Word: studio
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...lionize directors who develop groundbreaking styles or who come to dominate and define a genre - men like Hitchcock, Welles, Hawks and Ford. But what of the filmmaker who didn't try to stick out so much as fit in; the man-for-hire who could saddle up to any studio assignment - even a work in progress - and mold it to perfection? In Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master, Baltimore Sun film critic Michael Sragow argues that Fleming - who directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind - was such a man, denied his rightful place in the cinematic pantheon...
...jumped between westerns, family films, epic period pieces and goofball buddy pictures, Fleming's rapid climb up the studio ladder came in large part thanks to the friendships he cultivated with such movie stars as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Clark Gable and Gary Cooper. In particular, his association with Fairbanks got Fleming into the studios, affording the young director not only considerable clout but also an education as to how to tolerate, befriend and mentor major movie stars. It's a skill that was put to good use in working with Judy Garland in Oz and Gable in Gone With...
...Highlight Reel: On Fleming's introduction to MGM, the studio that served as his de facto home: "On October 2, 1931, Fleming received the most important document of his professional life. MGM delivered a letter of agreement for him to direct 'one photoplay' within a seventeen-week period for a salary of $40,000. For most of the 1930s, similar notes would fly back and forth between Victor's lawyers and the studio, because he resisted any long-term contract. Fleming would soon become the MGM director. In 1971, for an oral history project at Columbia University, the producer Pandro...
...score as few did, working his way up the ladder to take control of some of the most ambitious, unwieldy and risky epics in movie history. For readers with a limited knowledge of the movie industry, its transition from silents to talkies, and the rise of the big studio picture, Sragow's thorough scene-setting could double as a cinematic history lesson - illuminating the many famous lives that Fleming touched (and helped to shape) and the ways in which sets, casts, contracts and careers worked during Hollywood's grand glory days...
Established in 1933, SAG arrived at a time when actors were to Hollywood studios what cattle are to ranchers: they were bound to multi-year, exclusive contracts, unable to choose their own films, their own career paths or, in some cases, their own relationships. Actors were essentially the studios' property, and anyone who dared protest - Bette Davis and Olivia de Havilland, for example - was suspended, effectively blacklisted for a time. The first SAG-studio contract was signed in 1937, but it was only following the Supreme Court's 1948 anti-trust decision against Paramount Studios, which broke the studio monopoly...