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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.

Magnetic recording disk carbon overcoats are lubricated with nanometer-thick films of perfluoropolyether lubricant. It is well-known that lubricant thickness redistribution takes place due to air shear stress oscillation at air bearing resonant frequencies and also due to shear stress oscillation induced by disk topography waves on test tracks. We extended this work to demonstrate correlation between surface topography and lubricant redistribution on whole disk surfaces. Lubricant moguls are shown to form over regions of the disk surface which have topography waves that are half the slider length, and the lubricant thickness peak is out-of-phase down track from the topography peak height. There is a critical relative humidity above 20% beyond which moguls are readily formed by the slider flying at 10 nm without thermal fly-height control. The significance of the lubricant redistribution for drive magnetic performance has long been the subject of debate. The slider flying height modulation measured by magnetic head media spacing was in good agreement with the dynamic air bearing simulation based on the measured disk surface topography. Measured head media spacing image data on the same disk surface before and after lubricant redistribution had the same length scale as the correlation between topography and lubricant thickness variation. These results demonstrate that lubricant thickness redistribution on the order of atomic diameters can degrade magnetic performance, and that the surface topography waves alone can degrade areal density by as much as 2%.

We have investigated the resistance of a novel end-functionalized perfluoropolyether (PFPE) lubricant film to slider-disk interactions caused by low-flying sliders. The PFPE lubricant is based on the CF₂CF₂CF₂O main chain monomer unit. Both slider-disk interactions and the formation of lubricant moguls are significantly reduced compared to the Fomblin Z backbone, (CF₂O) p -(CF₂CF₂O) q . These results are interpreted on the basis of ab initio quantum chemical computations that show that the barrier to internal rotation about the C-O bond in the CF₂CF₂CF₂O monomer unit is significantly larger than in the CF₂O monomer unit that is bordered by another CF₂O monomer unit, ~8 kcal/mol compared to <2 kcal/mol, respectively. It is proposed that main chains containing CF₂O monomer units will be very flexible and hence their physical properties will be more sensitive to adhesive and cohesive interactions, while main chains containing CF₂CF₂O and CF₂CF₂CF₂O monomer units will be comparatively stiffer and hence their physical properties will be less sensitive to adhesive and cohesive interactions.

This chapter tracks Vitagraph's physical assets after its sale to Warner Bros., including the Brooklyn and Hollywood studios, as well as the actual films themselves, about 20% of which survive in archives. The post-Vitagraph activities of the company's founding partners is examined, from Blackton's profligacy that resulted in dire poverty, to Smith's second career as owner of the iconic Chateau Marmont hotel and receipt of an honorary Academy Award in recognition of his fundamental contributions to motion pictures. Several post-Vitagraph reunions and the fate of many of its key personnel are covered, including Margaret Gibson, a former ingénue at the Santa Monica and Hollywood studios who led an especially troubled existence. The chapter concludes with an in-depth discussion of how and why Vitagraph has been so utterly absent from the canon of film history.

Alexandra Juhasz asked twenty-one women to tell their stories-women whose names make up a who is (and who will be) who of independent and experimental film and video. What emerged in the resulting conversations is a compelling (and previously underdocumented) history of feminism and feminist film and video, from its origins in the fifties and sixties to its apex in the seventies, to today. Interviewees: Pearl Bowser, Margaret Caples, Michelle Citron, Megan Cunningham, Cheryl Dunye, Vanalyne Green, Barbara Hammer, Kate Horsfield, Carol Leigh, Susan Mogul, Juanita Mohammed, Frances Negrón-Muntaner, Eve Oishi, Constance Penley, Wendy Quinn, Julia Reichert, Carolee Schneemann, Valerie Soe, Victoria Vesna, and Yvonne Welbon.

Hollywood's relationship with Washington refl ected the broad political trends of the Great Depression decade. Once scorned as vulgar Jewish hucksters, the studio moguls looked to achieve social recognition through political identification with the largely White Anglo-Saxon Protestant (WASP) Republican party establishment. For some, most notably MGM's Louis B. Mayer, conservative convictions reinforced status concerns, as was evident in their opposition to the New Deal, the rise of labour unions, and radical causes like Upton Sinclair's End Poverty in California (EPIC) gubernatorial election crusade in 1934. This form of ‘mogul politics’ refl ected the instincts of its promoters: hardness, shrewdness, autocracy and coercion. In contrast, the crisis of the Great Depression and the coming of the New Deal engendered in other segments of the film community, including directors, writers and a galaxy of stars, a significant degree of liberal political activism – and radicalism in the case of some. This chapter analyses the mogul political response to the Great Depression, assesses the signifi- cance of the EPIC campaign for film community politics, and examines the politicisation of the Hollywood workforce in response to the New Deal and the rise of fascism abroad.MOGUL POLITICSExcept for Darryl Zanuck and Walt Disney, all the movie moguls (Carl Laemmle, Harry Cohn, Samuel Goldwyn, Louis B. Mayer, Joseph and Nicholas Schenck, the Warner brothers and Adolph Zukor) shared a common Jewish immigrant heritage. These men embodied the American Dream through their rise from the teeming immigrant ghettos of urban America to make fortunes in the new medium of the cinema. Having experienced the extremes of poverty, they jealously guarded their newly acquired fortunes, downplayed their Jewishness, and assimilated into mainstream society.While taking pride in their accumulation of riches, the Jewish moguls never forgot the pogroms that had driven their families to emigrate from Eastern Europe and were uncomfortably aware of ingrained WASP prejudice in their new homeland. Hollywood's Jewishness came regularly under attack from anti-Semites like Henry Ford, the moguls found themselves barred from the exclusive country clubs and oldest business groups of their adopted Los Angeles, and their children could not gain entry into the city's best schools. In spite of battling each other for ascendancy in the film business, the film bosses saw their real enemies as the ‘goyim of Wall Street who were constantly plotting to take over their studios’.

Hollywood has a long history of top directors becoming their own producers, but Steven Spielberg took this into another realm altogether, first with the creation and immediate success of Amblin Entertainment in the 1980s, and with the launch of DreamWorks SKG in the 1990s. Spielberg initially embraced the role of movie mogul, although he was sensitive to the impact it had on his opportunities, and his stature, as a filmmaker. The aim of this chapter is to sort out and assess Spielberg's multiple filmmaking roles, focusing on key phases of his career. It charts his move into producing and the ensuing launch and early success of Amblin, from Gremlins to Who Framed Roger Rabbit?, as Spielberg plunged into his production executive mode. The chapter examines the making of Jurassic Park and Schindler's List, which were controlled by Spielberg from conception through release.

Biographer Scott Berg -- one in the film's bottomless supply of commentators -- tells of the time Joseph Kennedy, the U.S. Ambassador to Britain and co-founder of RKO, who was notoriously partial to the view that there was nothing about Hitler or Nazism that Americans couldn't live with (a fact the film doesn't mention), held a lunch with movie-industry moguls prior to the war.

In \"Moguls and Movie Stars: A History of Hollywood,\" an ambitious seven-part series that begins airing next month on Turner Classic Movies, documentarian Jon Wilkman traces the moving picture from the magic lantern shows of the 18th century through the era of the all-powerful studio and concludes in the revolutionary 1960s, when the rise of independents and movies such as \"Bonnie and Clyde\" foretold the end of the studios.