The winner of the 2019 Peter C. Rollins Book Award This is the first comprehensive history of MGM from its origins in 1905 to the present. Following a straightforward chronology corresponding to specific periods of film industry history, each chapter describes how successive managements adjusted their production strategies and business practices in response to evolving industrial and market conditions. As the production subsidiary of the Loew’s Inc. theatre chain, MGM spent lavishly on its pictures and injected them with plenty of star power. The practice helped sustain MGM’s preeminent position during the heyday of Hollywood. But MGM was a conservative company and watched as other studios innovated with sound and widescreen, adjusted to television, and welcomed independent producers. By the 1960s, the company, sans its theatre chain, was in decline and was ripe for a takeover. A defining moment occurred in 1969, when Kirk Kerkorian, a Las Vegas entrepreneur, made a successful bid for the company. There followed a tumultuous thirty-six-year period when Kerkorian bought and sold MGM three times. Meanwhile, MGM never regained its former status and has functioned as a second-tier company to this day. Focusing on MGM’s top talent – such as Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, and Arthur Freed; directors King Vidor and Vincente Minnelli; and stars of the screen Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Mickey Rooney – and award-winning films, this book highlights the studio’s artistic achievements and status within the industry.
Hollywood is facing unprecedented challenges – and is changing rapidly and radically as a result. In this major new study of the contemporary film industry, leading film historian Tino Balio explores the impact of the Internet, declining DVD sales and changing consumer spending habits on the way Hollywood conducts its business. Today, the major studios play an insignificant role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents and have fled to safety, relying on big-budget tentpoles, franchises and family films to reach their target audiences. Comprehensive, compelling and filled with engaging case studies (TimeWarner, DreamWorks SKG, Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, IMAX, Netflix, Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate and Sundance), Hollywood in the New Millennium is a must-read for all students of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, communication studies, and radio and television.
Hollywood is facing unprecedented challenges – and is changing rapidly and radically as a result. In this major new study of the contemporary film industry, leading film historian Tino Balio explores the impact of the Internet, declining DVD sales and changing consumer spending habits on the way Hollywood conducts its business. Today, the major studios play an insignificant role in the bottom lines of their conglomerate parents and have fled to safety, relying on big-budget tentpoles, franchises and family films to reach their target audiences. Comprehensive, compelling and filled with engaging case studies (TimeWarner, DreamWorks SKG, Spider Man, The Lord of the Rings, IMAX, Netflix, Miramax, Sony Pictures Classics, Lionsgate and Sundance), Hollywood in the New Millennium is a must-read for all students of film studies, cinema studies, media studies, communication studies, and radio and television.
In this second volume of Tino Balio’s history of United Artists, he examines the turnaround of the company in the hands of Arthur Krim and Robert Benjamin in the 1950s, when United Artists devised a successful strategy based on the financing and distribution of independent production that transformed the company into an industry leader. Drawing on corporate records and interviews, Balio follows United Artists through its merger with Transamerica in the 1960s and its sale to MGM after the financial debacle of the film Heaven’s Gate. With its attention to the role of film as both an art form and an economic institution, United Artists: The Company That Changed the Film Industry is an indispensable study of one company’s fortunes from the 1950s to the 1980s and a clear-eyed analysis of the film industry as a whole. This edition includes an expanded introduction that examines the history of United Artists from 1978 to 2008, as well as an account of Arthur Krim’s attempt to mirror UA’s success at Orion Pictures from 1978 to 1991.
Largely shut out of American theaters since the 1920s, foreign films such as Open City, Bicycle Thief, Rashomon, The Seventh Seal, Breathless, La Dolce Vita and L’Avventura played after World War II in a growing number of art houses around the country and created a small but influential art film market devoted to the acquisition, distribution, and exhibition of foreign-language and English-language films produced abroad. Nurtured by successive waves of imports from Italy, Great Britain, France, Sweden, Japan, and the Soviet Bloc, the renaissance was kick-started by independent distributors working out of New York; by the 1960s, however, the market had been subsumed by Hollywood. From Roberto Rossellini’s Open City in 1946 to Bernardo Bertolucci’s Last Tango in Paris in 1973, Tino Balio tracks the critical reception in the press of such filmmakers as François Truffaut, Jean-Luc Godard, Federico Fellini, Michelangelo Antonioni, Tony Richardson, Ingmar Bergman, Akira Kurosawa, Luis Buñuel, Satyajit Ray, and Milos Forman. Their releases paled in comparison to Hollywood fare at the box office, but their impact on American film culture was enormous. The reception accorded to art house cinema attacked motion picture censorship, promoted the director as auteur, and celebrated film as an international art. Championing the cause was the new “cinephile” generation, which was mostly made up of college students under thirty. The fashion for foreign films depended in part on their frankness about sex. When Hollywood abolished the Production Code in the late 1960s, American-made films began to treat adult themes with maturity and candor. In this new environment, foreign films lost their cachet and the art film market went into decline.
The winner of the 2019 Peter C. Rollins Book Award This is the first comprehensive history of MGM from its origins in 1905 to the present. Following a straightforward chronology corresponding to specific periods of film industry history, each chapter describes how successive managements adjusted their production strategies and business practices in response to evolving industrial and market conditions. As the production subsidiary of the Loew’s Inc. theatre chain, MGM spent lavishly on its pictures and injected them with plenty of star power. The practice helped sustain MGM’s preeminent position during the heyday of Hollywood. But MGM was a conservative company and watched as other studios innovated with sound and widescreen, adjusted to television, and welcomed independent producers. By the 1960s, the company, sans its theatre chain, was in decline and was ripe for a takeover. A defining moment occurred in 1969, when Kirk Kerkorian, a Las Vegas entrepreneur, made a successful bid for the company. There followed a tumultuous thirty-six-year period when Kerkorian bought and sold MGM three times. Meanwhile, MGM never regained its former status and has functioned as a second-tier company to this day. Focusing on MGM’s top talent – such as Louis B. Mayer, Irving Thalberg, David O. Selznick, and Arthur Freed; directors King Vidor and Vincente Minnelli; and stars of the screen Greta Garbo, Judy Garland, Clark Gable, and Mickey Rooney – and award-winning films, this book highlights the studio’s artistic achievements and status within the industry.
The advent of color, big musicals, the studio system, and the beginning of institutionalized censorship made the thirties the defining decade for Hollywood. The year 1939, celebrated as "Hollywood's greatest year," saw the release of such memorable films as Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, and Stagecoach. It was a time when the studios exercised nearly absolute control over their product as well as over such stars as Bette Davis, Clark Gable, and Humphrey Bogart. In this fifth volume of the award-winning series History of the American Cinema, Tino Balio examines every aspect of the filmmaking and film exhibition system as it matured during the Depression era.
V. 1. The emergence of cinema : the American screen to 1907 / Charles Musser -- v. 2. The transformation of cinema, 1907-1915 / Eileen Bowser -- v. 3. An evening's entertainment : the age of the silent feature picture, 1915-1928 / Richard Koszarski -- v. 4. The talkies : American cinema's transition to sound, 1926-1931 / Donald Crafton -- v. 5. Grand design : Hollywood as a modern business enterprise, 1930-1939 / Tino Balio -- v. 6. Boom and bust : the American cinema in the 1940s / Thomas Schatz -- v. 7. Transforming the screen, 1950-1959 / Peter Lev -- v. 8. The sixties, 1960-1969 / Paul Monaco -- v. 9. Lost illusions : American cinema in the shadow of Watergate and Vietnam, 1970-1979 / David A. Cook -- v. 10. A new pot of gold : Hollywood under the electronic rainbow, 1980-1989 / Stephen Prince.
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