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"Smyth, J. E., 1977- author"
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Nobody's girl Friday : the women who ran Hollywood
\"Disillusioned with what the American film industry had become by the 1970s, Bette Davis remembered a time when \"women owned Hollywood.\" This book is their story. Historian J.E. Smyth challenges the belief, reinforced in too many histories and public comments, that feminism died between 1930 and 1950, that women were not important within the Hollywood studio system, that male directors called all the shots, and that the most important Hollywood writer you should know about is Dalton Trumbo\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance
Fred Zinnemann directed some of the most acclaimed and controversial films of the twentieth century, yet he has been a shadowy presence in Hollywood history. InFred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistance, J. E. Smyth reveals the intellectual passion behind some of the most powerful films ever made about the rise and resistance to fascism and the legacy of the Second World War, fromThe Seventh CrossandThe Search to High Noon, From Here to Eternity, andJulia. Smyth's book is the first to draw upon Zinnemann's extensive papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and brings Fred Zinnemann's vision, voice, and film practice to life.
In his engagement with the defining historical struggles of the twentieth century, Zinnemann fought his own battles with the Hollywood studio system, the critics, and a public bent on forgetting. Zinnemann's films explore the role of women and communists in the antifascist resistance, the West's support of Franco after the Spanish Civil War, and the darker side of America's national heritage. Smyth reconstructs a complex and conflicted portrait of Zinnemann's cinema of resistance, examining his sketches, script annotations, editing and production notes, and personal letters. Illustrated with seventy black-and-white images from Smyth's collection,Fred Zinnemann and the Cinema of Resistancediscusses the director's professional and personal relationships with Spencer Tracy, Montgomery Clift, Audrey Hepburn, Vanessa Redgrave, and Gary Cooper; the critical reaction to his revisionist Western,High Noon; his battles over the censorship ofFrom Here to Eternity, The Nun's Story, andBehold a Pale Horse; his unrealized history of the communist Revolution in China,Man's Fate; and the controversial study of political assassination,The Day of the Jackal. In this intense, richly textured narrative, Smyth enters the mind of one of Hollywood's master directors, redefining our knowledge of his artistic vision and practice.
eBook
Reconstructing American Historical Cinema
In Reconstructing American Historical Cinema: From Cimarron to Citizen Kane, J. E. Smyth dramatically departs from the traditional understanding of the relationship between film and history. By looking at production records, scripts, and contemporary reviews, Smyth argues that certain classical Hollywood filmmakers were actively engaged in a self-conscious and often critical filmic writing of national history. Her volume is a major reassessment of American historiography and cinematic historians from the advent of sound to the beginning of wartime film production in 1942. Focusing on key films such as Cimarron (1931), The Public Enemy (1931), Scarface (1932), Ramona (1936), A Star Is Born (1937), Jezebel (1938), Young Mr. Lincoln (1939), Gone with the Wind (1939), Stagecoach (1939), and Citizen Kane (1941), Smyth explores historical cinema's connections to popular and academic historigraphy, historical fiction, and journalism, providing a rich context for the industry's commitment to American history. Rather than emphasizing the divide between American historical cinema and historical writing, Smyth explores the continuities between Hollywood films and history written during the first four decades of the twentieth century, from Carl Becker's famous \"Everyman His Own Historian\" to Howard Hughes's Scarface to Margaret Mitchell and David O. Selznick's Gone with the Wind. Hollywood's popular and often controversial cycle of historical films from 1931 to 1942 confronted issues as diverse as frontier racism and women's experiences in the nineteenth-century South, the decline of American society following the First World War, the rise of Al Capone, and the tragic history of Hollywood's silent era. Looking at rarely discussed archival material, Smyth focuses on classical Hollywood filmmakers' adaptation and scripting of traditional historical discourse and their critical revision of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American history. Reconstructing American Historical Cinema uncovers Hollywood's diverse and conflicted attitudes toward American history. This text is a fundamental challenge the prevailing scholarship in film, history, and cultural studies.
eBook
Edna Ferber's Hollywood : American fictions of gender, race, and history
Edna Ferber's Hollywood reveals one of the most influential artistic relationships of the twentieth century—the four-decade partnership between historical novelist Edna Ferber and the Hollywood studios. Ferber was one of America's most controversial popular historians, a writer whose uniquely feminist, multiracial view of the national past deliberately clashed with traditional narratives of white masculine power. Hollywood paid premium sums to adapt her novels, creating some of the most memorable films of the studio era—among them Show Boat, Cimarron, and Giant. Her historical fiction resonated with Hollywood's interest in prestigious historical filmmaking aimed principally, but not exclusively, at female audiences. In Edna Ferber's Hollywood, J. E. Smyth explores the research, writing, marketing, reception, and production histories of Hollywood's Ferber franchise. Smyth tracks Ferber's working relationships with Samuel Goldwyn, Leland Hayward, George Stevens, and James Dean; her landmark contract negotiations with Warner Bros.; and the controversies surrounding Giant's critique of Jim-Crow Texas. But Edna Ferber's Hollywood is also the study of the historical vision of an American outsider—a woman, a Jew, a novelist with few literary pretensions, an unashamed middlebrow who challenged the prescribed boundaries among gender, race, history, and fiction. In a masterful film and literary history, Smyth explores how Ferber's work helped shape Hollywood's attitude toward the American past.
eBook