Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Entertainment & Performing Arts

The television industry is changing, and with it, the small screen's potential to engage in debate and present valuable representations of American history. Founded in 1972, HBO has been at the forefront of these changes, leading the way for many network, cable, and streaming services into the "post-network" era. Despite this, most scholarship has been dedicated to analyzing historical feature films and documentary films, leaving TV and the long-form drama hungry for coverage. Rebecca Weeks fills the gap in this area and defends the historiographic power of long-form dramas.

This book is the first anthology to explore the connection between race and the suburbs in American cinema from the end of World War II to the present. It builds upon the explosion of interest in the suburbs in film, television, and fiction in the last fifteen years, concentrating exclusively on the relationship of race to the built environment. Race and the Suburbs in American Film is a stimulating resource for considering the manner in which race is foundational to architecture and urban geography, which is reflected, promoted, and challenged in cinematic representations.

When the Nicholas Brothers danced, uptown at the Cotton Club, downtown at the Roxy, in segregated movie theatres in the South, and dance halls across the country, audiences cheered, clapped, stomped their feet, and shouted out uncontrollably. In Brotherhood in Rhythm, Constance Valis Hill interweaves an intimate portrait of these great performers with a rich, detailed history of jazz music and dance, both bringing their act to life and explaining their significance through a colorful analysis of their eloquent footwork, their full-bodied expressiveness, and their changing style.

Daryl Joji Maeda's account of Bruce Lee's legacy traces how movements and migrations across the Pacific Ocean structured the cultures Lee inherited, the milieu he occupied, the martial art he developed, the films he made, and the world he left behind. A unique blend of cultural history and biography, Like Water unearths the cultural strands intertwined in Lee's rise to a new kind of global stardom. Moving from the gold rush in California and the British occupation of Hong Kong to the Cold War, Maeda builds depth and complexity to this larger-than-life figure.

While gangster films are one of America's most popular genres, gangster movies appear in every film industry across the world. With contributions from an international panel of experts, A Companion to the Gangster Film explores the popularity of gangster films across three major continents: the Americas, Europe, and Asia.

A Companion to Steven Spielberg provides an authoritative collection of essays exploring the achievements and legacy of one of the most influential film directors of the modern era.

Warner Bros. Studio is best known as a media conglomerate with a broad range of intellectual property, spanning movies, TV shows, and streaming content. Despite popular interest in the origins of this empire, the core of the Warner Bros. saga cannot be found in its commercial successes. It is the story of four brothers—Harry, Albert, Sam, and Jack—whose vision for Hollywood helped shape the world of entertainment.

In 1963, 30-year-old Friedman - who had recently quit his job as a Boston advertising executive and returned to his hometown of New York to become a theatrical producer - opened a coffee house for Broadway performers called the Improvisation. His goal? Simply to make a living, and if all went according to plan, to also make enough professional contacts to be able to mount his first Broadway show within a year's time. Later shortened to the Improv, its first West 44th Street location was in a seedy section of Manhattan's Hell's Kitchen.

April 14, 1865. A famous actor pulls a trigger in the presidential balcony, leaps to the stage, and escapes, as the president lies fatally wounded. In the panic that follows, forty-six terrified people scatter in and around Ford's Theater as soldiers take up stations by the doors and the audience surges into the streets chanting, "Burn the place down!" This is the untold story of Lincoln's assassination: The forty-six stage hands, actors, and theater workers on hand for the bewildering events in the theater that night.

Suzanne Collins' epic trilogy was way more about death than food. Or at least this is what Bratniss Everclean discovers, when she leaves the comforts of Slum 12, Pandumb's garbage dump, to shortsightedly volunteer for a teenage death tournament. But she soon realizes there are fates worse than death...like weirdly having to date her fellow competitor, and lifelong stalker, Pita Malarkey. Okay, okay, it's not worse than DEATH, but it's still pretty annoying.

i>39 Years of Short-Term Memory Loss is a seriously funny, offbeat, and irreverent memoir that chronicles the early days of Saturday Night Live and features some of its greatest personalities---Al Franken, Lorne Michaels, Dan Aykroyd, John Belushi, Bill Murray, Michael O'Donoghue, and Chris Farley.

In 2014, the UK science-fiction television series Black Mirror was released on Netflix worldwide, quickly becoming a hit with US audiences. Like other beloved British imports, this series piqued Americans' interest with hints of dark comedy, clever plotlines, and six-episode seasons that left audiences frantic for more. In Transatlantic Television Drama, volume editors Michele Hilmes, Matt Hills, and Roberta Pearson team up with leading scholars in TV studies and transnational television to look at how dramas like Black Mirror captivate US audiences....

The opening decades of the 20th century witnessed a profound transformation in the history of modern sound media, with workers in US film, radio, and record industries developing pioneering production methods and performance styles. Focusing on broadcasting's initial expansion during the 1920s, Making Radio explores the forms of creative labor pursued for the medium in the period prior to the better-known network era, assessing their role in shaping radio's identity and identifying affinities with parallel practices pursued for conversion-era film and phonography.

Robert Altman and the Elaboration of Hollywood Storytelling reveals an Altman barely glimpsed in previous critical accounts of the filmmaker. This re-examination of his seminal work during the "Hollywood Renaissance" or "New Hollywood" period of the early 1970s (including M*A*S*H and Nashville) sheds new light on both the films and the filmmaker, reframing Altman as a complex, pragmatic innovator whose work exceeds, but is also grounded in, the norms of classical Hollywood storytelling rather than someone who rejected those norms in favor of modernist art cinema.

The Radio Right tells the story of the 1960s far right, who were frustrated by what they perceived to be liberal bias in the national media, particularly the media's sycophantic relationship with the John F. Kennedy administration. By the early 1960s, millions of Americans listened each week to conservative broadcasters, the most prominent of which were clergy or lay broadcasters from across the religious spectrum, including Carl McIntire, Billy James Hargis, and Clarence Manion.

An entertaining and insightful examination of the Emmy-award winning American satirical news show, broadcast on Comedy Central in the US, and (in an edited edition) on More4 in the UK and CNN International around the world.

Sometimes it feels like you need a PhD to follow the show. But you don't. You just need this book in which 21 philosophers explore the deep questions we all face as survivors on this planet: Does "everything happen for a reason"? Is torture ever justified? Who are the Others? How do we know we're not patients in Hurley's psych ward? What if the Dharma Intitiative is experimenting on us? Desmond may not be able to save Charlie, but this book could save you.

Just when you thought paper couldn't be more exciting, this book comes your way! This book unites philosophy with one of the best shows ever: The Office. Addressing both the current American incarnation and the original British version, The Office and Philosophy brings these two wonders of civilization together for a frolic through the mundane yet curiously edifying worlds of Scranton's Dunder-Mifflin and Slough's Wernham-Hogg.

Albert Poland, legendary Broadway and Off-Broadway producer and general manager, presents Stages: A Theater Memoir.

He was, according to Pauline Kael, "the greatest American screenwriter." Jean-Luc Godard called him "a genius" who "invented eighty percent of what is used in Hollywood movies today." Besides tossing off dozens of now-classic scripts - including Scarface, Twentieth Century, and Notorious - Ben Hecht was known in his day as ace reporter, celebrated playwright, taboo-busting novelist, and the most quick-witted of provocateurs. During World War II, he also emerged as an outspoken crusader for the imperiled Jews of Europe.