Word: hollywoodism
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...Williams (1893-1969) was a large, boisterous actor-singer best known for playing Andy Brown in the early-50s TV series "Amos 'n' Andy." In early-talkies Hollywood he had worked as a sound technician for Christy Studios, helped write a series of black-cast shorts based on the stories of Octavius Roy Cohen and appeared in all four Herb Jeffries black Westerns of the late 30s. In 1940 he wrote and appeared in the cheapie black-cast horror movie "Son of Ingagi," He was then hired by Dallas exhibitor Al Sack to write and direct films, apparently with...
...Griffith's film, the Chicago-based brothers George and Noble Johnson had set up the Lincoln Motion Picture Company and released "The Realization of a Negro's Ambition." Soon entrepreneurs, black and white, were making black-cast pictures in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, Jacksonville, Fla. - virtually everywhere but Hollywood. Eventually some 500 race films were made and were shown in an equal number of segregated movie houses...
...their artlessness, they were also clear mirrors of their time, perhaps of their audiences, certainly of their writers and directors. For in most race films, as in mainstream Hollywood product, it was white people taking the pictures. They imitated the Hollywood genres of comedy, melodrama, musicals and Westerns. Race movies were counterfeit white movies - faux-ofay. And though the producers surely didn't intend to offend their customers, black-cast pictures flaunted racial stereotypes: idle bucks spending the rent money on dice games and numbers policies, and the women who love them. In the 1939 "Moon Over Harlem," directed...
...makes this Spider-Man a nest of conflicting ambitions. Every Hollywood marketing impulse screams for the movie to be zippily cartoonish. Yet the story is also Rebel Without a Cause: an agitated boy, the girl he loves, his best friend (James Franco as the Goblin's son) and some adults who never quite get it. Will Spider-Man be Ghostbusters or Ghost World...
...still end up on top. The same applies to Marvel, the company that created him. Four years ago, it was in Chapter 11, but three hit films based on Marvel comics--1998's Blade, 2000's X-Men and this year's Blade II--have made it a Hollywood hulk, with studios hustling to put its characters onscreen. Marvel earned $19 million in the last quarter of 2001, its first in the black since the bankruptcy. "There's an instantaneous awareness of Marvel properties among a lot of people, and that translates into dollars and cents," says Amir Malin...