Established in 1919 by Hollywood's top talent United Artists has had an illustrious history, from Hollywood minor to industry leader to a second-tier media company in the shadow of MGM. This edited collection brings together leading film historians to examine key aspects of United Artists' centennial history from its origins to the sometimes chaotic developments of the last four decades. The focus is on several key executives – ranging from Joseph Schenck to Paula Wagner and Tom Cruise – and on many of the people making films for United Artists, including Gloria Swanson, David O. Selznick, Kirk Douglas, the Mirisch brothers and Woody Allen. Drawing on a wide range of primary sources, individual case studies explore the mutually supportive but also in places highly contentious relationships between United Artists and its producers, the difficult balance between artistic and commercial objectives, and the resulting hits and misses (among them The General, the Pink Panther franchise, Heaven’s Gate, Cruising, and Hot Tub Time Machine). The second volume in the Routledge Hollywood Centenary series, United Artists is a fascinating and comprehensive study of the firm’s history and legacy, perfect for students and researchers of cinema and film history, media industries, and Hollywood.

United Artists was a unique motion picture company in the history of Hollywood. Founded by Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, and director D.W. Griffith—four of the greatest names of the silent era—United Artists functioned as a distribution company for independent producers. In this lively and detailed history of United Artists from 1919 through 1951, film scholar Tino Balio chronicles the company’s struggle for survival, its rise to prominence as the Tiffany of the industry, and its near extinction in the 1940s. This edition is updated with a new introduction by Balio that places in relief UA’s operations for those readers who may be unfamiliar with film industry practices and adds new perspective to the company’s place within Hollywood.

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.

The New Historical Dictionary of the American Film Industry is a completely revised and updated edition of Anthony Slide's The American Film Industry, originally published in 1986 and recipient of the American Library Association's Outstanding Reference Book award for that year. More than 200 new entries have been added, and all original entries have been updated; each entry is followed by a short bibliography. As its predecessor, the new dictionary is unique in that it is not a who's who of the industry, but rather a what's what: a dictionary of producing and releasing companies, technical innovations, industry terms, studios, genres, color systems, institutions and organizations, etc. More than 800 entries include everything from Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences to Zoom Lens, from Astoria Studios to Zoetrope. Outstanding Reference Source - American Library Association

The Evil Twins of American Television examines evil-twin depictions in over fifty years of television, comparing male twins to female twins and male-writer depictions to female-writer depictions. Kristi Rowan Humphreys evaluates The Patty Duke Show, Bewitched, Gilligan’s Island, I Dream of Jeannie, and The Brady Bunch, among other television programs that use the twinning trope to explore themes of feminism and identity. Employing traits identified by Betty Friedan in The Feminine Mystique as belonging to the “evil” side of her “schizophrenic split” theory, Humphreys analyzes the ways in which these alter ego characters embody the desire for a separate self and independence through loose inhibitions, career interests, political interests, intellectual prowess, and assertiveness. This book then compares female-written twin episodes to male-written twin episodes, finding that when “evil twin” episodes are written by women writers, the twins are presented less as oppositional binaries and more as compatible, often symbiotic binaries. Thus, the women writers of these shows offer a compelling response to Friedan’s text, one that acknowledges and underscores the many complexities of women—the image of which cannot in reality be so easily split into two oppositional binaries. Humphreys then connects 1960s depictions to more current evil-twin examples, including those in Friends, Knight Rider, and Sabrina the Teenage Witch.

First Published in 2005. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

It is just thirteen inches tall and weighs eight pounds, yet the Oscar has come to exert an hypnotic hold over film performers and audiences alike. This book uses the narrative story of an individual year as the basis of a much broader and historical canvas, to present a portrait of the film world today, and its personalities, finances and power-struggles. It also includes detailed lists of Oscar facts and figures, winners and losers. The author's other books include best-selling biographies of Prince Charles and Laurence Olivier.