, Stefano Harney and Fred Moten's logistics and the hold, and accelerationism. Representing a significant contribution to the growing interest in temporality in Theatre and Performance Studies, the book offers alternatives to what have been prevailing temporal preoccupations in those fields. Countering investments in phenomenology, finitude, ghosting, repetition, and return, Wickstrom argues that theatre and performance can create a fiery sense of how to change time and thereby nominate a new possibility for what it means to live.

King Lear is arguably the most complex and demanding play in the whole of Shakespeare. Once thought impossible to stage, today it is performed with increasing frequency, both in Britain and America. It has been staged more often in the last fifty years than in the previous 350 years of its performance history, its bleak message clearly chiming in with the growing harshness, cruelty and violence of the modern world. Performing King Lear offers a very different and practical perspective from most studies of the play, being centred firmly on the reality of creation and performance. The book is based on Jonathan Croall's unique interviews with twenty of the most distinguished actors to have undertaken this daunting role during the last forty years, including Donald Sinden, Tim Pigott-Smith, Timothy West, Julian Glover, Oliver Ford Davies, Derek Jacobi, Christopher Plummer, Michael Pennington, Brian Cox and Simon Russell Beale. He has also talked to two dozen leading directors who have staged the play in London, Stratford and elsewhere. Among them are Nicholas Hytner, David Hare, Kenneth Branagh, Adrian Noble, Deborah Warner, Jonathan Miller and Dominic Dromgoole. Each reveals in precise and absorbing detail how they have dealt with the formidable challenge of interpreting and staging Shakespeare's great tragedy.

The essays offered here were written between 1970 and 2005. Teaching assignments, requests for articles, and the authors own evolving interests prompted them. They were not written with the view to form a book. They are now published together in the conviction that, both singly and as a whole, they can contribute to a better appreciation of Satyajit Rays legacy. The essays deal with Ray as a film-maker. The date on which each essay was written is indicated as it situate each in the cultural context in which it was conceived. Out of the twenty-nine feature films of Ray, only eight, plus the Apu Trilogy as a whole, are discussed. Moreover, this small collection is not a selection, indicaing preferences; nor is it a classification, rating the films. The discussion of Jana Aranya is the only essay that was written for this book to illuminate the evolution that took place from the first to the last film of Satyajit Ray. In order to preserve their historical value, generally, the essays were not updated. Given Rays deep involvement in film education, especially in the film societies movement in India, it was felt mandatory to include two articles on the subject, one discussing the situation of the film societies today, and the other, inspired by Satyajit Ray, and proposing a programme of media education for a new type of film society.

In this first substantive study of directing Shakespeare in the USA, Charles Ney compares and contrasts directors working at major companies across the country. Because of the complexities of directing Shakespeare for audiences today, a director's methods, values and biases are more readily perceptible in their work on Shakespeare than in more contemporary work. Directors disclose their interpretation of the text, their management of the various stages of production, how they go about supervising rehearsals and share tactics. This book will be useful to students wanting to develop skills, practitioners who want to learn from what other directors are doing, and scholars and students studying production practice and performance.

Composer and cultural official Nicolas Nabokov (1903-78) led an unusual life even for a composer who was also a high-level diplomat. Nabokov was for nearly three decades an outstanding and far-sighted player in international cultural exchanges during the Cold War, much admired by some of the most distinguished minds of his century for the range of his interests and the breadth of his vision. Nicolas Nabokov: A Life in Freedom and Music follows Nabokov's life through its fascinating details: a privileged Russian childhood before the Revolution; exile, first to Germany, then to France; the beginnings of a promising musical career, launched under the aegis of Diaghilev and his Ballets Russes with Ode in 1928; his twelve-year "American exile" during which he occupied several academic positions; his return to Europe after the war to participate in the denazification of Germany; his involvement in anti-Stalinist causes in the first years of the Cold War; his participation in the Congress for Cultural Freedom; his role as cultural adviser to the Mayor of Berlin and director of the Berlin Festival in the early 1960s; the resumption of his American academic and musical career in the late 1960s and 1970s. Nabokov is unique not only in that he was involved on a high level in international cultural politics, but also in that his life intersected at all times with a vast array of people within, and also well beyond, the confines of classical music. Drawing on a vast array of primary sources, Vincent Giroud's first-ever biography of Nabokov will be of interest readers interested in twentieth-century music, Russian music, Russian emigration, and the Cold War, particularly in its cultural aspects. Musicians and musicologists interested in Nabokov as a composer, or in twentieth century Russian composers in general, will find in the book information not available anywhere else.

If you've ever wondered what it's like to soar through space like a leaf on the wind in a Firefly spaceship, this is the manual for you. The Firefly-class transport ship was originally created by the Allied Spacecraft Corporation, but since the Browncoats' Independence War, it has become a favourite among smugglers on the Rim worlds. The aircraft's many nooks, crannies, and hidden compartments give it an incredible cargo capacity, and its speed and small size make it the perfect getaway vehicle. The many secrets of Serenity are revealed in this fascinating crew-created owner's manual, which features in-depth technical specifications and insightful commentary from the entire crew. Designed as an in-world crew-made manual for the ship, this book will allow fans of Firefly and Serenity to explore the iconic Firefly-class Series 3 ship in a whole new way.

`The Plea on Oath' is a story of a bright and gifted boy.... will have you gripped, inspiring, powerful, intensive story as you read about how the boy grew up to become a Doctor, a thriller of his own hard work but not so much to show for it as he struggled and battled his notorious addiction to gambling with adverse consequences leaving a vacuum...........the author keeps you in suspense as the intriguing story unfolds...... Segun lived his life like a `Candle in the Wind' with his struggle and fight back from the edge of death, his recovery and then back to the unavoidable end....... Doctors are human......and so are we all.

Renowned for making films that are at once sly domestic satires and heartbreaking 'social realist' dramas, British writer-director Mike Leigh confronts his viewers with an un-romanticized dramatization of modern-day society in the hopes of inspiring them to strive for greater self-awareness and compassion for others. This collection features new, interdisciplinary essays that cover all phases of the BAFTA-award-winner's film career, from his early made-for-television film work to his theatrical releases, including "Life is Sweet" (1990), "Naked" (1993), "Secrets & Lies" (1996), "Career Girls" (1997), "Topsy-Turvy" (1999), "All or Nothing" (2002), "Vera Drake" (2004), "Happy-Go-Lucky" (2008) and "Another Year "(2010).With contributions from international scholars from a variety of fields, the essays in this collection cover individual films and the recurring themes and motifs in several films, such as representations of class and gender, and overt social commentary and political subtexts. Also covered are Leigh's visual stylizations and storytelling techniques ranging from explorations of the costume design to set design to the music and camerawork and editing; the collaborative process of 'devising and directing' a Mike Leigh film that involves character-building, world-construction, plotting, improvisations and script-writing; the process of funding and marketing for these seemingly 'uncommercial' projects, and a survey of Leigh's critical reception and the existing writing on his work.

To say that children matter in Steven Spielberg's films is an understatement. Think of the possessed Stevie in Something Evil (TV), Baby Langston in The Sugarland Express, the alien-abducted Barry in Close Encounters, Elliott and his unearthly alter-ego in E.T, the war-damaged Jim in Empire of the Sun, the little girl in the red coat in Schindler's List, the mecha child in A.I., the kidnapped boy in Minority Report, and the eponymous boy hero of The Adventures of Tintin. (There are many other instances across his oeuvre). Contradicting his reputation as a purveyor of 'popcorn' entertainment, Spielberg's vision of children/childhood is complex. Discerning critics have begun to note its darker underpinnings, increasingly fraught with tensions, conflicts and anxieties. But, while childhood is Spielberg's principal source of inspiration, the topic has never been the focus of a dedicated collection of essays. The essays in Children in the Films of Steven Spielberg therefore seek to address childhood in the full spectrum of Spielberg's cinema. Fittingly, the scholars represented here draw on a range of theoretical frameworks and disciplines-cinema studies, literary studies, audience reception, critical race theory, psychoanalysis, sociology, and more. This is an important book for not only scholars but teachers and students of Spielberg's work, and for any serious fan of the director and his career.

Nancy Meyers is acknowledged as the most commercially successful woman filmmaker of all time, described by Daphne Merkin in The New York Times on the release of It's Complicated as "a singular figure in Hollywood - [she] may, in fact, be the most powerful female writer-director-producer currently working". Yet Meyers remains a director who, alongside being widely dismissed by critics, has been largely absent in scholarly accounts both of contemporary Hollywood cinema, and of feminism and film. Despite Meyers' impressive track record for turning a profit (including the biggest box-office return ever achieved by a woman filmmaker at that timefor What Women Want in 2000), and a multifaceted career as a writer/producer/director dating back to her co-writing Private Benjamin in 1980, Meyers has been oddly neglected by Film Studies to date. Including Nancy Meyers in the Bloomsbury Companions to Contemporary Filmmakers rectifies this omission, giving her the kind of detailed consideration and recognition she warrants and exploring how, notwithstanding the challenges authorship holds for feminist film studies, Meyers can be situated as a skilled 'auteur'. This book proposes that Meyers' box-office success, the consistency of style and theme across her films, and the breadth of her body of work as a writer/producer/director across more than three decades at the forefront of Hollywood, (thus importantly bridging the second/third waves of feminism) make her a key contemporary US filmmaker. Structured to meet the needs of both the student and scholar, Jermyn's volume situates Meyers within this historical and critical context, exploring the distinctive qualities of her body of work, the reasons behind the pervasive resistance to it and new ways of understanding her films.