Bücher der Reihe Texas Film and Media Studies Series

Pioneering the field of media industry studies, Indie, Inc. explores how Miramax changed the landscape not only of independent filmmaking but of Hollywood itself during the 1990s.

Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century-the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era-among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences. In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider-a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.

The Hollywood blacklist, which began in the late 1940s and ran well into the 1960s, ended or curtailed the careers of hundreds of people accused of having ties to the Communist Party. Bernard Gordon was one of them. In this highly readable memoir, he tells a engrossing insider's story of what it was like to be blacklisted and how he and others continued to work uncredited behind the scenes, writing and producing many box office hits of the era. Gordon describes how the blacklist cut short his screenwriting career in Hollywood and forced him to work in Europe. Ironically, though, his is a success story that includes the films El Cid, 55 Days at Peking, The Thin Red Line, Krakatoa East of Java, Day of the Triffids, Earth vs. the Flying Saucers, Horror Express, and many others. He recounts the making of many movies for which he was the writer and/or producer, with wonderful anecdotes about stars such as Charlton Heston, David Niven, Sophia Loren, Ava Gardner, and James Mason; directors Nicholas Ray, Frank Capra, and Anthony Mann; and the producer-studio head team of Philip Yordan and Samuel Bronston.

The first comprehensive, season-by-season analysis of the critically acclaimed HBO series The Wire, this book explicates the complex narrative arc of the entire series and its sweeping vision of institutional failure in the postindustrial United States.

A study of the lost golden age of Soviet cinema, which was a time of both achievement and contradiction, as reflected in the films of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, and Kuleshov.

This literate and lively study explores the spread of American culture into international cinema as reflected by the collision and partial merger of two important styles of filmmaking: the Hollywood style of stars, genres, and action, and the European art

J. P. Telotte and twelve other noted film scholars examine the appeal of the cult film in this groundbreaking study.

Nina Leibman analyzes many feature films and dozens of TV situation comedy episodes from 1954 to 1963 to find surprising commonalities in their representations of the family.

A study of el Nuevo Cine (the New Cinema) and its films presenting alienated characters caught in a painful transition period in which old family, gender, and social roles have ceased to function without being replaced by viable new ones.

This book examines the INCINE film project and assesses its achievements in recovering a Nicaraguan national identity through the creation of a national cinema.

A study of the first half-century of cable television and why it never achieved its promise as a radically different means of communication.

Alan David Vertrees challenges the popular image of Selznick as a megalomaniacal meddler whose hiring and firing of directors and screenwriters created a patchwork film that succeeded despite his interference.

This pioneering study offers the first thorough exploration of the movie industry's shaping role in the development of television and its narrative forms.

The first overall survey of the effects of glasnost on the work of Soviet filmmakers and their films.

Starting from the premise that movie trailers can be considered a film genre, this pioneering book explores the genre's conventions and offers a primer for reading the rhetoric of movie trailers.

This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s.

The first detailed account of the popular film as it has grown and changed during the tumultuous decades of Indian nationhood.