Stars and Silhouettes traces the history of the cameo as it emerged in twentieth-century cinema. Although the cameo has existed in film culture for over a century, Joceline Andersen explains that this role cannot be strictly defined because it exists as a constellation of interactions between duration and recognition, dependent on who is watching and when. Even audiences of the twenty-first century who are inundated by the lives of movie stars and habituated to images of their personal friends on screens continue to find cameos surprising and engaging. Cameos reveal the links between our obsession with celebrity and our desire to participate in the powerful cultural industries within contemporary society. Chapter 1 begins with the cameo's precedents in visual culture and the portrait in particular-from the Vitagraph executives in the 1910s to the emergence of actors as movie stars shortly after. Chapter 2 explores the fan-centric desire for behind-the-scenes visions of Hollywood that accounted for the success of cameo-laden, Hollywood-set films that autocratic studios used to make their glamorous line-up of stars as visible as possible. Chapter 3 traces the development of the cameo in comedy, where cameos began to show not only glimpses of celebrities at their best but also of celebrities at their worst. Chapter 4 examines how the television guest spot became an important way for stars and studios to market both their films and stars from other media in trades that reflected an increasingly integrated mediascape. In Chapter 5, Andersen examines auteur cameos and the cameo as a sign of authorship. Director cameos reaffirm the fan's interest in the film not just as a stage for actors but as a forum for the visibility of the director. Cameos create a participatory space for viewers, where recognizing those singled out among extras and small roles allows fans to demonstrate their knowledge. Stars and Silhouettes belongs on the shelf of every scholar, student, and reader interested in film history and star studies.

Drawing on fascinating archival discoveries from the past two centuries, Brent Salter shows how copyright has been negotiated in the American theatre. Who controls the space between authors and audiences? Does copyright law actually protect playwrights and help them make a living? At the center of these negotiations are mediating businesses with extraordinary power that rapidly evolved from the mid-nineteenth to mid-twentieth centuries: agents, publishers, producers, labor associations, administrators, accountants, lawyers, government bureaucrats, and film studio executives. As these mediators asserted authority over creativity, creators organized to respond, through collective minimum contracts, informal guild expectations, and professional norms, to protect their presumed rights as authors. This institutional, relational, legal, and business history of the entertainment history in America illuminates both the historical context and the present law. An innovative new kind of intellectual property history, the book maps the relations between the different players from the ground up.

Film is dead! Three little words that have been heard around the world many times over the life of the cinema. Yet, some 120 years on, the old dog's ability to come up with new tricks and live another day remains as surprising and effective as ever. This book is an exploration of film's ability to escape its own 'The End' title card. It charts the history of cinema's development through a series of crises that could, should, ought to have 'ended' it. From its origins to Covid - via a series of unlikely friendships with sound, television and the internet - the book provides industry professionals, scholars and lovers of cinema with an informing and intriguing journey into the afterlife of cinema and back to the land of the living. It is also a rare collaboration between an Oscar-winning filmmaker and a film scholar, a chronicle of their attempt to bridge two worlds that have often looked at each other with as much curiosity as doubt, but that are bound by the deep love of cinema that they both share.