"Most people know Andrew McCarthy from his movie roles in Pretty in Pink, St. Elmo's Fire, Weekend at Bernie's, and Less than Zero, and as a charter member of Hollywood's Brat Pack. That iconic group of ingenues and heartthrobs included Rob Lowe, Molly Ringwald, Emilio Estevez, and Demi Moore, and has come to represent both a genre of film and an era of pop culture. In his memoir Brat: An '80s Story, McCarthy focuses his gaze on that singular moment...

"The story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. "They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God." So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local...

"The camera's movement in a film may seem straightforward or merely technical. Yet skillfully deployed pans, tilts, dollies, cranes, and zooms can express the emotions of a character, convey attitude and irony, or even challenge an ideological stance. In The Dynamic Frame, Patrick Keating offers an innovative history of the aesthetics of the camera that examines how camera movement shaped the classical Hollywood style. In careful readings of dozens...

"John Connolly recreates the golden age of Hollywood for an intensely compassionate study of the tension among the commercial demands, artistic integrity, and the human frailties behind even the greatest of artists"--

Acclaimed media critic J. Hoberman's masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies of the era The third book in a brilliant and ambitious trilogy, celebrated cultural and film critic. J. Hoberman's Make My Day is a major new work of film and pop culture history. In it he chronicles the Reagan years, from the waning days of the Watergate scandal when disaster films like Earthquake ruled the box office...

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden...

Alice Guy Blaché became the first film director in 1896 while she was working in Paris at Gaumont, one of the earliest manufacturers of the motion picture camera. The first films were only a minute long and thought to be scientific novelties until Alice decided to stage a scene and film a narrative. Gustave Eiffel was president of the Gaumont company from its inception in 1895, but Alice did not meet him there. For a century, Eiffel has been thought...

"From legendary entertainment journalist and author of Caddyshack comes a rollicking history of 1980s cinema-how eight legendary sci-fi films changed Hollywood forever In the summer of 1982, eight science fiction films were released within six weeks of one another. E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior changed the careers of some of Hollywood's now biggest names-altering...

World War II coincided with cinema's golden age. Movies now considered classics were created at a time when all sides in the war were coming to realize the great power of popular films to motivate the masses. Through multinational research, One World, Big Screen reveals how the Grand Alliance--Britain, China, the Soviet Union, and the United States--tapped Hollywood's impressive power to shrink the distance and bridge the differences that separated...

"From Some Like it Hot and The Apartment to Double Indemnity and Sunset Boulevard, Billy Wilder directed some of Hollywood's most iconic movies. However, the roots of Wilder's directorial vision and worldview were very much shaped by his Austrian background and experiences working as a journalist in Berlin at the dawn of Hitler's rise to power. Though a fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always felt an outsider and his perspective as an exiled Jew provided...