Why would a punk band popular only in Indonesia cut songs in English? If you're rapping in Tanzania and Malawi, what do you rhyme in? Swahili? Chichewa? English? Some combination of these? This book examines how performers and audiences from a wide range of cultures deal with the issue of language choice and dialect in popular music.
"Earl Hooker's life may tell us a lot about the blues," biographer Sebastian Danchin says, "but it also tells us a great deal about his milieu. This book documents the culture of the ghetto through the example of a central character, someone who is to be regarded as a catalyst of the characteristic traits of his community."
Michael Crichton (1942-2008), one of the world's most successful authors, had many careers - doctor, novelist, film director, screenwriter - but was best known to millions of readers as 'Father of the techno-thriller'. This title brings together interviews and profiles of this author.
One of the most eclectic and distinctive writers currently working in comics, Grant Morrison brings the auteurist sensibility of alternative comics and graphic novels to the popular genres that dominate the American and British comics industries. Marc Singer examines how Morrison uses this fusion of styles to intervene in the major political, aesthetic, and intellectual challenges of our time.
Edited by comics scholar M. Thomas Inge, this volume collects the best interviews with Will Eisner from 1965 to 2004. Taken together, the interviews cover the breadth of Eisner's career with in-depth information about his creation of The Spirit and other well-known comic book characters, his devotion to the educational uses of the comics medium, and his contributions to the graphic novel.
Intellectual, cultural, and film historians have long considered neorealism the founding block of post-World War II Italian cinema. Neorealism, the traditional story goes, was an Italian film style born in the second postwar period. This collection brings together distinguished film scholars and cultural historians to complicate this nation-based approach to the history of neorealism.
Born Lee Earle Ellroy in 1948, James Ellroy is one of the most critically acclaimed and controversial contemporary writers of crime and historical fiction. This title presents a collection of interviews with the 'bad boy' of American crime fiction, conducted between 1984 to 2010.
When George Jones recorded "He Stopped Loving Her Today" more than 30 years ago, he was a walking disaster. Twin addictions to drugs and alcohol had him drinking Jim Beam by the case and snorting cocaine as long as he was awake. This book tells the story behind the making of the song often voted the best country song ever by both critics and fans.
Loretta Young (1913-2000) was an Academy Award-winning actress known for devout Catholicism and her performances in The Farmer's Daughter, The Bishop's Wife, and Come to the Stable, and for her long-running and tremendously popular television series. But that was not the whole story. Hollywood Madonna explores the full saga of Loretta Young's professional and personal life. She made her film debut at age four, became a star at fifteen, and many awards and accolades later, made her final television movie at age seventy-six. This biography withholds none of the details of her affair with Clark Gable and the daughter that powerful love produced. Bernard F. Dick places Young's affair in the proper context of the time and the choices available to women in 1935, especially a noted Catholic like Young, whose career would have been in ruins if the public knew of her tryst. With the birth of a daughter, who would have been branded a love child, Loretta Young reached the crossroads of disclosure and deception, choosing the latter path. That choice resulted in an illustrious career for her and a tortured childhood for her daughter.
Moviegoers know her as the housekeeper in White Christmas, the nurse in Now, Voyager, and the crotchety choir director in Sister Act. This book, filled with never-published behind-the-scenes stories from Broadway and Hollywood, chronicles the life of a complicated woman who brought an assortment of unforgettable nurses, nuns, and housekeepers to life on screen and stage. Wickes (1910-1995) was part of some of the most significant moments in film, television, theatre, and radio history. On that frightening night in 1938 when Orson Welles recorded his earth-shattering "e;War of the Worlds"e; radio broadcast, Wickes was waiting on another soundstage for him for a rehearsal of Danton's Death, oblivious to the havoc taking place outside. When silent film star Gloria Swanson decided to host a live talk show on this new thing called television, Wickes was one of her first guests. When Lucille Ball made one of her first TV appearances, Wickes appeared with her-and became Lucy's closest friend for more than thirty years. Wickes was the original Mary Poppins, long before an umbrella carried Julie Andrews across the rooftops of London. And when Disney began creating 101 Dalmatians, Wickes was asked to pose for animators trying to capture the evil of Cruella De Vil. The pinched-face actress who cracked wise by day became a confidante to some of the day's biggest stars by night, including Bette Davis and Doris Day. Bolstered by interviews with almost three hundred people, and by private correspondence from Ball, Davis, Day, and others, Mary Wickes: I Know I've Seen That Face Before includes scores of never-before-shared anecdotes about Hollywood and Broadway. In the process, it introduces readers to a complex woman who sustained a remarkable career for sixty years.
Despite their commercial appeal and cross-media reach, superheroes are only recently starting to attract sustained scholarly attention. This groundbreaking collection brings together essays and book excerpts by major writers on comics and popular culture.
These interviews cover the career to date of Neil Jordan (b. 1950), easily the most renowned filmmaker working in contemporary Irish cinema. His films have won many accolades, including the London Critics Circle Award for Best Film and Best Director, Best Film at the BAFTAs, and an Academy Award for Best Screenwriter.
The fan magazine has often been viewed simply as a publicity tool, a fluffy exercise in self-promotion by the film industry. But as an arbiter of good and bad taste, as a source of knowledge, and as a gateway to the fabled land of Hollywood and its stars, the American fan magazine represents a fascinating and indispensable chapter in journalism and popular culture. Anthony Slide's Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine provides the definitive history of this artifact. It charts the development of the fan magazine from the golden years when Motion Picture Story Magazine and Photoplay first appeared in 1911 to its decline into provocative headlines and titillation in the 1960s and afterward. Slide discusses how the fan magazines dealt with gossip and innuendo, and how they handled nationwide issues such as Hollywood scandals of the 1920s, World War II, the blacklist, and the death of President Kennedy. Fan magazines thrived in the twentieth century, and they presented the history of an industry in a unique, sometimes accurate, and always entertaining style. This major cultural history includes a new interview with 1970s media personality Rona Barrett, as well as original commentary from a dozen editors and writers. Also included is a chapter on contributions to the fan magazines from well-known writers such as Theodore Dreiser and e. e. cummings. The book is enhanced by an appendix documenting some 268 American fan magazines and includes detailed publication histories.
American soul music of the 1960s is one of the most creative and influential musical forms of the twentieth century. Female performers were responsible for some of the most enduring and powerful contributions to the genre. All too frequently overlooked by the star-making critics, seven of these women are profiled in this book.
Moviegoers often assume Frank Capra's life resembled his beloved films (such as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It's a Wonderful Life). A man of the people faces tremendous odds and, by doing the right thing, triumphs! But as Joseph McBride reveals in this meticulously researched, definitive biography, the reality was far more complex, a true American tragedy. Using newly declassified U.S. government documents about Capra's response to being considered a possible "e;subversive"e; during the post-World War II Red Scare, McBride adds a final chapter to his unforgettable portrait of the man who gave us It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, and Meet John Doe.
Until the first edition of Steven Spielberg: A Biography was published in 1997, much about Spielberg's personality and the forces that shaped it had remained enigmatic, in large part because of his tendency to obscure and mythologize his own past. But in this first full-scale, in-depth biography of Spielberg, Joseph McBride reveals hidden dimensions of the filmmaker's personality and shows how deeply personal even his most commercial work has been.This new edition adds four chapters to Spielberg's life story, chronicling his extraordinarily active and creative period from 1997 to the present, a period in which he has balanced his executive duties as one of the partners in the film studio DreamWorks SKG with a remarkable string of films as a director. Spielberg's ambitious recent work--including Amistad, Saving Private Ryan, A. I. Artifucial Intelligence, Minority Report, The Terminal and Munich--has continually expanded his range both stylistically and in terms of adventurous, often controversial, subject matter.Steven Spielberg: A Biography brought about a reevaluation of the great filmmaker's life and work by those who viewed him as merely a facile entertainer. This new edition guides readers through the mature artistry of Spielberg's later period in which he manages, against considerable odds, to run a successful studio while maintaining and enlarging his high artistic standards as one of America's most thoughtful, sophisticated, and popular filmmakers.
John Ford's classic films have earned him worldwide admiration as America's foremost filmmaker, a director whose rich visual imagination conjures up indelible, deeply moving images of a collective past. Joseph McBride's Searching for John Ford, described as definitive by the New York Times surpasses all other biographies of the filmmaker in its depth, originality, and insight.
The interviews in this collection cover Walter Mosley's career and reveal an overarching theme: a belief in the transformative power of reading and writing. Conversations with Walter Mosley covers the breadth of Mosley's career and reveals a craftsman and wryly witty conversationalist.
In this volume Don Peri expands his extraordinary work conducting in-depth interviews with Disney employees and animators. These recent interviews include conversations with actors and performers rather than solely animators. Taken together, these interviews create an enlightening perspective on the Walt Disney Company as it grew from its animation roots into a media powerhouse.
No recent television creator has generated more critical, scholarly, and popular discussion or acquired as devoted a cult following as Joss Whedon. If Whedon has shown himself to be a virtuoso screenwriter/script-doctor, director, comic book author, and librettist, he is as well a masterful conversationalist.
One of the most distinctive voices in mainstream comics since the 1970s, Howard Chaykin has earned a reputation as a visionary formal innovator and a compelling storyteller. Beginning with early interviews in fanzines and concluding with a new interview conducted in 2010, Howard Chaykin: Conversations collects widely ranging discussions from Chaykin's earliest days to his recent work.
Although three earlier volumes were thought to have gathered most of Faulkner's interviews, continued research has turned up many more. Ranging from 1916, when he was a shabbily dressed young Bohemian poet to the last year of his life when he was putting finishing touches on his final novel, they are collected here for the first time.
Presents an irreverent and humorous collection of conversations with the acclaimed documentary filmmaker. Errol Morris (b. 1948) has created some of America's most innovative, lasting cinematic works. This volume features startling interviews from throughout his career, as well as intimate, never-before-published discussions.
Presents a wide-ranging collection in which the Maysles brothers, together and separately, discuss all aspects of their filmmaking - the nature of collaboration, technical matters, contextual considerations, and more. They recount a personal history of cinema verite and modern documentary filmmaking.
Weaving incisive political commentary, razor-sharp satire, and suspense, John le Carre's work reflects upon and dissects both Cold War anxieties and the complications of social relationships. In Conversations with John le Carre, the acclaimed writer talks about his craft, the nature of language, the literature that he loves, and the ways in which his own life influences his novels.
Looks at the life and time of Thomas Jefferson - through his lifelong passion for wine. This title discusses how Jefferson's tastes developed - from his student days to his retirement at Monticello - which wines and foods he preferred at different stages of his life, and how he became the greatest wine expert of the early American republic.
These interviews starts with the years of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's early success and continue through his turn-of-the-century exchanges. He speaks of his childhood, his life as an indifferent student, his apprenticeship as a journalist, the inspiration for his most renowned novel, the difficulties brought by fame, and his leftist opinions.
Isaac Asimov (1920-1992), one of the most popular and influential American authors of the twentieth century, sparked the imagination of generations of writers. Conversations with Isaac Asimov collects interviews with a man considered to be - along with Robert Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, and Arthur C. Clarke - a founder of modern science fiction.
Brings to life the legendary Warner Bros. artist who helped shape the history of American animation, defining our impressions of such characters as Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Road Runner, Wile E. Coyote, and Pepe le Pew. These interviews span more than thirty years, beginning with a 1968 conversation in which Jones shares the spotlight with science fiction giant Ray Bradbury.
In the 1980s, a sea change occurred in comics. Fueled by Art Spiegel- man and Francoise Mouly's avant-garde anthology Raw and the launch of the Love & Rockets series by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, the decade saw a deluge of comics that were more autobiographical, emotionally realistic, and experimental than anything seen before. These alternative comics were not the scatological satires of the 1960s underground, nor were they brightly colored newspaper strips or superhero comic books. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield establishes the parameters of alternative comics by closely examining long-form comics, in particular the graphic novel. He argues that these are fundamentally a literary form and offers an extensive critical study of them both as a literary genre and as a cultural phenomenon. Combining sharp-eyed readings and illustrations from particular texts with a larger understanding of the comics as an art form, this book discusses the development of specific genres, such as autobiography and history. Alternative Comics analyzes such seminal works as Spiegelman's Maus, Gilbert Hernandez's Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, and Justin Green's Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Hatfield explores how issues outside of cartooning-the marketplace, production demands, work schedules-can affect the final work. Using Hernandez's Palomar as an example, he shows how serialization may determine the way a cartoonist structures a narrative. In a close look at Maus, Binky Brown, and Harvey Pekar's American Splendor, Hatfield teases out the complications of creating biography and autobiography in a substantially visual medium, and shows how creators approach these issues in radically different ways.
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