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Always Look on the Bright Side of Life: A Sortabiography
by Eric IdleBest known for his unforgettable roles in Monty Python, from the Flying Circus to The Meaning of Life, Eric Idle reflects on the meaning of his own life in this brilliantly entertaining memoir that takes us on an unforgettable journey from his childhood in an austere boarding school through his successful career in comedy, television, theatre and film. Coming of age as a writer and comedian during the Sixties and Seventies, Eric stumbled into the crossroads of the cultural revolution and found himself rubbing shoulders with the likes of George Harrison, David Bowie and Robin Williams, all of whom became lifelong friends. With anecdotes sprinkled throughout that involve other close friends and luminaries such as Mick Jagger, Steve Martin, Paul Simon and Mike Nichols - let alone the Pythons themselves - Eric captures a time of tremendous creative output with equal hilarity and heart. In Always Look on the Bright Side of Life, named after the song he wrote for Life of Brian that has since become the number-one song played at funerals in the UK, he shares the highlights of his life and career with the off-beat humour that has delighted audiences for decades.A legend in his own lunchtime, Eric is the author of many books, some not half bad, some not even a quarter bad. Now he enters his anecdotage as the last word in Python memoirs, and the last of this extraordinary group to tell his story. 2019 marks the fiftieth anniversary of The Pythons, and Eric is celebrating the occasion with this laugh-out-loud memoir, chock-full of behind-the-scenes stories from a high-flying life that features everyone from Princess Leia to the Queen.
American Film Exhibition and an Analysis of the Motion Picture Industry's Market Structure 1963-1980 (Routledge Library Editions: Cinema)
by Gary EdgertonThis study looks at how the movie industry organisation functioned between the late ‘40s and 1983 when it was originally published. It describes the changing role of domestic exhibition through this time and analyses the wider film industry to provide a model of the exhibition structure in relation to production, distribution and outside factors. It addresses the growing issues of the cable and video markets as competition to the film exhibition business at that time and looks forward into a highly turbulent environment. With particular interest now as the film industry address a new range of threats and adaptations of its working structure, this book offers and integral understanding of a key stage in cinema history.
Angelina Ballerina
by Katharine HolabirdAngelina loves to dance. She dances so much she is too busy to do anything else. Then one day her parents think of a plan that will change her life.
BRAT: An '80s Story
by Andrew McCarthyFans of Patti Smith's Just Kids and Rob Lowe's Stories I Only Tell My Friends will love this beautifully written, entertaining and bracingly honest memoir by an actor, director and author who found his start as a 1980s Hollywood Brat pack member. Most people know Andrew McCarthy from his roles in movies like Pretty in Pink and St Elmo's Fire, and as a charter member of Hollywood's Brat Pack. That iconic group of ingenues and heart throbs, including Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore, has come to represent both a genre of film and an era of pop culture. In Brat, McCarthy focuses his gaze on that singular moment in time and the most defining moments of his youth. The result is a revealing look at coming of age in a maelstrom, reckoning with conflicted ambition, innocence, addiction and expectations of masculinity. New York City of the 1980s is brought to vivid life, from scoring joints in Washington Square Park to skipping school in favour of the dark revival houses of the Village where he fell in love with the movies that would change his life. Brat is at once an exclusive window into a defining period of pop-culture history and a surprising, intimate story of an outsider caught up in a most unwitting success. &‘Wit, wisdom, and a depth of honesty that resonates to your core&’ Demi Moore &‘Explores masculinity, success, the dangers of fame, ambition and cigarettes in an elegant and humorous coming of age story&’ Candace Bushnell &‘Absorbing, thoughtful, and sometimes painfully honest … a fascinating read&’ Jay McInerney &‘A riveting portrait of the artist as a young man&’ Publishers Weekly
Broadcasting and Society 1918–1939 (Routledge Library Editions: Broadcasting #12)
by Mark PeggBroadcasting and Society (1983) examines the power of radio broadcasting as a medium of instant communication and entertainment. It is a detailed and critical examination of the social changes brought about by radio broadcasting in the crucial and formative stages between 1918 and 1939 – whether broadcasting was successful in keeping people better informed, in introducing wider interests, and its influence on social behaviour.
Cary Grant: A Celebration
by Richard SchickelRichard Schickel's text, combining critical analysis and a re-interpretation of all the available biographical information, masterfully maps the intersections where a great star's personal history and his screen personality met in a style as elegant, graceful and witty as the actor himself.
Film Semiotics, Metz, and Leone's Trilogy (Routledge Library Editions: Cinema)
by Lane RothSemiotics offers a systematic approach to analysing the stylistic structure of film. When this study was originally published in 1983 this was a recent addition to the methods of film study and it presents an explanation of film semiotics with direct application to comparative film research. It takes as its representative subject one trilogy of films and applies semiology, with careful textual analysis. The book begins with a basic introduction to semiotics and the ideas of Christian Metz on cinesemiotics. It then presents a syntagmatic analysis of each of the three Dollars films, with an outline of autonomous segments for each and a discussion of the findings before undertaking a wider analysis of the trilogy as a whole with commentary on the stylistic unity of the director’s work. This book, an enduring detailed study of these three films, also outlines clearly this method of classifying the formal structuring codes of film communication.
Footlights: Critical Notebook 19701982 (Semiotext(e) / Foreign Agents)
by Serge DaneyThe early essays of the most influential French film critic of the post-68 period.The Footlights (1983) was the first book by Serge Daney, a film critic admired in his lifetime by Gilles Deleuze and Jean-Luc Godard and recognized since his premature death in 1992 as the most important French writer on film after André Bazin. The Footlights stands apart in Daney&’s body of work as the only collection of his essays he conceived of as a book, organizing his seminal pieces from Cahiers du Cinéma by theme and linking them with original texts that reflect in a personal voice on the doubts, battles, and illuminations of a generation of film lovers inspired by the explorations of Lacanian theory and roused by the collective aspirations of Maoist dogma. In pieces on fellow travelers Godard and Straub/Huillet, on films ranging from Pasolini&’s Saló to Spielberg&’s Jaws, and on the difference between film language and television discourse, Daney offers a definitive portrait of an era of radical hope and disappointment.
Horowitz: A Biography of Vladimir Horowitz
by Glenn PlaskinWell-researched, richly evocative and provocative biography of the legendary Russian pianist.
Louis Armstrong: An American Genius
by James Lincoln CollierLouis Armstrong. "Satchmo." To millions of fans, he was just a great entertainer. But to jazz aficionados, he was one of the most important musicians of our times--not only a key figure in the history of jazz but a formative influence on all of 20th-century popular music. Set against the backdrop of New Orleans, Chicago, and New York during the "jazz age", Collier re-creates the saga of an old-fashioned black man making it in a white world. He chronicles Armstrong's rise as a musician, his scrapes with the law, his relationships with four wives, and his frequent feuds with fellow musicians Earl Hines and Zutty Singleton. He also sheds new light on Armstrong's endless need for approval, his streak of jealousy, and perhaps most important, what some consider his betrayal of his gift as he opted for commercial success and stardom. A unique biography, knowledgeable, insightful, and packed with information, it ends with Armstrong's death in 1971 as one of the best-known figures in American entertainment.
The Love You Make
by Peter BrownHere is the national bestseller that Newsday called “the most authoritative and candid look yet at the personal lives…of the oft-scrutinized group. ” In The Love You Make , Peter Brown, a close friend of and business manager for the band—and the best man at John and Yoko’s wedding—presents a complete look at the dramatic offstage odyssey of the four lads from Liverpool who established the greatest music phenomenon of the twentieth century. Written with the full cooperation of each of the group’s members and their intimates, this book tells the inside story of the music and the madness, the feuds and the drugs, the marriages and the affairs—from the greatest heights to the self-destructive depths of the Fab Four. In-depth and definitive, The Love You Make is an astonishing account of four men who transformed the way a whole generation of young people thought and lived. It reigns as the most comprehensive, revealing biography available of John, Paul, George, and Ringo. Includes 32 pages of rare and revealing photos A Literary Guild® Alternate Selection .
Making Tootsie: A Film Study with Dustin Hoffman and Sydney Pollack
by Susan DworkinThe only book on the creation of the classic film that's ranked #2 on the American Film Institute list of 100 Best Comedies. Susan Dworkin was given unprecedented access to the cast and crew during the shoot and editing of Tootsie in 1982 during the sweltering summer in New York City and editing bay in Los Angeles. A playwright, award-winning documentary writer, and Ms. contributing editor, Dworkin used her unique talent to tell how two superbly talented and driven men-actor Dustin Hoffman and director Sydney Pollack-actually make a movie about a serious actor, desperate for work, who takes on the challenge of playing a woman in a daily soap opera, becomes a star, and a better man for it. Drawn from observation and interviews not only with Hoffman and Pollack, but with costume designer Ruth Morley, actors Teri Garr, Bill Murray, and Dabney Coleman, editors Fritz and Bill Steinkamp, and many others, Dworkin delivers an intimate view of the acting and filmmaking process, as well as insight into the release of comedy and the force of creative power.
Masters of the Soviet Cinema: Crippled Creative Biographies (Routledge Library Editions: Cinema)
by Herbert MarshallEisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovzhenko, Vertov: these Soviet film directors are acknowledged to be among the greatest in the history of cinematography. To Eisenstein we owe such films as Battleship Potemkin and October; to Pudovkin Mother and The End of St Petersburg; to Dovzhenko Earth and Zvenigora; and to Vertov The Man With a Movie Camera and The Three Songs of Lenin. Herbert Marshall knew each of them personally, both as artists and as friends, and shared their cinema world when he was a student at the GIK (The Moscow State Institute of Cinematography) in the heady years following the Revolution into the period of the first Five Year Plan. His material is culled from personal recollections, diaries, notes, unpublished and published biographies, letters, press cuttings, articles and books in various languages, but mainly from Soviet sources and the Soviet cinema world. Taking the subjects one by one, this indispensible book discusses their major films including an account of their creation and reception in the USSR and abroad. It shows the tragedy of these four Soviet artists who were lucky enough not to be arrested or deprived of their limited freedom, yet who nevertheless ended up with ‘crippled creative biographies’. The author then examines the changed viewpoint in the climate of 1983 when the book was originally published.
Midnight Movies
by J. Hoberman Jonathan RosenbaumMidnight Movies is a comprehensive and in-depth look at over 100 subculture movies of the past three decades. It discusses the complete history of cult films, their makers, and their audience and what keeps audiences coming back to see them over and over again.
Motherhood: The Second Oldest Profession
by Erma BombeckMotherhood is the second oldest profession in the world. It never questions age, height, religious preference, health, political affiliation, citizenship, morality, ethnic background, marital status, economic level, convenience, or previous experience. It's the biggest on-the-job training program in existence today.
My Last Sigh
by Luis BunuelA provocative memoir from Luis Buñuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema's most important films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.Luis Buñuel's films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism and subversion of his cinema, Buñuel turns his artistic gaze inward. In swift and generous prose, Buñuel traces the surprising contours of his life, from the Good Friday drumbeats of his childhood to the dreams that inspired his most famous films to his turbulent friendships with Federico García Lorca and Salvador Dalí. His personal narratives also encompass the pressing political issues of his time, many of which still haunt us today--the specter of fascism, the culture wars, the nuclear bomb. Filled with film trivia, framed by Buñuel's intellect and wit, this is essential reading for fans of cinema and for anyone who has ever wanted to see the world through a surrealist's eyes.
OUT ON A LIMB
by Shirley MaclaineHer most controversial book is one you will never forget. An outspoken thinker, a celebrated actress, a truly independent woman, Shirley MacLaine goes beyond her previous two bestsellers to take us on an intimate yet powerful journey into her personal life and inner self. An intense, clandestine love affair with a prominent politician sparks Shirley MacLaine's quest of self-discovery. From Stockholm to Hawaii to the mountain vastness of Peru, from disbelief to radiant affirmation, she at last discovers the roots of her very existence. . . and the infinite possibilities of life. Shirley MacLaine opens her heart to explore the meaning of a great and enduring passion with her lover Gerry; the mystery of her soul's connection with her best friend David; the tantalizing secrets behind a great actor's inspiration with the late Peter Sellers. And through it all, Shirley MacLaine's courage and candor new doors, new insights, new revelations-and a luminous new world she invites us all to share.From the Paperback edition.
Parade
by Donald CrewsShowing the same dynamic energy and brilliant colors as in <i>Freight Train</i> and <i>Truck</i>, Donald Crews conveys the breathless anticipation and delighted enjoyment generated by a parade in this book.
Passion for the Piano
by Judith OringerEvolution of the piano, its manufacturing, care of a piano, piano competitions, the piano in literature and films, and politics and the piano.
Rainmaker
by N. Richard NashAt the time of a paralyzing drought in the West, we discover a girl whose father and two brothers are worried as much about her becoming an old maid as they are about their dying cattle. For the truth is, she is indeed a plain girl. The brothers try every possible scheme to marry her off but without success. Nor is there any sign of relief from the dry heat. Suddenly from out of nowhere appears a picaresque character with a mellifluous tongue and the most grandiose notions a man could imagine. He claims to be a rainmaker. And he promises to bring rain, for $100. It's a silly idea, but the rainmaker is so refreshing and ingratiating that the family finally consents. Forthwith they begin banging on big brass drums to rattle the sky; while the rainmaker turns his magic on the girl, and persuades her that she has a very real beauty of her own. And she believes it, just as her father believes the fellow can actually bring rain. And rain does come, and so does love.
The San Francisco Symphony: Music, Maestros and Musicians
by David Schneider Edo De WaartA guide to the last 50 years of music in San Francisco.
Swedish Film Classics
by A. KwiatkowskiMemorable stills from great cinematic tradition -- Ingeborg Holm (1913) to Wild Strawberries (1957). Complete credits, synopsis, commentary for each film. Introduction, critical biographies of directors.
This Is NPR: The First Forty Years
by Noah Adams Cokie Roberts David Folkenflik Susan Stamberg Ari Shapiro John Ydstie Renee MontagneAlways put the listener first has been NPR's mantra since its inception in 1970. Now celebrating its 40th anniversary, NPR's programming attracts over 27 million listeners every week. This beautifully designed volume chronicles NPR's storied history, featuring dozens of behind-the-scenes photos, essays and original reporting by a who's who of NPR staff and correspondents, transcripts of memorable interviews, and an audio CD of the most memorable programming throughout the decades. Beyond an entertaining and inspiring tribute to NPR's remarkable history, this book is an intimate look at the news and stories that have shaped our world, from the people who were on the ground and on the air. With contributions from Steve Inskeep, Neal Conan, Robert Siegel, Nina Totenberg, Linda Wertheimer, Scott Simon, Melissa Block, P.J. O'Rourke, David Sedaris, Sylvia Poggioli, and many more, this is the perfect book for any NPR supporter, fan, or devotee.