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It may be that the song most baby boomers identify from July 1956 is a simple twelve-bar blues, hyped on national television by a twenty-one-year-old Elvis Presley and his handlers But it is a very different song, with its elongated fourteen-bar choruses of rhythm and dissonance, played on the night of July 7, 1956, by a fifty-seven-year-old Duke Ellington and his big band that got everybody on their feet and moving as one. More than fifty years later, "Diminuendo and Crescendo in Blue," recorded at the 1956 Newport Jazz Festival, still makes a profound statement about postwar America - how we got there and where it all went."Backstory in Blue" is a behind-the-scenes look at this epic moment in American cultural history. It is the story of who and what made Ellington's composition so compelling and how one piece of music reflected the feelings and shaped the sensibilities of the postwar generation. As John Fass Morton explains, it was music expressed as much by those who performed offstage as by those who performed on.Written from the point of view of the audience, this unique account draws on interviews with fans and music professionals of all kinds who were there and whose lives were touched, and in some cases changed, by the experience. Included are profiles of George Avakian, who recorded and produced Ellington at Newport 1956; Paul Gonsalves, the tenor sax player responsible for the legendary twenty-seven choruses that enabled the rebirth of Ellington's career; and the "Bedford Blonde," Elaine Anderson, whose dance ignited both the band and the crowd.Duke Ellington once remarked, "I was born at Newport." Here we learn that Newport was much more than the turning point for Ellington's career. It was the tipping point for a generation and a musical genre..
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Fifty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors, including two members of the Hollywood Ten; seminal directors of film noir; starring actresses and equally memorable supporting players; several of Hollywood's top screenwriters; and many others, lesser known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here. Casting a long-overdue light onto not only the blacklist itself but onto the close-knit, vibrant liberal community it decimated, Tender Comrades is the definitive portrait of Hollywood's dark High Noon. .
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Backstory" is the screenwriter's term for what happens in a plot before the screen story begins. In this companion volume to McGilligan's widely praised Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, fourteen studio scribes active in later decades rail and reminisce about their fifty-plus years of inventing and scripting movies. Richard Brooks, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Arthur Laurents, Ben Maddow, Stewart Stern, Daniel Taradash, and Philip Yordan are among the distinguished figures included.
The 1940s were a period of transition for the motion picture industry, from an era of hope and glory and the upheavals of World War II to a postwar era of caution and confusion. The 1950s brought a great decline in the number of films produced and led to the extinction of that peculiar creature, the contract writer.
The survivors of Hollywood's most productive years remain wonderfully talkative, however. In this lively collection of interviews they contribute useful writing tips, radical correctives to screen history and industry folklore, and just plain fascinating gossip. As a whole, the interviews provide a compelling biographical close-up of an entire generation of men and women whose talent, vision, and tenacity were critical to the institution we know as "Hollywood..
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America’s foremost analyst of media and journalism, New Yorker columnist and national bestselling author Ken Auletta has been called the “James Bond of the media world” (BusinessWeek) for his unparalleled access to news sources, keen analysis, smooth writing style, and uncompromising commitment to his profession. In Backstory, Auletta’s piercing gaze sweeps into every corner of a subject that has generated tremendous noise but precious little clear thinking: the state of today’s media. From Howell Raines and the New York Times to Roger Ailes and Fox News to the fractious relationship between President Bush and the press, the essays in Backstory survey the troubled landscape of the people and institutions who tell Americans what to believe. Comprehensive, trenchant, and unflinchingly honest, Backstory is a book that only Ken Auletta could write..
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Influenced by such poets as Lowell, Roethke, Bishop, Frost, Stevens, and inspired by the sacred books of various faiths, Chuck O'Neil's poems speak with elegant, plainspoken reverence. They bear witness to history with clarity and compassion. They affirm hope and seek out the transformation of anger and regret."Backstory" sings praise for the blessings of a life lived in the present moment, all the while bringing healing to the past and embracing the future. You could be tempted On a morning like this,When trees lift leaves and sway, To believe in halcyon days again -That somehow, in the face of all you know About chaos and creaturehood,These high, breezy, sun-soaked days Could be your red-letter days: So weary are you now of Dousing everything with doubt.So great is your desire for Equilibrium,Wings.from Red-letter Days.
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Continuing Patrick McGilligan's highly acclaimed series on Hollywood screenwriters, these engrossing, informative, provocative interviews give wonderfully detailed and personal stories from veteran screenwriters of the seventies and eighties focusing on their craft, their lives, and their profession. Backstory 4 is a riveting insider's look at how movies get made; a rich perspective on many of the great movies, directors, and actors of the seventies and eighties; and an articulate, forthright commentary on the art and the business of screenwriting.
The screenwriters interviewed for this volume include well-known Oscar winners as well as cult filmmakers, important writers who were also distinguished directors, and key practitioners of every commercial genre. These writers have worked with Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, and other film giants of the so-called New Hollywood. The stories of their collaborations--some divine, some disastrous--provide some of the most fascinating material in this volume. They also discuss topics including how they got started writing screenplays, their working routines, their professional relationships, their influences, and the work of other major writers and directors.
Backstory 4 features interviews with Robert Benton, Larry Cohen, Blake Edwards, Walter Hill, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Lawrence Kasdan, Elmore Leonard, Paul Mazursky, Nancy Meyers, John Milius, Frederic Raphael, Alvin Sargent, and Donald E. Westlake..
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The illustrious line-up in this volume includes Hitchcock collaborator Charles Bennett, the sophisticated husband-and-wife team of Frances Goodrich and Albert Hackett, the Astaire-Rogers writer Allan Scott, and many more..
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Back-Story: First Time Tales by the Stranger Next Door is a collection of non-fiction short stories that spans an inspiring scope of first-time experiences. From stand-up comedy in a Boston night club to death in Asia, life in unfamiliar countries, trials of burgeoning adulthood, and discovery of Olympian strengths, these stories illuminate the stories in all of us; tales that make us who we are today. Everyone has a story, even the stranger next door..
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