Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History
Contemporary Approaches to Film and Television
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Narrated by:
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Brian E. Smith
About this listen
The pantheon of big-budget, commercially successful films encompasses a range of genres, including biblical films, war films, romances, comic-book adaptations, animated features, and historical epics. In Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History authors Sheldon Hall and Steve Neale discuss the characteristics, history, and modes of distribution and exhibition that unite big-budget pictures, from their beginnings in the late nineteenth century to the present. Moving chronologically, the authors examine the roots of today's blockbuster in the "feature," "special," "superspecial," "roadshow," "epic," and "spectacle" of earlier eras, with special attention to the characteristics of each type of picture.
In the first section, Hall and Neale consider the beginnings of features, specials, and superspecials in American cinema, as the terms came to define not the length of a film but its marketable stars or larger budget. The second section investigates roadshowing as a means of distributing specials and the changes to the roadshow that resulted from the introduction of synchronized sound in the 1920s.
In the third section, the authors examine the phenomenon of epics and spectacles that arose from films like Gone with the Wind, Samson and Deliliah, and Spartacus and continues to evolve today in films like Spider-Man and Pearl Harbor. Hall and Neale consider advances in visual and sound technology and the effects and costs they introduced to the industry.
Scholars of film and television studies as well as readers interested in the history of American moviemaking will enjoy Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters.
©2010 Wayne State University Press (P)2013 Redwood AudiobooksListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
Universal Studios never really wanted to get into the theme park business. They wanted to be the anti-Disney. But when forced to do so, they did it in a big way. Despite the fits and starts of multiple owners, the parks have finally gained the momentum to mount a serious challenge to the Walt Disney Company. How did this happen? Who made it happen? What does this mean for the theme park industry?
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Dull and VERY Misleading Title
- By MagicMan504 on 03-19-16
By: Sam Gennawey
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Designers & Dragons: The '70s
- A History of the Roleplaying Game Industry
- By: Shannon Appelcline
- Narrated by: Colby Elliott
- Length: 14 hrs and 38 mins
- Unabridged
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Designers & Dragons: The ’70s is a comprehensive picture of the beginnings of the RPG industry. This second edition expands the original single book into a series of four, and we’ve added over 50,000 new words to this volume alone. Learn about the colorful history of TSR and the wave of D&D inspired games (and gaming companies) to follow, and dip your toes into war gaming trivia. Regardless of your gaming background, Shannon Appelcline’s meticulously researched history won’t disappoint.
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the forgotten realm of where RPGs arize
- By RAW-ATX on 01-02-22
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With Amusement for All
- A History of American Popular Culture since 1830
- By: LeRoy Ashby
- Narrated by: Kevin Pierce
- Length: 33 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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With Amusement for All is the first comprehensive history of two centuries of mass entertainment in the United States, covering everything from the penny press to Playboy, the NBA to NASCAR, big band to hip hop, and other topics including film, comics, television, sports, and music. Paying careful attention to matters of race, gender, class, economics, and politics, LeRoy Ashby emphasizes the complex ways in which popular culture simultaneously reflects and transforms American culture.
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So Much Fun!
- By Paul on 11-28-13
By: LeRoy Ashby
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The Master Switch
- The Rise and Fall of Information Empires
- By: Tim Wu
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 14 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Could history repeat itself, with one giant entity taking control of American information? Most consider the Internet Age to be a moment of unprecedented freedom in communications and culture. But as Tim Wu shows, each major new medium, from telephone to cable, arrived on a similar wave of idealistic optimism only to become, eventually, the object of industrial consolidation profoundly affecting how Americans communicate.
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Great Read
- By Roy on 11-12-10
By: Tim Wu
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Death of the Territories
- Expansion, Betrayal and the War That Changed Pro Wrestling Forever
- By: Tim Hornbaker
- Narrated by: Kyle Tait
- Length: 11 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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By creating WrestleMania, jumping into the pay-per-view field, and expanding across North America, Vince McMahon changed professional wrestling forever.
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An Enjoyable Listen
- By Casey on 03-21-19
By: Tim Hornbaker
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We Don't Need Roads
- The Making of the Back to the Future Trilogy
- By: Caseen Gaines
- Narrated by: Ron Butler
- Length: 8 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Long before Marty McFly and Doc Brown traveled through time in a flying DeLorean, director Robert Zemeckis and his friend and writing partner Bob Gale worked tirelessly to break into the industry with a hit. For the first time ever, the story of how these two young filmmakers struck lightning is being told by those who witnessed it. We Don't Need Roads includes original interviews with Zemeckis, Gale, Christopher Lloyd, Lea Thompson, Huey Lewis, and over 50 others who contributed to one of the most popular and profitable film trilogies of all time.
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Great for fans - good for others.
- By Pete Johns on 06-25-15
By: Caseen Gaines
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The Mirage Factory
- Illusion, Imagination, and the Invention of Los Angeles
- By: Gary Krist
- Narrated by: Rob Shapiro
- Length: 11 hrs and 55 mins
- Unabridged
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Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California - bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges - seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer; D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture; and Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist.
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Great start, weak completion
- By steve on 05-11-21
By: Gary Krist
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Americana
- A 400-Year History of American Capitalism
- By: Bhu Srinivasan
- Narrated by: Scott Brick, Bhu Srinivasan
- Length: 21 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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From the days of the Mayflower and the Virginia Company, America has been a place for people to dream, invent, build, tinker, and bet the farm in pursuit of a better life. Americana takes us on a 400-year journey of this spirit of innovation and ambition through a series of Next Big Things - the inventions, techniques, and industries that drove American history forward: from the telegraph, the railroad, guns, radio, and banking, to flight, suburbia, and sneakers, culminating with the Internet and mobile technology at the turn of the 21st century.
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Excellent history!
- By L. Maranto on 10-14-17
By: Bhu Srinivasan
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Competition Demystified
- A Radically Simplified Approach to Business Strategy
- By: Judd Kahn, Bruce C. Greenwald
- Narrated by: Timothy Andrés Pabon
- Length: 14 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Bruce Greenwald, one of the nation's leading business professors, presents a new and simplified approach to strategy that cuts through much of the fog that has surrounded the subject. Based on his hugely popular course at Columbia Business School, Greenwald and his co-author, Judd Kahn, offer an easy-to-follow method for understanding the competitive structure of your industry and developing an appropriate strategy for your specific position.
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Prof, we need the figures/graphs that’s in the the book
- By sid on 12-25-20
By: Judd Kahn, and others
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The Image, 50th Anniversary Edition
- A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
- By: Daniel J. Boorstin, Douglas Rushkoff - afterword
- Narrated by: Timothy Danko
- Length: 10 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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First published in 1962, this wonderfully provocative book introduced the notion of "pseudo-events" - events such as press conferences and presidential debates, which are manufactured solely in order to be reported - and the contemporary definition of celebrity as "a person who is known for his well-knownness". Since then Daniel J. Boorstin's prophetic vision of an America inundated by its own illusions has become an essential resource for any listeners who wants to distinguish the manifold deceptions of our culture from its few enduring truths.
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Boorstin’s deep Conservative mindset reaches through every example in this book.
- By Christine on 10-12-20
By: Daniel J. Boorstin, and others
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Age of Cage
- Four Decades of Hollywood Through One Singular Career
- By: Keith Phipps
- Narrated by: Keith Sellon-Wright
- Length: 8 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Nicolas Cage is many things, but love him, or laugh at him, there's no denying two things: You've seen one of his many films, and you certainly know his name. But who is he, really, and why has his career endured for over 40 years, with more than a hundred films, and birthed a million memes? Age of Cage is a smart, beguiling book about the films of Nicolas Cage and the actor himself, as well as a sharp-eyed examination of the changes that have taken place in Hollywood over the course of his career.
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Excellent filmography of a successful career
- By Pamela Plimpton on 04-04-22
By: Keith Phipps
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American Rebel
- The Life of Clint Eastwood
- By: Marc Eliot
- Narrated by: Marc Eliot
- Length: 12 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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From the New York Times best-selling author Marc Eliot comes the definitive biography of one of the most critically acclaimed and commercially successful actors, producers, and directors in the history of American motion pictures. Marc Eliot examines the ever-exciting, often tumultuous arc of Eastwood's life and career, from his days as a disaffected college dropout, to his rise to fame as the archetypal loner, to his acceptance into the pantheon of the Academy as a multiple Oscar Award winner.
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I learned the hard way.
- By Ty Pritchard on 07-23-10
By: Marc Eliot
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Behemoth
- A History of the Factory and the Making of the Modern World
- By: Joshua B. Freeman
- Narrated by: Stephen Bowlby
- Length: 13 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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We live in a factory-made world: modern life is built on three centuries of advances in factory production, efficiency, and technology. But giant factories have also fueled our fears about the future since their beginnings, when William Blake called them "dark Satanic mills". Many factories that operated over the last two centuries - such as Homestead, River Rouge, and Foxconn - were known for the labor exploitation and class warfare they engendered, not to mention the environmental devastation caused by factory production.
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Get rid of the fake accents
- By J. R. Valery on 03-13-18
What listeners say about Epics, Spectacles, and Blockbusters: A Hollywood History
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Troy
- 09-25-15
Detail, Names, and Statistics
I took a course in film history back in college, and while I won't go into detail, suffice it to say it was a joke. This is the book that outlines what I wish they had taught. I want to go back in time with a physical copy of it and beat my professors over the head with it.
What's inside here is an almost complete look at the evolution of the Hollywood blockbuster machine, just as the title of the book implies. Fair warning to the uninitiated: if you're not already familiar with the lingo, you'll get no real definitions here. For all things there is Google. This book will expect you to know the difference between roadshows, grindhouse, reserve ticket, and things of that nature. Easy enough to wrap your head around. It will also outline the differences in process as the evolution goes, so you'll learn about Cinemascope, Vistascope, Panavision, Dolby, and other such things, and how it all fits together. The spotlight is on the process, the commercial trends, and the development of how things became what they are today. It's not exactly in chronological order, but it is told generally that way with an eye towards sweeping trends first, so there is some overlap here and there in the timeline.
The narrator gives a solid delivery, though I had to grin whenever he does a direct quote from any source. All quoted passages are delivered in what I call "golfer announcer voice." He drops his tone to a kind of a whisper and removes all expression from it. On the plus column, he's more upbeat when the text doesn't directly quote.
All in all, this one's for the film buffs and armchair historians who like to peek behind the scenes. It could be better, it could be more in-depth on certain stories, but it will definitely offer a breadth of material with deliberate focus and will point you towards more research if you so desire.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Anonymous User
- 01-30-23
Even included Cinerama
The author got it right. So many times I get books about the movie business where dates are wrong or details are wrong. Everything in this book was spot on. This book covered the widescreen era of the 1950's and 1960's, which most film history books ignore. If you're interested in the business end of Hollywood, especially in distribution, you'll love this one
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- APS
- 02-19-19
Interesting film history
Focused on production and distribution economics, technological innovation, and on the films and genres of biggest US films. Not focused on aesthetics.
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- Ray Bergen
- 02-18-18
Well narrated, but the content was not spectacular
This book, although well narrated, was mostly facts and figures... Very dry to listen to
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