Made In America Read Online Free PDF

line: ‘By William Shakespeare, with additional dialogue by Sam Taylor.’ 15 Possibly the most choleric credit line appeared on the 1974 movie The Taking of Pelham 123, which concerned the hijacking of a New York subway train and finished with the closing line: ‘Madewithout any help whatsoever from the New York Transport Authority.’
    No discussion of the lexicon of Hollywood would be complete without at least a passing mention of the Oscars and how these golden statuettes got their name. Few terms in any creative field have engendered more varied explanations of an etymology. The most plausible story perhaps is that the figure was named by Margaret Herrick, a librarian at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, who said upon seeing the prototype, ‘Oh, that reminds me of my Uncle Oscar’ (whose surname, for the record, was Pierce). 16 But it must be said there are many other similar versions to choose from. What is certain is that the figure of a naked man with a long sword standing on a film can originated as a doodle by Cedric Gibbons, the MGM art director, and that the first one was awarded in 1929.
    In 1949, after nearly half a century of continuous, seemingly unstoppable success, Hollywood’s executives got a shock when movie attendances slumped from 90 million to just 70 million in a single year. Matters would grow increasingly more fearful for them as the 1950s unfolded and Americans abandoned the movie theatres for the glowing comforts of their own televisions. In desperation the studios tried to make the most of whatever advantages they could muster. One was colour. Colour movies had been possible since as far back as 1917, when a Dr Herbert Kalmus invented a process he called Technicolor. The first Technicolor movie was Toll of the Sea, made by MGM in 1922. But the process was expensive and therefore little used. In 1947, only about a tenth of movies were in colour. By 1954 well over half were. Hollywood studios also responded by forbidding their stars to appear on the new medium, and by denying television networks access to their library of films, until it gradually dawned on them that old movies generated money when shown on television and didn’t when locked in vaults.
    But what was needed was some new technique, some blockbuster development, that television couldn’t compete with. In September 1952 the world – or at least an audience at New York’s Broadway Theatre – was introduced to a startling new process called Cinerama. Employing a curved screen, stereophonic sound and three projectors, it provided watchers with the dizzying sensation of being on a Coney Island roller-coaster or whizzing perilously through the Grand Canyon. People loved it. But Cinerama had certain intractable shortcomings, notably distractingly wobbly lines where the three projected images joined, and an absence of theatres in which to show it. It cost $75,000 to convert a theatre to Cinerama, more than most could afford. There was also the problem that the process didn’t lend itself to narrative performances and the few Cinerama movies that were made, such as This Is Cinerama, Cinerama Holiday, and Cinerama South Seas Adventure, consisted mainly of a succession of thrills. In 1962, as a kind of last gasp effort to save the process (theatre owners who had invested heavily in the massive screens and projector systems naturally wanted to put them to use) two narrative films were made, How the West Was Won and The Wonderful World of the Brothers Grimm, but the problem of having to swivel your head to follow a conversation between characters separated by sixty feet of screen was one that audiences failed to warm to.
    In the same year that Cinerama was born, the world was also given 3-D movies. The first was a film called Bwana Devil, apparently one of the worst movies ever made. The process involved slightly overlapping images which melded into a three-dimensional whole once the viewer donned special Polaroid glasses.