This accessible and engaging text covering sketch, sitcom and comedy drama, alongside improvisation and stand-up, brings together a panoply of tools and techniques for creating short and long-form comedy narratives for live performance, TV and online. Referencing a broad range of comedy from both sides of the Atlantic, spanning several decades and including material on contemporary internet sketches, it offers all kinds of useful advice on creating comic narratives for stage and screen: using life experience as raw material; constructing comedy worlds; creating comic characters, their relationships and interactions; structuring sketches, scenes and routines; and developing and plotting stories. The book's interviewees, from the UK and the USA, feature stand-ups, sketch comics, improvisers and TV comedy producers, and include Steve Kaplan, Hollywood comedy guru and author of The Hidden Tools of Comedy, Will Hines teacher and improviser from the Upright Citizens Brigade Theatre and Lucy Lumsden TV producer and former Controller of Comedy Commissioning for BBC. Written by "the ideal person to nurture new talent" (The Guardian), Creating Comedy Narratives for Stage & Screen includes material you won't find anywhere else and is a stimulating resource for comedy students and their teachers, with a range and a depth that will be appreciated by even the most eclectic and multi-hyphenated writers and performers.

The most successful weekend show on Radio 2, Sounds of the Sixties has over 3.5 million listeners every Saturday morning. Presented by Brian Matthew, the programme has become an institution. This new book contains fascinating facts about memorable hits from key Sixties artists, hard-to-find tracks alongside many hidden gems that have never before been made available on any CD or compilation album since their initial Sixties release plus fascinating stories and behind-the-scenes info from producer Phil The Collector Swern. This is a comprehensive collection that music fans and hardened Sixties collectors will cherish.

In defiance of the alleged "death of romantic comedy," After "Happily Ever After": Romantic Comedy in the Post-Romantic Age edited by Maria San Filippo attests to rom-com's continuing vitality in new modes and forms that reimagine and rejuvenate the genre in ideologically, artistically, and commercially innovative ways. No longer the idyllic fairy tale, today's romantic comedies ponder the realities and complexities of intimacy, fortifying the genre's gift for imagining human connection through love and laughter. It has often been observed that the rom-com's "happily ever after" trope enables the genre to avoid addressing the challenges of coupled life. This volume's contributors confront how recent rom-coms contend with a "post-romantic age" of romantic disillusionment and seismically shifting emotional and relational bonds. Fifteen chapters contemplate the resurgence of the "radical romantic comedy" and uncoupling comedy, new approaches in genre hybridity and serial narrative, and how recent rom-coms deal with divisive topical issues and contemporary sexual mores from reproductive politics and marriage equality to hook-up culture and technology-enabled sex. Rom-coms remain underappreciated and underexamined-and still largely defined within Hollywood's parameters of culturally normative coupling and its persistent marginalization of racial and sexual minorities. Making the case for taking romantic comedy seriously, this volume employs critical perspectives drawn from feminist, queer, postcolonial, and race studies to critique the genre's homogeneity and social and sexual conservatism, recognizing innovative works inclusive of LGBTQ people, people of color, and the differently aged and abled. Encompassing a rich range of screen media from the last decade, After "Happily Ever After" celebrates works that disrupt and subvert rom-com fantasy and formula so as to open audience's eyes along with our hearts. This volume is intended for all readers with an interest in film, media, and gender studies.

Religious Narratives in Contemporary Culture: Between Cultural Memory and Transmediality analyses the meaning and role of religion in western cultural practices in the twenty-first century. This inquiry situates itself at the intersection between cultural memory studies and the transmedial study of narrative and art. Contributors focus on genres which have yet to receive significant critical attention within the field, including speculative fiction films and television series, autobiographical prose and poetry, and action-adventure video games. In this time of crisis, where traces of religious thinking still persist in the presence or absence of religious faith, this volume's collective look into some of their cultural embodiments is necessary and timely. The volume is addressed primarily to scholars and students interested in intersections between religious and cultural studies, revisions of traditional religious narratives, literature as a space of reflection on today's world, contemporary media studies and remediation. Maria-Sabina Draga Alexandru's editing work in the last stages of this volume was supported by a grant of the Romanian Ministry of Education and Research, CNCS - UEFISCDI, project number PN-III-P3-3.6-H2020-0035.

This book traces the cultural transformation of nostalgia on the Chinese screen over the past three decades. It explores how filmmakers from different generations have engaged politically with China's rapidly changing post-socialist society as it has been formed through three mutually constitutive frameworks: political discourse, popular culture and state-led media commercialisation. The book offers a new, critical model for understanding relationships between filmmakers, industry and the State.

This book argues for a durational cinema that is distinct from slow cinema, and outlines the history of its three main waves: the New York avant-garde of the 1960s, the European art cinema in the years after 1968, and the international cinema of gallery spaces as well as film festivals since the 1990s. Figures studied include Andy Warhol, Ken Jacobs, Chantal Akerman, Marguerite Duras, Claude Lanzmann, James Benning, Kevin Jerome Everson, Lav Diaz, and Wang Bing.Durational cinema is predominantly minimal, but has from the beginning also included a more encompassing or encyclopedic kind of filmmaking. Durational cinema is characteristically representational, and converges on certain topics (the Holocaust, deindustrialization, the experience of the working class and other marginalized people), but has no one meaning, signifying differently at different moments and in different hands. Warhol's durational cinema of subtraction is quite different from Jacobs's durational cinema of social disgust, while Lav Diaz' durational sublime is quite different from Kevin Jerome Everson's unblinking studies of African-American working people.

A filmmaker whose work exhibits a wide range of styles and approaches, Louis Malle (1932-1995) was the only French director of his generation to enjoy a significant career in both France and the United States. Although Malle began his career alongside members of the French New Wave like Francois Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, and Claude Chabrol, he never associated himself with that group. Malle is perhaps best known for his willingness to take on such difficult or controversial topics as suicide, incest, child prostitution, and collaboration with the Nazis during World War II. His filmography includes narrative films like Zazie dans le Metro, Murmur of the Heart, Atlantic City, My Dinner with Andre, and Au revoir les enfants, as well as several major documentaries. In the late 1970s, Malle moved to the United States, where he worked primarily outside of the Hollywood studio system. The films of his American period display his keen outsider's eye, which allowed him to observe diverse aspects of American life in settings that ranged from turn-of-the-century New Orleans to present-day Atlantic City and the Texas Gulf Coast. Louis Malle: Interviews covers the entirety of Malle's career and features seventeen interviews, the majority of which are translated into English here for the first time. As the collection demonstrates, Malle was an extremely intelligent and articulate filmmaker who thought deeply about his own choices as a director, the ideological implications of those choices, and the often-controversial themes treated in his films. The interviews address such topics as Malle's approach to casting and directing actors, his attitude toward provocative subject matter and censorship, his understanding of the relationship between documentary and fiction film, and the differences between the film industries in France and the US. Malle also discusses his sometimes-challenging work with such actors as Brigitte Bardot, Pierre Blaise, and Brooke Shields, and sheds new light on the making of his films.