"American police departments have presided over the business of motion pictures since the end of the nineteenth century. Their influence is evident not only on the screen but also in the ways movies are made, promoted, and viewed in the United States. Screening the Police explores the history of film's entwinement with law enforcement, showing the role that state power has played in the creation and expansion of a popular medium. For the New Jersey State Police in the 1930s, film offered a method of visualizing criminality and of circulating urgent information about escaped convicts. For the New York Police Department, the medium was a means of making the agency world-famous as early as 1896. Beat cops became movie stars. Police chiefs made their own documentaries. And from Maine to California, state and local law enforcement agencies regularly fingerprinted filmgoers for decades, amassing enormous records as they infiltrated theatres both big and small. Understanding the scope of police power in the United States requires attention to an aspect of film history that has long been ignored. Screening the Police reveals the extent to which American cinema has overlapped with the politics and practices of law enforcement. Today, commercial filmmaking is heavily reliant on public policing-and vice versa. How such a working relationship was forged and sustained across the long twentieth century is the subject of this book"--

Prior to 1862, when the Department of Agriculture was established, the report on agriculture was prepared and published by the Commissioner of Patents, and forms volume or part of volume, of his annual reports, the first being that of 1840. Cf. Checklist of public documents ... Washington, 1895, p. 148.

Hollywood Independent dissects the Mirisch Company, one of the most successful employers of the package-unit system of film production, producing classic films like The Apartment (1960), West Side Story (1961), The Great Escape (1963) and The Thomas Crown Affair (1968) as irresistible talent packages. Whilst they helped make the names of a new generation of stars including Steve McQueen and Shirley MacLaine, as well as banking on the reputations of established auteurs like Billy Wilder, they were also pioneers in dealing with controversial new themes with films about race (In the Heat of the Night), gender (Some Like it Hot) and sexuality (The Children's Hour), devising new ways of working with film franchises (The Magnificent Seven, The Pink Panther and In the Heat of the Night spun off 7 Mirisch sequels between them) and cinematic cycles, investing in adaptations of bestsellers and Broadway hits, exploiting frozen funds abroad and exploring so-called runaway productions. The Mirisch Company bridges the gap between the end of the studio system by about 1960 and the emergence of a new cinema in the mid-1970s, dominated by the Movie Brats.

Embattled Shadows is the first and only history of Canadian film making in the years before the establishment of the National Film Board of Canada in 1939. It begins with an entertaining account of the travelling showmen who brought the movies to large and small communities across the country, and discusses the films produced in Canada before World War I. In the atmosphere of heightened nationalism during and after the war there was a determined attempt to establish a film industry. Peter Morris chronicles its occasional successes while, at the same time, examining the reasons behind its ultimate failure -- using the colourful career of the independent producer Ernest Shipman ("Ten Percent Ernie") as a particular reference. He goes on to describe the establishment and eventual collapse of both the federal and Ontario governments' Motion Picture Bureaus. By the Thirties, with the connivance of the Canadian government, Canadian feature film production had deteriorated to the point of turning out "quota" films from the Hollywood mould.