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\"Slow Fade to Black completes Richard B. Jewell's richly detailed two-part history of the RKO film studio, which began with RKO Radio Pictures: A Titan Is Born, published in 2012. This second volume charts the studio's fortunes, which peaked during World War II, declined in the post-war period, and finally collapsed in the 1950s. With unparalleled access to archival materials, Jewell chronicles the period from 1942 to the company's demise in 1957. Some of the towering figures associated with the studio were Howard Hughes, Orson Welles, Charles Koerner, Val Lewton, Jane Russell, and Robert Mitchum. In addition to its colorful cast of characters, the RKO narrative features key moments in entertainment history: Hollywood collaboration with Washington, film noir, censorship, HUAC, the rise of independent film production, and the impact of television on film. Taken as a whole, Jewell's two-volume study represents the most substantial and insightful exploration of the Hollywood studio system to date\"-- Provided by publisher.

In January of 1965, twenty-four-year-old U.S. Army sergeant Charles Robert Jenkins abandoned his post in South Korea, walked across the DMZ, and surrendered to communist North Korean soldiers standing sentry along the world's most heavily militarized border. He believed his action would get him back to the States and a short jail sentence. Instead he found himself in another sort of prison, where for forty years he suffered under one of the most brutal and repressive regimes the world has known. This fast-paced, harrowing tale, told plainly and simply by Jenkins (with journalist Jim Frederick), takes the reader behind the North Korean curtain and reveals the inner workings of its isolated society while offering a powerful testament to the human spirit.

Postmodern traces Welles's impact on contemporary media narratives, focusing on four emerging narrative modes found in the unfinished RKO films: deconstruction of the first-person singular, adaptation of classic texts for mass media, exploration of the self via primitivism, and examination of the line between reality and fiction. Ultimately, these four narrative styles would enormously impact the development of mass media entertainment, and they still resonate today in popular modes like the “mock”umentary and reality television

Death of the Mogulsis a detailed assessment of the last days of the \"rulers of film.\" Wheeler Winston Dixon examines the careers of such moguls as Harry Cohn at Columbia, Louis B. Mayer at MGM, Jack L. Warner at Warner Brothers, Adolph Zukor at Paramount, and Herbert J. Yates at Republic in the dying days of their once-mighty empires. He asserts that the sheer force of personality and business acumen displayed by these moguls made the studios successful; their deaths or departures hastened the studios' collapse. Almost none had a plan for leadership succession; they simply couldn't imagine a world in which they didn't reign supreme. Covering 20th Century-Fox, Selznick International Pictures, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, Paramount Pictures, RKO Radio Pictures, Warner Brothers, Universal Pictures, Republic Pictures, Monogram Pictures and Columbia Pictures, Dixon briefly introduces the studios and their respective bosses in the late 1940s, just before the collapse, then chronicles the last productions from the studios and their eventual demise in the late 1950s and early 1960s. He details such game-changing factors as the de Havilland decision, which made actors free agents; the Consent Decree, which forced the studios to get rid of their theaters; how the moguls dealt with their collapsing empires in the television era; and the end of the conventional studio assembly line, where producers had rosters of directors, writers, and actors under their command.Complemented by rare, behind-the-scenes stills,Death of the Mogulsis a compelling narrative of the end of the studio system at each of the Hollywood majors as television, the de Havilland decision, and the Consent Decree forced studios to slash payrolls, make the shift to color, 3D, and CinemaScope in desperate last-ditch efforts to save their kingdoms. The aftermath for some was the final switch to television production and, in some cases, the distribution of independent film.

How science fiction films in the 1950s were marketed and helped create the broader genre itself. For Hollywood, the golden age of science fiction was also an age of anxiety. Amid rising competition, fluid audience habits, and increasing government regulation, studios of the 1950s struggled to make and sell the kinds of films that once were surefire winners. These conditions, the leading media scholar J. P. Telotte argues, catalyzed the incredible rise of science fiction. Though science fiction films had existed since the earliest days of cinema, the SF genre as a whole continued to resist easy definition through the 1950s. In grappling with this developing genre, the industry began to consider new marketing approaches that viewed films as fluid texts and audiences as ever-changing. Drawing on trade reports, film reviews, pressbooks, trailers, and other archival materials, Selling Science Fiction Cinema reconstructs studio efforts to market a promising new genre and, in the process, shows how salesmanship influenced what that genre would become. Telotte uses such films as The Thing from Another World , Forbidden Planet , and The Blob , as well as the influx of Japanese monster movies, to explore the shifting ways in which the industry reframed the SF genre to market to no-longer static audience expectations. Science fiction transformed the way Hollywood does business, just as Hollywood transformed the meaning of science fiction.

Hailed for its dramatic expressionist visuals, film noir is one of the most prominent genres in Hollywood cinema. Yet, despite the \"boom\" in sound studies, the role of sonic effects and source music in classic American noir has not received the attention it deserves.Siren Cityengagingly illustrates how sound tracks in 1940s film noir are often just as compelling as the genre's vaunted graphics.Focusing on a wide range of celebrated and less well known films and offering an introductory discussion of film sound, Robert Miklitsch mobilizes the notion of audiovisuality to investigate period sound technologies such as the radio and jukebox, phonograph and Dictaphone, popular American music such as \"hot\" black jazz, and \"big numbers\" featuring iconic performers such as Lauren Bacall, Veronica Lake, and Rita Hayworth.Siren Cityresonates with the sounds and source music of classic American noir-gunshots and sirens, swing riffs and canaries. Along with the proverbial private eye and femme fatale, these audiovisuals are central to the noir aesthetic and one important reason the genre reverberates with audiences around the world.

The dismissal of Orson Welles from his contract at RKO is one of the most debated topics in the history of American film. This article examines the corporate background behind this decision through the role of Floyd Odlum and the Atlas Corporation in engineering Welles's dismissal. It then explains the company strategy that Odlum pursued vis-à-vis his assumption of control at RKO, against the backdrop of Atlas as a large US investment firm. It also re-examines Welles's claim that (apart from It's All True ) his films never went over-budget. By bringing these elements together, a new understanding of why Welles was dismissed from RKO is obtained.