The Adventures of Cinema Dave is a celebration of films from the turn of the recent century. Dave Montalbano, alias Cinema Dave, wrote over 500 film reviews and interviewed Hollywood Legends such as Fay Wray, Louise Fletcher, Dyan Cannon and new talent like Josh Hutcherson, Jane Lynch and Courtney Ford. With South Florida as his home base, Cinema Dave details his growing involvement with the Fort Lauderdale, Palm Beach and Delray Film Festivals, while covering local interest stories about individuals who contribute to the film culture. Featuring a fun introduction from Cindy Morgan, actress from Caddyshack and Tron fame, and an extensive appendix of Literary Cinema, The Adventures of Cinema Dave is a saga about one mans bibliomania and his pursuit of an entertaining story in the big cave known as cinema.

This is a major new assessment of the American movie industry in the 1990's, focusing on the development of new communication technologies such as cable and home video and examining their impact on the production and distribution of motion pictures.

Uses statistical tables, charts, photographs, maps, and illustrations to explore everyday life in the United States during the Cold War period.

Tweety Bird was colored yellow because censors felt the original pink made the bird look nude. Betty Boop's dress was lengthened so that her garter didn't show. And in recent years, a segment of Mighty Mouse was dropped after protest groups claimed the mouse was actually sniffing cocaine, not flower petals. These changes and many others like them have been demanded by official censors or organized groups before the cartoons could be shown in theaters or on television. How the slightly risque gags in some silent cartoons were replaced by rigid standards in the sound film era is the first misadventure covered in this history of censorship in the animation industry. The perpetuation of racial stereotypes in many early cartoons is examined, as are the studios' efforts to stop producing such animation. This is followed by a look at many of the uncensored cartoons, such as Lenny Bruce's Thank You Mask Man and Ralph Bakshi's Fritz the Cat. The censorship of television cartoons is next covered, from the changes made in theatrical releases shown on television to the different standards that apply to small screen animation. The final chapter discusses the many animators who were blacklisted from the industry in the 1950s for alleged sympathies to the Communist Party.

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

In this extensive analysis of the renewed popularity of the 'woman's film' in the 1990s, Roberta Garrett examines melodrama, romantic comedy, costume drama and female-led noirs , revealing the way they blend classical and contemporary themes and formal devices.

The economics of the movie industry has been curiously neglected by scholars, especially given the material circumstances in which film has been produced, distributed and exhibited in capitalist economies and its central importance in the lives of the huge numbers attracted to it as a commodity. This book provides an economic framework for understanding developments in film history. Film is a peculiar commodity with a unique set of characteristics. The topic hence is interesting and covered with aplomb by the contributors to the volume. The book includes sections on: long-term trends in the film industry the transformation of film from a primitive commodity to a heavily branded product the operation of the studio system the end of the studio system in post-war America the role and payment of stars Hollywood’s approach to risk during the 1990s. Experts from the UK and North America have come together in these pages and the result is a readable, insightful and enlightening book that will gain many fans amongst those with an interest in the economics of film, economic historians, film historians and aficionados of the movie industry generally.