From Havana To Hollywood

From Havana to Hollywood examines the presence or absence of Black resistance to slavery in feature films produced in either Havana or Hollywood—including Gillo Pontecorvo's Burn!, neglected masterpieces by Cuban auteurs Tomás Gutiérrez Alea and Sergio Giral, and Steve McQueen's Oscar-winning 12 Years a Slave. Philip Kaisary argues that, with rare exceptions, the representation of Black agency in Hollywood has always been, and remains, taboo. Contrastingly, Cuban cinema foregrounds Black agency, challenging the ways in which slavery has been misremembered and misunderstood in North America and Europe. With powerful, richly theorized readings, the book shows how Cuban cinema especially recreates the past to fuel visions of liberation and asks how the medium of film might contribute to a renewal of emancipatory politics today.

From the turn of the twentieth century through the late 1950s, Havana was a locus for American movie stars, with glamorous visitors including Errol Flynn, John Wayne, and Marlon Brando. In fact, Hollywood was seemingly everywhere in pre-Castro Havana, with movie theaters three to a block in places, widely circulated silver screen fanzines, and terms like “cowboy” and “gangster” entering Cuban vernacular speech. Hollywood in Havana uses this historical backdrop as the catalyst for a startling question: Did exposure to half a century of Hollywood pave the way for the Cuban Revolution of 1959? Megan Feeney argues that the freedom fighting extolled in American World War II dramas and the rebellious values and behaviors seen in postwar film noir helped condition Cuban audiences to expect and even demand purer forms of Cuban democracy and national sovereignty. At the same time, influential Cuban intellectuals worked to translate Hollywood ethics into revolutionary rhetoric—which, ironically, led to pointed critiques and subversions of the US presence in Cuba. Hollywood in Havana not only expands our notions of how American cinema was internalized around the world—it also broadens our view of the ongoing history of US-Cuban interactions, both cultural and political.

In the 1920s, Los Angeles enjoyed a buoyant homegrown Spanish-language culture comprised of local and itinerant stock companies that produced zarzuelas, stage plays, and variety acts. After the introduction of sound films, Spanish-language cinema thrived in the city's downtown theatres, screening throughout the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in venues such as the Teatro Eléctrico, the California, the Roosevelt, the Mason, the Azteca, the Million Dollar, and the Mayan Theater, among others. With the emergence and growth of Mexican and Argentine sound cinema in the early to mid-1930s, downtown Los Angeles quickly became the undisputed capital of Latin American cinema culture in the United States. Meanwhile, the advent of talkies resulted in the Hollywood studios hiring local and international talent from Latin America and Spain for the production of films in Spanish. Parallel with these productions, a series of Spanish-language films were financed by independent producers. As a result, Los Angeles can be viewed as the most important hub in the United States for the production, distribution, and exhibition of films made in Spanish for Latin American audiences. In April 2017, the International Federation of Film Archives organized a symposium, "Hollywood Goes Latin: Spanish-Language Cinema in Los Angeles," which brought together scholars and film archivists from all of Latin America, Spain, and the United States to discuss the many issues surrounding the creation of Hollywood's "Cine Hispano." The papers presented in this two-day symposium are collected and revised here. This is a joint publication of FIAF and UCLA Film & Television Archive.

For decades, Screen World has been the film professional's, as well as the film buff's, favorite and indispensable annual screen resource, full of all the necessary statistics and facts. Now Screen World editor Barry Monush has compiled another comprehensive work for every film lover's library. In the first of two volumes, this book chronicles the careers of every significant film actor, from the earliest silent screen stars – Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks – to the mid-1960s, when the old studio and star systems came crashing down. Each listing includes: a brief biography, photos from the famed Screen World archives, with many rare shots; vital statistics; a comprehensive filmography; and an informed, entertaining assessment of each actor's contributions – good or bad! In addition to every major player, Monush includes the legions of unjustly neglected troupers of yesteryear. The result is a rarity: an invaluable reference tool that's as much fun to read as a scandal sheet. It pulsates with all the scandal, glamour, oddity and glory that was the lifeblood of its subjects. Contains over 1 000 photos!

Hollywood's Silent Closet provides a banquet of information about the pansexual intrigues of Hollywood between 1919 and 1926, compiled from eyewitness interviews with men and women, all of them insiders, who flourished in its midst. Not for the timid, it names names and doesn't spare the guilty. If you believe, like Truman Capote, that the literary treatment of gossip will become the literature of the 21st century, then you will love Hollywood's Silent Closet. Hollywood's Silent Closet is a vivid portrait of the decadent, homosexual, and gossipy world of pre-talkie Hollywood. It's an Info-Novel where 90% of everything in it is true. It represents the greatest collection of star-studded scandal ever assembled on the film stars of Hollywood's Silent Era. Valentino, Ramon Novarro, Charlie Chaplin, Fatty Arbuckle, Pola Negri, Nazimova, and many others figure into eyewitness accounts of the debauched excesses that went on behind closed doors. It also documents the often tragic endings of America's first screen idols, some of whom admitted to being more famous than the monarchs of England and Jesus Christ combined. Many of the interviews that went into the compilation of this book were conducted between 1940 and 1974, as the subjects were nearing the end of their lives and were willing, at last, to reveal scandals and insights that had previously been repressed by their own fears and by the media machines of the studio system. Marriages of convenience are the norm as intra-male peccadillos (and lots of lesbian love, too) are swept under the potted palms of the Edwardian age. The hero of this tale is the amiably cross-dressing Durango Jones, a wide-eyed neophyte from Kansas, circa 1919, who hits Hollywood during its Pre-Code excesses, and stays for a sexual feast wherein the banquet consists of many of the era's most flamboyant sex symbols. And although technically, this title has been formatted as a novel rather than a straight-line biography, there's the sometimes disturbing sense that this book is genuinely historical as well as being a jolly and rollicking piece of very savvy entertainment. This is high-testosterone Hollywood at its most compulsively readable. The 60s didn't invent sex-the stars of the Silent Screen did. --Cruiser. Who slept with Mary Pickford's three husbands, her two brothers-in-law, and even her brother? The hero of Hollywood's Silent Closet, that's who! --Trova Roma.

USA TODAY BESTSELLER "A wild ride beneath the glitz and glamour of 1950s Hollywood, proving once again that Casey Sherman is a master of the genre." —Ben Mezrich, New York Times bestselling author of Dumb Money, Bringing Down the House, and The Accidental Billionaires The dark story behind the bright lights of Tinseltown From the outside, Hollywood starlet Lana Turner seemed to have it all—a thriving film career, a beautiful daughter, and the kind of fame and fortune that most people could only dream of. But when the famous femme fatale began dating mobster Johnny Stompanato, thug for the infamous west coast mob boss Mickey Cohen, her personal life became violent and unpredictable. Lana's teenage daughter, Cheryl, watched her beloved mother's life deteriorate as Stompanato's intense jealousy took over. Eventually, the physical and emotional abuse became too much to bear, and Lana attempted to break it off with Johnny—with disastrous consequences. The details of what happened that fateful night remain foggy, but it ended in a series of frantic phone calls and Stompanato dead on Lana's bedroom floor, with Cheryl claiming to have plunged a knife into his abdomen in an attempt to protect her mother. The subsequent murder trial made for the biggest headlines of the year, its drama eclipsing every Hollywood movie. New York Times bestselling author Casey Sherman pulls back Tinseltown's velvet curtain to reveal the dark underbelly of celebrity, rife with toxic masculinity and casual violence against women, and tells the story of Lana Turner and her daughter, who finally stood up to the abuse that plagued their family for years. A Murder in Hollywood transports us back to the golden age of film and illuminates one of the 20th century's most notorious true crime tales.

Winner - 2022 Richard Wall Memorial Award, Theatre Library Association Beginning in the 1920s, audiences around the globe were seduced not only by Hollywood films but also by lavish movie theaters that were owned and operated by the major American film companies. These theaters aimed to provide a quintessentially “American” experience. Outfitted with American technology and accoutrements, they allowed local audiences to watch American films in an American-owned cinema in a distinctly American way. In a history that stretches from Buenos Aires and Tokyo to Johannesburg and Cairo, Ross Melnick considers these movie houses as cultural embassies. He examines how the exhibition of Hollywood films became a constant flow of political and consumerist messaging, selling American ideas, products, and power, especially during fractious eras. Melnick demonstrates that while Hollywood’s marketing of luxury and consumption often struck a chord with local audiences, it was also frequently tone-deaf to new social, cultural, racial, and political movements. He argues that the story of Hollywood’s global cinemas is not a simple narrative of cultural and industrial indoctrination and colonization. Instead, it is one of negotiation, booms and busts, successes and failures, adoptions and rejections, and a precursor to later conflicts over the spread of American consumer culture. A truly global account, Hollywood’s Embassies shows how the entanglement of worldwide movie theaters with American empire offers a new way of understanding film history and the history of U.S. soft power.

Bizarre inside stories of Hollywood's most beautiful women who were doomed for death. Hollywood's Babylon Women takes the reader behind closed doors and beyond the official reports of law enforcement agencies and studio public relations departments to reveal the sordid romantic, sexual, political and financial factors behind these tragedies. Photos.