This year-by-year, behind-the-camera look at Hollywood's most successful movies, from 1939 to the present, offers intriguing details for the trivia buff, glamour and gossip for the star seeker, and all the facts for the film and media maven. From Gone with the Wind to Apollo 13, this entertaining guide presents the complete story behind the top five releases at the box office for each year. 328 photos.

More thon forty years ago, Robert Warshow wrote that "the unresolved problem of 'popular culture' . . . has come to be a kind of nagging embarrassment to criticism." Despite the rise of academic trends like cultural studies, we don't have a criticism that speaks to the actual, immediate experience of seeing and responding to popular culture. Warshow argued that the evasion of the popular arts in his time was due to a "disastrous vulgarization of intellectual life" that corrupted American liberalism from the 1930s to the 1950s. Political correctness then, like political correctness since the 1960s, had led to "organized mass disingenuousness" on the part of intellectuals who turned away from developing a vocabulary for describing the immediate, aesthetic experience and used irony instead, even about their own experiences. But, says Warshow, "a whole literature cannot be built on irony." Warshaw died a young man of 37 in 1955, but he left as his legacy a series of essays for The Partisan Review, Commentary, The Nation, and other journals. These writings, the cornerstone of a major account of the role of mass culture in our lives, were first gathered and published as a book in 1962. A number of essays have been anthologized frequently, and the book as a whole has achieved cult status for a number of discerning critics. "A legendary little book, partly because its author died at the age of 37, but mostly because it stands as a virtually unique representative from its period of a consistently open-minded, moral, aesthetic, and political engagement with commercial culture." -Louis Menand

The Grossis an all-access pass to the movers, shakers, and fakers who make Hollywood run. Tinseltown is an edgy place where risk-taking is a way of lifeand the risks now run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Summertime, when the studios unfurl their most expensive and effects-laden "tent-pole pictures," has become the only season in which Hollywood makes money, and so, as this book illustrates, the summer season provides an ideal microcosm for scrutinizing the mega-budget-driven revolution that has forever changed the movie business. Bart interviews all the key players, including studio executives, producers, directors, and stars, to show how creativity and commerce hang in a dangerous balance in the new Hollwood.

A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde , The Godfather , and other modern movie classics “Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker , Kael used those formidable tools to shape the tastes of a generation. She had a gift for capturing, with force and fluency, the essence of an actor’s gesture or the full implication of a cinematic image. Kael called movies “the most total and encompassing art form we have,” and her reviews became a platform for considering both film and the worlds it engages, crafting in the process a prose style of extraordinary wit, precision, and improvisatory grace. Her ability to evoke the essence of a great artist—an Orson Welles or a Robert Altman—or to celebrate the way even seeming trash could tap deeply into our emotions was matched by her unwavering eye for the scams and self-deceptions of a corrupt movie industry. Here are her appraisals of era-defining films such as Breathless , Bonnie and Clyde , The Leopard , The Godfather , Last Tango in Paris , Nashville , along with many others, some awaiting rediscovery—all providing the occasion for masterpieces of observation and insight, alive on every page.

A timely exploration of intellectual dogmatism in politics, economics, religion, and literature—and what can be done to fight it Polarization may be pushing democracy to the breaking point. But few have explored the larger, interconnected forces that have set the stage for this crisis: namely, a rise in styles of thought, across a range of fields, that literary scholar Gary Saul Morson and economist Morton Schapiro call “fundamentalist.” In Minds Wide Shut , Morson and Schapiro examine how rigid adherence to ideological thinking has altered politics, economics, religion, and literature in ways that are mutually reinforcing and antithetical to the open-mindedness and readiness to compromise that animate democracy. In response, they propose alternatives that would again make serious dialogue possible. Fundamentalist thinking, Morson and Schapiro argue, is not limited to any one camp. It flourishes across the political spectrum, giving rise to dueling monologues of shouting and abuse between those who are certain that they can’t be wrong, that truth and justice are all on their side, and that there is nothing to learn from their opponents, who must be evil or deluded. But things don’t have to be this way. Drawing on thinkers and writers from across the humanities and social sciences, Morson and Schapiro show how we might begin to return to meaningful dialogue through case-based reasoning, objective analyses, lessons drawn from literature, and more. The result is a powerful invitation to leave behind simplification, rigidity, and extremism—and to move toward a future of greater open-mindedness, moderation, and, perhaps, even wisdom.

Traces the evolution of the Romantic approach to literary criticism and compares it to the other methods which prevailed in the early nineteenth century.

"An unprecedented and historic new book, The First Homosexuals traces the evolution of the homosexual identity through an archive of hundreds of artworks in a wide variety of media. Organized geographically, each chapter highlights a different part of the world and includes an insightful essay by an expert in the art and sexuality of that region. Ranging from well-known masterpieces to works by unknown artists and pieces rarely considered in the context of sexuality, The First Homosexuals offers a stunning and illuminating look at the first self-consciously queer art"--

The classic collection of criticism about television and American culture from the late, multi-award-winning legend. From 1968 through 1972, Harlan Ellison penned a series of weekly columns, sharing his uncompromising thoughts about contemporary television programming for the Los Angeles Free Press , a.k.a. "The Freep," a countercultural, underground newspaper. Sitcoms and variety shows, westerns and cop dramas, newscasts and commercials, Ellison left no pixilated stone unturned, expounding on the insipidness, hypocrisy, and malaise found in the glowing images projected into the faces of American audiences. The Glass Teat: Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television collects fifty-two of Ellison's columns--including his 2011 introduction "Welcome to the Gulag," his unapologetic commentary about how cellphones and the internet have extended television's reach, eroding intelligence and freedom and creating a legion of bloodshot eyed zombies unable to communicate beyond their screens or think for themselves. Provocative and prescient, irreverent and insightful, Ellison's critical analyses of the glowing box that became the center of American life are even more relevant in the twenty-first century. Also available: The Other Glass Teat: Further Essays of Opinion on the Subject of Television

In 2003 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences celebrated the diamond (75th) anniversary of the Academy Awards. What began as an organizational banquet for several-hundred industry insiders has grown to an unequaled international spectacle viewed by more than one billion people. This book is an entirely new version of Emanuel Levy¿s critically acclaimed ¿Oscar Fever.¿ It is both history & appreciation, chockablock with inside stories & little-known facts. All statistics & tables have been updated & completely new information has been added on all 432 nominated films. Even more comprehensive than before, ¿All about Oscar¿ makes us look at the Academy Awards with a fresh vision. Illustrations.

Rejects the model of competitive memory, i.e. the conception that collective memories of different groups, especially memories of victimization, confront one another in the public sphere, and eventually one group history blocks other group histories. Proposes a model of multidirectional memory, according to which various group memories interact productively and borrow from one another. In the post-World War II West, a process of coming to terms with the Nazi Holocaust of Jews went on side by side with a process of decolonization and coming to terms with Europe's and America's colonial and slavery past. In this process, the attitude that the Holocaust is unique as a historical phenomenon proved to be harmful and has been increasingly rejected. Discusses a number of artworks, literary works, and films, mainly by French artists and authors (e.g. Taslitzky, Fougeron, Césaire, Schwarz-Bart, Delbo, Rouch and Morin) as well as by some non-French ones (e.g. Arendt, W.E.B. DuBois, Caryl Phillips, Haneke), in which racism and events of the colonial past have been juxtaposed with the Holocaust.

An extraordinarily gifted musician and writer, Charles Rosen is a peerless commentator on the history and performance of music. Critical Entertainments brings together many of the essays that have established him as one of the most influential and eloquent voices in the field of music in our time. These essays cover a broad range of musical forms, historical periods, and issues—from Bach through Brahms to Carter and Schoenberg, from contrapuntal keyboard music to opera, from performance practices to music history as a discipline. They revisit Rosen’s favorite subjects and pursue some less familiar paths. They court controversy (with strong opinions about performance on historical instruments, the so-called New Musicology, and the alleged “death” of classical music) and offer enlightenment on subjects as diverse as music dictionaries and the aesthetics of stage fright. All are unified by Rosen’s abiding concerns and incomparable style. In sum, Critical Entertainments is a treasury of the vast learning, wit, and insight that we have come to expect from this remarkable writer. It will delight all music lovers.

Theatre Chronicles, 1937-1956.

Hard to find

The seminal work of Ruth Rubin, a pioneering collector, singer, folklorist, writer, and crusader for the vanishing legacy of the Yiddish world, "Voices of a People" remains the only general introduction to Yiddish folksong. A priceless collection of song texts in Yiddish and English, as well as a selection of tunes Rubin transcribed, this volume brings the Jews' ancient, itinerant culture alive through children's songs, dancing songs, and songs about love and courtship, poverty and work, crime and corruption, immigration, and the dream of a homeland. Rubin's notes and annotations weave each text into the larger story of the Jewish experience. Noted scholar Mark Slobin provides a new foreword that includes a biographical sketch of Rubin and an assessment of her contributions over a lifetime of collecting, absorbing, and disseminating Yiddish folksong.

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

This book talks about music. It incorporates modal and tonal music. It talks about Arnold Schoenberg, the founder of contempoary music, Alban Berg and how the past plays on contemporary music and Anton Webern and the future of contemporary music. As well as the structure of contemporary musical speech. René Leibowitz was a French composer, conductor, music theorist and teacher born in Warsaw, Poland. During the early 1930s, Leibowitz studied composition and orchestration with Ravel in Paris, where he was introduced to Schoenberg's Twelve-note technique by the German pianist and composer Erich Itor Kahn. He subsequently studied with Schoenberg's pupil Webern. Many of the works of the Second Viennese School were first heard in France at the International Festival of Chamber Music established by Leibowitz in Paris in 1947. Leibowitz was highly influential in establishing the reputation of the Second Viennese School, both through activity as a teacher in Paris after WWII and through his book Schoenberg et son ecole, published in 1947 and translated by Dika Newlin as Schoenberg and his School (US and UK editions 1949). This was among the earliest theoretical treatises written on Schoenberg's 12-tone method of composition. Leibowitz's advocacy of the Schoenberg school was taken further by his two most gifted pupils, each taking different paths in promoting the musics of Schoenberg, Webern and the development of serialism, namely Pierre Boulez and Jacques-Louis Monod. His American students include the composers Will Ogdon, Janet Maguire, and the avant-garde film director-animator John Whitney. As conductor, Leibowitz was active in many recording projects. One of the most widely circulated and most notable is a set of the Beethoven symphonies made for Reader's Digest Recordings; it was apparently the first recording of the symphonies to follow Beethoven's original metronome markings. In choosing this approach, Leibowitz was influenced by his friend and colleague Rudolf Kolisch. Leibowitz likewise made many recordings for Reader's Digest in their various compilation albums. He also wrote for Les Temps modernes, applying existentialist ideas to musicology.

Michael Wolff knows Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Jean-Marie Messier, Steve Ross and Ted Turner. He knows what they want, what fuels their appetites and what they can and can't see when they look in the mirror (or the financial pages). And he tells us all he knows in this report.

In 1979, Beatles expert Mark Lewisohn set about establishing a complete list of the group’s live appearances from 1957 through 1966, when they stopped giving concerts; the research took seven long years and was published as the book The Beatles Live! Shortly thereafter, EMI Records invited Lewisohn to be the only person outside of the Beatles and their production staff to go into Abbey Road and listen to the entire collection of Beatles session tapes and to interview practically everyone involved in their making. The result was published in 1988 as The Complete Beatles Recording Sessions, and sold over 150,000 copies. This book artfully combines and updates all the vital material in Lewisohn’s earlier two books with his definitive account of the Beatles’ work in radio, television, film, and video to create a complete day-by-day summary of the group’s entire oeuvre. First published in 1992, The Complete Beatles Chronicle has become the Beatles Bible, the one book no fan can live without, and a perfect companion to the bestselling Beatles Anthology, which recounted their story in their own words.

In the late 1980s Jon Ronson was the keyboard player in the Frank Sidebottom Band. Frank wore a big fake head. Nobody outside his inner circle knew his true identity. This became the subject of feverish speculation during his zenith years. Together, they rode relatively high. Then it all went wrong. 25 years later and Jon has co-written with Peter Straughan a film - Frank - inspired by those times. It's directed by Lenny Abrahamson and stars Michael Fassbender, Domhnall Gleeson, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Scoot McNairy, Carla Azar and Francois Civil. It isn't a biopic. It's fictional. Frank tells the true story that inspired the film.

A powerful meditation on political resistance and the global search for justice From the ‘War on Terror’ to resistance in Ramallah and traumatic dislocation in the Middle East, Berger explores the uses of art as an instrument of political resistance. Visceral and passionate, Hold Everything Dear is a profound meditation on the far extremes of human behaviour, and the underlying despair. Looking at Afghanistan, Palestine and Iraq, he makes an impassioned attack on the poverty and loss of freedom at the heart of such unnecessary suffering. These essays offer reflections on the political at the core of artistic expression and at the center of human existence itself.