Playwrights have been depicting Hollywood as a cultural desert and an industry of profit-driven philistines ever since the early days of the movies. This collection of original essays covers the period from the 1920s to the present but concentrates on such contempory playwrights as David Mamet, Sam Shepard, David Rabe, Arthur Kopit, and Adrienne Kennedy. A substantial proportion of the volume is devoted to a discussion of the way in which these authors deconstruct Hollywood myths to reveal painful social and psychological issues in American life, providing a deeper and darker picture than the simple satires of movie-making in the 1920s and 1930s or Odets's comparison of the commercially debased Hollywood with the higher, purer art of the theatre. To complete and further complicate the picture, the volume concludes with essays on the African American experience, gay writers, and feminist writing as seen through the lens of Marlane Myer's ETTA JENKS. It is obvious that the legitimate stage remains a watchdog and constant critic of what is possibly the world's most powerful cultural phenomenon This book will be eargerly read by all students of film, theatre, and 20th century literature.

(Vocal Selections). Winner of the New York Drama Critics' Circle Award for Best Musical, The Band's Visit is a musical adaptation of the 2007 Israeli film of the same name. This vocal selections folio features 11 vocal line arrangements with piano accompaniment composed by David Yazbek: Answer Me * The Beat of Your Heart * Haled's Song About Love * It Is What It Is * Itzik's Lullaby * Omar Sharif * Papi Hears the Ocean * Something Different * Soraya * Waiting * Welcome to Nowhere.

When films like The Jazz Singer started to integrate synchronized music, in the late 1920s many ambitious songwriting pioneers of the Great White Way - George and Ira Gershwin, Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers, and Lorenz Hart, among many others - were enticed westward by Hollywood studios' promises of national exposure and top dollar success. But what happened when writers native to the business of Broadway ran into the very different business of Hollywood? Their movies had their producer despots, their stacking of writing teams on a single project, their use of five or six songs per story where Broadway fit in a dozen, and it seemed as if everyone in Hollywood was uncomfortable with characters bursting into song on the street, in your living room, or in "a cottage small by a waterfall." Did the movies give theater writers a chance to expand their art, or did mass marketing ruin the musical's quintessential charm? Is it possible to trace the history of the musical through both stage and screen manifestations, or did Broadway and Hollywood give rise to two wholly irreconcilable art forms? And, finally, did any New York writer or writing team create a film musical as enthralling and timeless as their work for the stage? In When Broadway Went to Hollywood, writer and celebrated steward of musical theatre Ethan Mordden directs his unmistakable wit and whimsy to these challenging questions and more, charting the volatile and galvanizing influence of Broadway on Hollywood (and vice versa) throughout the twentieth century. Along the way, he takes us behind the scenes of the great Hollywood musicals you've seen and loved (The Wizard of Oz, Gigi, The Sound of Music, Chicago, West Side Story, The Music Man, Grease) as well as some of the outrageous flops you probably haven't. The first book to tell the story of how Broadway affected the Hollywood musical, When Broadway Goes to Hollywood is sure to thrill theatre buffs and movie lovers alike.

"Once a guarded cinematic secret, this definitive history reveals for the first time the art and craft of Hollywood's hand painted-backdrops, and pays homage to the scenic artists who brought them to the big screen." -- Slipcase.

A fully updated edition of David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic, "The ultimate book on Dracula" (Newsweek). The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David J. Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all. includes black-and-white Illustrations throughout, plus a new Introduction.

Describes the history of the screen adaptations of Broadway musicals from Showboat to Grease and tells the story of the composers, stars, and directors

Peter Lorre described himself as merely a ‘face maker’. His own negative attitude also characterizes traditional perspectives which position Lorre as a tragic figure within film history: the promising European artist reduced to a Hollywood gimmick, unable to escape the murderous image of his role in Fritz Lang’s M. This book shows that the life of Peter Lorre cannot be reduced to a series of simplistic oppositions. It reveals that, despite the limitations of his macabre star image, Lorre’s screen performances were highly ambitious, and the terms of his employment were rarely restrictive. Lorre’s career was a complex negotiation between transnational identity, Hollywood filmmaking practices, the ownership of star images and the mechanics of screen performance.

."A .A . both fresh and informed, as well as a pleasure to read." -- Film Quarterly Since 1982, when this book first appeared, the Hollywood musical has undergone a rebirth, with the rise of teen musicals such as Dirty Dancing and Flashdance. In a chapter written especially for this second edition of her well-known study, Jane Feuer shows how this new development in the genre relates to important changes in the cinema audience itself. It is the text for the study of Hollywood musicals.

This book offers a different take on the early history of Warner Bros., the studio renowned for introducing talking pictures and developing the gangster film and backstage musical comedy. The focus here is on the studio’s sustained commitment to produce films based on stage plays. This led to the creation of a stock company of talented actors, to the introduction of sound cinema, to the recruitment of leading Broadway stars such as John Barrymore and George Arliss and to films as diverse as The Gold Diggers (1923), The Marriage Circle (1924), Beau Brummel (1924), Disraeli (1929), Lilly Turner (1933), The Petrified Forest (1936) and The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex (1939). Even the most crippling effects of the Depression in 1933 did not prevent Warners’ production of films based on stage plays, many being transformed into star vehicles for the likes of Ruth Chatterton, Leslie Howard and Bette Davis.

Richard Wesley was witness to a revolution. As both a celebrated participant and eager student of the Black Theater Movement in the late 1960s, he became part of a seismic force in American culture, breaking down barriers and helping to disrupt the cultural landscape. It’s Always Loud in the Balcony: A Life in Black Theater, from Harlem to Hollywood and Back is both history and memoir, tracing Wesley’s roots from riot-torn Newark, New Jersey, across the rocky terrain of Harlem, and finally to Hollywood, where he became partners with Sidney Poitier, writing several successful films before returning to New York and the theater world—a trip that Wesley has wryly characterized as "black power to black establishment." Wesley unfolds the history of black theater with love and precision, from the emergence of Amiri Baraka, and his own debut, the fiercely militant Black Terror—which landed him a deal with the legendary producer Joseph Papp—through his moviemaking experience in Los Angeles, working with Bill Cosby and Richard Pryor, among others. Wesley lands on solid ground in the twenty-first century as an elder statesman, a happy witness to the great success of a new breed of black theater that includes the widespread success of Tyler Perry and Lin-Manuel Miranda's Hamilton, which brought hip-hop to Broadway. It’s Always Loud in the Balcony is the passionate, firsthand account of a crucial American art movement whose effects will be felt for generations to come.