Francis X. Bushman


Book Description

Before Burt Lancaster and Charlton Heston, before Bogart and Gable, even before Rudolph Valentino, there was Francis X. Bushman. Named the King of the Movies at San Francisco's Panama-Pacific Exposition of 1915, Bushman virtually created the Hollywood model of the male heartthrob that hundreds of others have sought to imitate over the years. Born in 1883, Bushman had his first acting jobs in stock companies in his hometown of Baltimore. His film career started in 1911 when he starred in a one-reeler entitled His Friend's Wife. Over the next seven years, he became one of the top stars in movies. But his divorce from his wife, Josephine, and subsequent remarriage to leading lady, Beverly Bayne, effectively ended his career. He did manage a triumphant return to the big screen as Messala in Ben Hur (1926), but mostly thereafter he had smaller parts or was on stage. From contemporary sources and conversations with many of Bushman's surviving relatives, this is the compelling tale of one of Hollywood's first superstars and how his career laid the foundation for the matinee idols who followed.




Silent Serial Sensations


Book Description

The first book-length study of pioneering and prolific filmmakers Ted and Leo Wharton, Silent Serial Sensations offers a fascinating account of the dynamic early film industry. As Barbara Tepa Lupack demonstrates, the Wharton brothers were behind some of the most profitable and influential productions of the era, including The Exploits of Elaine and The Mysteries of Myra, which starred such popular performers as Pearl White, Irene Castle, Francis X. Bushman, and Lionel Barrymore. Working from the independent film studio they established in Ithaca, New York, Ted and Leo turned their adopted town into "Hollywood on Cayuga." By interweaving contemporary events and incorporating technological and scientific innovations, the Whartons expanded the possibilities of the popular serial motion picture and defined many of its conventions. A number of the sensational techniques and character types they introduced are still being employed by directors and producers a century later.







Flickering Empire


Book Description

Flickering Empire tells the fascinating yet little-known story of how Chicago served as the unlikely capital of American film production in the years before the rise of Hollywood (1907–1913). As entertaining as it is informative, Flickering Empire straddles the worlds of academic and popular nonfiction in its vivid illustration of the rise and fall of the major Chicago movie studios in the mid-silent era (principally Essanay and Selig Polyscope). Colorful, larger-than-life historical figures, including Thomas Edison, Charlie Chaplin, Oscar Micheaux, and Orson Welles, are major players in the narrative—in addition to important though forgotten industry titans, such as "Colonel" William Selig, George Spoor, and Gilbert "Broncho Billy" Anderson.




Encyclopedia of Early Cinema


Book Description

One-volume reference work on the first twenty-five years of the cinema's international emergence from the early 1890s to the mid-1910s.




Ben-Hur


Book Description




After the Silents


Book Description

Many believe Max Steiner's score for King Kong (1933) was the first important attempt at integrating background music into sound film, but a closer look at the industry's early sound era (1926–1934) reveals a more extended and fascinating story. Viewing more than two hundred films from the period, Michael Slowik launches the first comprehensive study of a long-neglected phase in Hollywood's initial development, recasting the history of film sound and its relationship to the "Golden Age" of film music (1935–1950). Slowik follows filmmakers' shifting combinations of sound and image, recapturing the volatility of this era and the variety of film music strategies that were tested, abandoned, and kept. He explores early film music experiments and accompaniment practices in opera, melodrama, musicals, radio, and silent films and discusses the impact of the advent of synchronized dialogue. He concludes with a reassessment of King Kong and its groundbreaking approach to film music, challenging the film's place and importance in the timeline of sound achievement.




The Refinement of America


Book Description

This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from mansions and silverware to etiquette books, city planning, and sentimental novels, Richard L. Bushman shows how a set of values originating in aristocratic court culture gradually permeated almost every stratum of American society and served to prevent the hardening of class consciousness. A work of immense and richly nuanced learning, The Refinement of America newly illuminates every facet of both our artifacts and our values.




The John Wayne Filmography


Book Description

"Decades after the death of John Wayne, polls show that he is still among America's top-ten movie stars. This comprehensive filmography covers his entire career - more than 170 films - from 1926 through 1976." "Each entry includes dates, running time, cast and crew credits, reviews, synopsis, and notes devoted to interesting details such as locations, budgets, costs, salaries, box-office performance, alternate casting, and what competition existed for the moviegoer. There are also more than 700 capsule biographies of fellow actors and production workers. There are quotations from 800 contemporary reviews in The New York Times, Hollywood Reporter, Life Magazine, and other periodicals." "Five appendices list films by release date, Wayne's colleagues and where their capsule biographies may be found, specific review information, the biggest box office films, and the films most popular on television." --Book Jacket.




I'll Take You There


Book Description

In this radiant homage to the resiliency, strength, and power of women, Wally Lamb—author of numerous New York Times bestselling novels including She’s Come Undone, I Know This Much is True, and We Are Water—weaves an evocative, deeply affecting tapestry of one Baby Boomer's life and the trio of unforgettable women who have changed it. I’ll Take You There centers on Felix, a film scholar who runs a Monday night movie club in what was once a vaudeville theater. One evening, while setting up a film in the projectionist booth, he’s confronted by the ghost of Lois Weber, a trailblazing motion picture director from Hollywood’s silent film era. Lois invites Felix to revisit—and in some cases relive—scenes from his past as they are projected onto the cinema’s big screen. In these magical movies, the medium of film becomes the lens for Felix to reflect on the women who profoundly impacted his life. There’s his daughter Aliza, a Gen Y writer for New York Magazine who is trying to align her post-modern feminist beliefs with her lofty career ambitions; his sister, Frances, with whom he once shared a complicated bond of kindness and cruelty; and Verna, a fiery would-be contender for the 1951 Miss Rheingold competition, a beauty contest sponsored by a Brooklyn-based beer manufacturer that became a marketing phenomenon for two decades. At first unnerved by these ethereal apparitions, Felix comes to look forward to his encounters with Lois, who is later joined by the spirits of other celluloid muses. Against the backdrop of a kaleidoscopic convergence of politics and pop culture, family secrets, and Hollywood iconography, Felix gains an enlightened understanding of the pressures and trials of the women closest to him, and of the feminine ideals and feminist realities that all women, of every era, must face.