Hollywood's Cold War

Hollywood's Indies offers an in depth examination of the phenomenon of the classics divisions by tracing its history since the establishment of the first specialty label in 1980.

The Hollywood 100 is a carefully curated list that spans generations, genres, and the ever-evolving landscape of the film industry. Each actress selected for this collection has not only graced the screen but has also left an indelible mark on the cultural zeitgeist. From the luminosity of the Golden Age to the dynamism of contemporary cinema, these women have transcended the screen, becoming beacons of inspiration for aspiring actors and audiences alike. Behind the glamour and glitz, each actress's journey is a tale of passion, perseverance, and the pursuit of excellence. Whether they emerged from humble beginnings or were born into the limelight, their stories are threaded with the common theme of dedication to their craft. From auditions that tested their mettle to roles that defined careers, these narratives unfold like a script, revealing the raw, unfiltered reality that exists behind the scenes.

Melodrama is the foundation of American cinema. It is, however, a poorly understood term. While it is a pervasive and persuasive dramatic mode, it is not tied to any specific moral or ideological system. It is not a singular genre; rather, it operates as a "genre generating machine" capable of determining the aesthetics and structure of the drama within many genres. Melodrama centers the conflict around the clash between good and evil and provides a sense of poetic justice--but the specific values embedded in notions of good and evil are determined by the culture, and they shift from nation to nation, region to region, and period to period. This book explores the "populist" westerns of the 1930s, the propaganda films that followed the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and the popularity of Sax Rohmer's master villain Fu Manchu. "Melodramas of passion" and film noir also offer a challenge to melodrama with its seemingly alienated protagonists and downbeat endings. Yet, with few exceptions, Hollywood was able to assimilate these genres within its melodramatic imagination.

It is based on hitherto unstudied documents from these institutions. While European film production was at a standstill after World War I, Hollywood companies flooded the European market with hundreds of films at very low prices."--BOOK JACKET.

For years people said someone should write a book about Bö Roos, but nobody will believe it. Now his daughter Carolyn has written the book, and it is believeable as it captures Hollywood's Golden Age and Bö Roos's unique part in it as one of Hollywood's most powerful and successful business managers. It's an amazing piece of Hollywood history that hasn't been covered before. Ben Newman, Attorney (Bö Roos) virtually founded the profession of business manager and personal manager (to Hollywood's stars). Daily Variety Because of his flamboyant, high powered and hectic way of life, Bö (pronounced Boo) Roos could have been the model for the movie sterotype of the Hollywood business manager. The New York Times Bö Roos' life story is a saga that would top the Horatio Alger novels of yesteryear. The Foreign Friends of Acapulco newsletter Bö Roos was a man of outsize personality and zest. Ballerina Margot Fonteyn Bö Roos not only keeps (his clients) on an allowance - he eats, drinks, and even weeps with them. Saturday Evening Post Bö invested and took risks right alongside his clients claiming more conservative managers were 'guys going through life with nothing on their chests.' Working with him was always full of excitement and the unexpected. Carolyn's captured his story well. Al Marsella, CPA

In 1929 and 1930, during the Hollywood studios' conversion to synchronized-sound film production, white-controlled trade magazines and African American newspapers celebrated a "vogue" for "Negro films." "Hollywood's African American Films" argues that the movie business turned to black musical performance to both resolve technological and aesthetic problems introduced by the medium of "talking pictures" and, at the same time, to appeal to the white "Broadway" audience that patronized their most lucrative first-run theaters. Capitalizing on highbrow associations with white "slumming" in African American cabarets and on the cultural linkage between popular black musical styles and "natural" acoustics, studios produced a series of African American-cast and white-cast films featuring African American sequences. Ryan Jay Friedman asserts that these transitional films reflect contradictions within prevailing racial ideologies--arising most clearly in the movies' treatment of African American characters' decisions to migrate. Regardless of how the films represent these choices, they all prompt elaborate visual and narrative structures of containment that tend to highlight rather than suppress historical tensions surrounding African American social mobility, Jim Crow codes, and white exploitation of black labor.