Faced with the challenges that inevitably occur in small markets, feature film production in Jamaica has been sporadic and uneven, yet local filmmakers have succeeded in creating a small but exciting body of work that is receiving increasing attention. Organized as a series of discussions on a selection of the more well-known Jamaican films, this study employs close readings of these texts to reveal their complexity, sophistication and artistry. The...

Lara Ivory is a movie star -- an incandescent beauty with cat-like green eyes, full luscious lips, and honey blond hair. Lara has been at the top of her profession for eight years and everybody loves her. But at thirty-two she cannot find a man who can handle being with such an exquisite object of desire. Her ex-husband, Richard Barry, an extremely successful veteran film director, is currently married to Nikki, a feisty brunette clothes designer...

It is in the nature of today's movie business that while Hollywood blockbusters invade every megaplex, smaller, quality films often don't get screen time. Fans of finer films have to count on catching up with them on video and DVD, but even the most hard-core devotees have trouble remembering what sounded good when a film was originally released. “Never Coming to a Theater Near You” will remedy that situation. This selection of renowned film...

In this insightful study of Hollywood cinema since 1969, film historian Nick Smedley traces the cultural and intellectual heritage of American films, showing how the more thoughtful recent cinema owes a profound debt to Hollywood's traditions of liberalism, first articulated in the New Deal era. Although American cinema is not usually thought of as politically or socially engaged, Smedley demonstrates how Hollywood can be seen as one of the most value-laden...

"Romantic-comedy-obsessed Annie Cassidy dreams of being the next Nora Ephron. She spends her days writing internet content, rewatching Sleepless in Seattle, and waiting for her movie-perfect meet cute. If she could just find her own Tom Hanks--a man who's sweet, sensitive, and possibly owns a houseboat--her problems would disappear and her life would be perfect. But Tom Hanks is nowhere in sight. When a movie starts filming in her neighborhood and...

Meet the Weiss family, who are making their way in Hollywood rife with money, fame, envy, and relentless hauntings. Stafford Weiss is a famed TV self-help therapist with an A-list celebrity clientele. Meanwhile, Cristina Weiss has her work cut out managing the career of their disaffected child-star son, Benjie, a fresh graduate of rehab at age thirteen. Yet unbeknownst to them, another member of the Weiss family has arrived in town, mysteriously scarred...

It's like something out of a Hollywood potboiler: start out in the mailroom, end up a mogul. Only for dozens of Hollywood's brightest, it happens to be true. Some of the biggest names in entertainment-including David Geffen, Barry Diller, and Mike Ovitz-began as trainees in musty talent agency mailrooms. Now, in this fascinating new book, veteran Hollywood writer David Rensin travels behind the scenes and through sixty-five years of show business...

"A personal and cultural exploration of the struggles between art and business at the heart of modern Hollywood, through the eyes of the talent that shaped it Matthew Specktor grew up in the film industry: the son of legendary CAA superagent Fred Specktor, his childhood was one where Beau Bridges came over for dinner, Martin Sheen's daughter was his close friend, and Marlon Brando left long messages on the family answering machine. He would eventually...

"JFK, Nixon, Oliver Stone and Me” is the funny, thoughtful memoir of an accomplished former Congressional staffer who left D.C. for Hollywood and a job with Oliver Stone...

Argues that Indian cinema's deep nineteenth-century past continues to play a vital role in its twenty-first-century present. In A Very Old Machine, Sudhir Mahadevan shows how Indian cinema's many origins in the technologies and practices of the nineteenth century continue to play a vital and broad function in its twenty-first-century present. He proposes that there has never been a singular cinema in India; rather, Indian cinema has been a multifaceted...