|
Showing 1 - 25 of
38 matches in All Departments
For almost half a century, celebrated ventriloquist and entertainer
Shari Lewis delighted generations of children and adults with the
help of her trusted sock puppet sidekick Lamb Chop. For decades,
the beloved pair were synonymous with children's television,
educating and entrancing their young audience with their symbiotic
personalities and their proclivity for song, dance, and the joy of
silliness. But as iconic as their television personas were,
relatively little inside knowledge has been revealed about Lewis
herself and the life-changing moments that led her to the
entertainment industry and perhaps, most importantly, to Lamb Chop.
Renowned for her skills as a performer, Lewis was an equally
skilled businesswoman. Operating in an era when women were largely
left out of the conversation, she was one of the few women to run
her own television production company. Whether it was singing,
dancing, conducting, writing, drawing, or ventriloquism-a skill in
which she was virtually unmatched face=Calibri>- Lewis spent the
entirety of her 65 years in pursuit of performative perfection.
Constantly innovating and adapting to the needs of her audience and
the market, Lewis extended the longevity of her career decade after
decade. Her contributions, and that of Lamb Chop, and the rest of
her puppet pals forever changed the history of children's
television. Now, two decades after Lewis and Lamb Chop last graced
television with their presence, Lewis' daughter Mallory and author
Nat Segaloff have set the record straight about the iconic pair in
Shari Lewis and Lamb Chop: The Team that Changed Children's
Television. In this seminal biography, the pair pull the veritable
wool from the eyes of audiences who adored the legendary
entertainer to examine the joys, sorrows, triumphs, and sheer hard
work that gave Lewis and Lamb Chop their enduring star power.
Breaking the Code reveals the efforts of director-producer Otto
Preminger to bring his aesthetic vision to the screen even if it
meant challenging the Production Code, a system of self-censorship
that shaped the movies during the four decades it was in force.
Along the way, Preminger sent shock waves through Hollywood and a
network of exhibitors, publishers, and religious leaders who had
personal, and even financial, stakes in the repression of artistic
freedom. The process of telling this story began in 2003 when Arnie
Reisman and Nat Segaloff thought it might be interesting to write a
play about Preminger's efforts to get a Code seal for his 1954
romantic comedy The Moon is Blue, based on F. Hugh Herbert's 1951
play. In those days, no film could be shown that did not receive
authorization from the Production Code Administration, and his film
was deemed too "adult" for even adults to see. Preminger was met
with opposition from administrator, Joseph Breen, who was prepared
to go to war to save the rest of the country from its
sensibilities. Along with their play Code Blue, which dramatizes
the clash between these two evenly matched but wildly disparate
titans, Breaking the Code chronicles the battle between Otto
Preminger and the Code. Between 1953 and 1962, he fought the
censorship of The Moon Is Blue, The Man with the Golden Arm,
Anatomy of a Murder, and Advise and Consent. The details of each
skirmish vary, but they cover the same issues: art versus commerce,
freedom of speech versus censorship, and money versus principle.
Times may have changed, but these battles continue. Breaking the
Code is an attempt to go back and see how the walls can be made to
crumble.
Critic-producer Nat Segaloff was granted access to private papers,
production records, never-before-published interviews, and
specialized archives in reconstructing the colorful, touching, and
sometimes scandalous stories behind the making of the last films of
some of Hollywood's top directors. Winningly readable and yet
meticulously researched, its substantial entries range from Robert
Aldrich and Robert Altman to Peter Yates and Fred Zinnemann, and
John Ford and Howard Hawks to Otto Preminger and Richard Brooks.
Certain to attract controversy because of whom it ignores as well
as whom it includes, Final Cuts presents fifty widely varied
chronicles of success and failure, inspiration and ennui, elation
and heartache, and every other emotion enjoyed or endured by the
greatest filmmakers that Hollywood ever knew. About the Author Nat
Segaloff always wanted to write and produce, but it took him
several careers before he learned how to get paid for it. He was a
journalist for The Boston Herald covering the motion picture
business, but has also variously been a studio publicist (Fox, UA,
Columbia), college teacher (Boston University, Boston College),
on-air TV talent (Group W), entertainment critic (CBS radio) and
author (nine books including Hurricane Billy: The Stormy Life and
Films of William Friedkin and, as co-author, Love Stories:
Hollywood's Most Romantic Movies). He has contributed career
monographs on screenwriters Stirling Silliphant, Walon Green, Paul
Mazursky and John Milius to the University of California Press's
acclaimed Backstory series, and his writing has appeared in such
varied periodicals as Film Comment, Written By, International
Documentary, Animation Magazine, The Christian Science Monitor,
Time Out (US), MacWorld, and American Movie Classics Magazine. He
was also senior reviewer for AudiobookCafe.com. His The
Everything(r) Etiquette Book and The Everything Trivia Book and The
Everything(r) Tall Tales, Legends and Outrageous Lies Book are in
multiple printings for Adams Media Corp. As a TV writer-producer,
Segaloff helped perfect the format and create episodes for
A&E's flagship "Biography" series. His distinctive productions
include John Belushi: Funny You Should Ask; Shari Lewis & Lamb
Chop; Larry King: Talk of Fame; Darryl F. Zanuck: Twentieth
Century-Filmmaker and Stan Lee: The ComiX-MAN He has written and
co-produced the Rock 'n' Roll Moments music documentaries for The
Learning Channel/Malcolm Leo Productions, and has written and/or
produced programming for New World, Disney, Turner and USA
Networks. He is co-creator/co-producer of Judgment Day with
Grosso-Jacobson Communications Corp. for HBO. His extraterrestrial
endeavors include the cheeky sequel to the Orson Welles "Invasion
From Mars" radio hoax, When Welles Collide, which featured a "Star
Trek"(r) cast. It was produced by L.A. Theatre Works and has become
a Halloween tradition on National Public Radio. In 1996 he formed
the multi-media production company Alien Voices(r) with actors
Leonard Nimoy and actor John de Lancie and produced five
best-selling, fully dramatized audio plays for Simon &
Schuster: The Time Machine, Journey to the Center of the Earth, The
Lost World, The Invisible Man and The First Men in the Moon, all of
which feature "Star Trek"(r) casts. Additionally, his teleplay for
The First Men in the Moon was the first-ever TV/Internet simulcast
and was presented live by The Sci-Fi Channel. He has also written
narrative concerts for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, celebrity
events, is a script consultant, and was a contributing writer to
Moving Pictures
|
You may like...
Aladdin
Robin Williams, Scott Weinger, …
Blu-ray disc
R206
Discovery Miles 2 060
|