No comments about Rage And Glory: The Volatile Life and Career of George C. Scott.

5 comments about Underfoot in Show Business.

1. This witty, touching memoir tells the story of Helene Hanff's attempt to "crash the theater". It is as entertaining and charming as her great book, 84 Charing Cross Road



2. I stumbled across Helene Hanff in a place no devout reader should ever be--a video store. After watching '84 Charing Cross Road' I was enchanted with Miss Hanff's wit and humor, and needed more. After an arduous search, I found a used copy of 'Underfoot...' and read it in less than 2 days. I even found myself laughing aloud at parts, which greatly disturbed the people sitting next to me. Hanff's ability to laugh at herself and to extract the humor from any situation is addictive. The book begins with a note to the reader: 'Each year, hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre, firmly convinced they're destined to be famous Broadway stars or playwrights. One in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward. This book is about life among the other 999. By one of them.' From there, Miss Hanff takes the reader on a tour of her adventures and experiences as a struggling playwright in an honest and spirited manner. I was left wishing that my life was as unpredictable and ironic as Miss Hanff's struggle to live her dreams.



3. Helene Hanff published this, her first book, in 1961. She shares stories from her years as a struggling playwright in New York City; her good friend Maxine was a struggling actress. Practically penniless, they still managed to see first-run shows and movies regularly. How they did it is one of many memorable and funny tales.

   I couldn't help laughing at the merry-go-round of a Broadway agent shopping a play all over town. Ms. Hanff tells how 'Oklahoma!' was named (she was there). One of her many jobs involved speed-reading long novels; her take on Tolkein is slightly different than Peter Jackson's.

   I echo a previous reviewer's thought: this book would make a terrific film. 'Underfoot in Show Business' is a gem, a memoir full of magic and wit. Highly recommended.




4. I first heard of this book 20 years ago, in a letter to the editor in Seventeen Magazine. The letterwriter was distantly related to Helene Hanff and was recommending the book. At the time, I was deeply involved in my high school drama program and the title of the book appealed to me. I tried for years to find the book, but it was out of print for a time. When I did finally find it, it was worth the wait. It is laugh-out-loud funny and touching to anyone who has ever been bitten by the drama bug. I was sold on the book the minute I read the preface, which reads in part, "Each year hundreds of of stage-struck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre...one in a thousand turns out to be Noel Coward. This book is about life among the other 999, by one of them." This book turned me on to all of Helene Hanff's other books, each of which is worthwhile in its own right. However, the best of the bunch is right here. This book should be on every booklover's must have list!



5. I once had to read a bit of this book out to some strangers on a plane who wanted to know why I was laughing out loud and then we had champagne and it was a great flight and Miss Hanff had even more fans. The tears were running down our faces. [ For those of you who have read it already it was the bit about the funeral parlour].

   This book, like all of Miss Hanff's works, makes you feel great to be alive.

   I've come to love my native city more and more by seeing it through Miss Hanff's eyes.

5 comments about The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution 1926-1930.

1. "The Speed of Sound: Hollywood and the Talkie Revolution" examines the rapid transition from silent to sound films that transformed the American film industry between 1926 and 1930. In just 4 years, Hollywood witnessed "the extermination of an art form at the height of its power -something unprecedented in history", as the booming business of silent pictures was replaced by talkies, and the nature of films, filmmaking, and the film business were reinvented. Early talkies weren't nearly as good as their silent competition, but audiences enthralled by the new technology didn't care. They wanted sound. And movies as we know them emerged triumphant.
   
   Scott Eyman presents the upheaval in five parts, each dedicated to one year in Hollywood's transition period. The occasional digression brings us up to speed on the technologies and people central to the drama, including a history of the efforts to synchronize sound with film, from 1905 until the invention of sound-on-film in 1913. By this time, no one in the film industry was interested. In 1926, only Sam Warner of Warner Brothers and William Fox of Fox Film believed that sound could be profitable. Warner adopted the Vitaphone system, which uses an accompanying 33 1/3 RPM record. Fox adopted the sound-on-film Movietone system. And the race was on.
   
   "The Speed of Sound" describes the production of the first feature-length talkie, "The Jazz Singer", in 1927. Although it was only 15% sound, the movie's popularity sent a message to studios that sound had arrived. It also follows the production of the last great silent films, F.W. Murnau's "Sunrise" and King Vidor's "The Crowd", alongside that of major early talkies by Warner, Fox, Paramount, MGM, and Universal. Eyman debunks the notion that silent actors and actresses were inarticulate clowns. Instead, he claims that many could not make the transition to sound films, because their voices -which can now be heard on recovered Vitaphone records- didn't fit their onscreen images.
   
   The most fascinating comparison of silent and sound films is how the new constraints of recording sound set the art of cinematography back and mandated at least a couple years of bad movies, until how to "show" as opposed to "tell" was rediscovered. Movies became more literal, less visual, more talky, less musical. Their component part became the scene, whereas for silents, it had been the shot. Theater actors, writers, and directors flooded in from New York, along with sound technicians and elocutionists, actors were practically tethered to microphones, cameramen confined to airtight "iceboxes", and directors' power were supplanted by producers and sound men.
   
   Part 5, which is supposed to be about 1930, reads more like an epilogue. But I guess there isn't much to say. Although many movies were being shot in both silent and sound formats for overseas release, silent films were all but dead by that point. Scott Eyman refers to Albert Warner as both "Abe" and "Al" in different places, which is confusing. But, apart from that, he has made a lot of technical detail, business analysis, and cultural study very readable, accessible, and sometimes absurdly funny. "The Speed of Sound" is essential reading for anyone interested in film history. It gave me a greater appreciation of the silents and a greater understanding of the current state of film as well.



2. This book goes above and beyond the call of duty in writing about, primarily, the very turbulent years of 1926-30 in the American film industry, during the transitional period between silence and sound. It covers everything--the technology behind these new innovations and the technology of silent film-making, the business and financial aspects, the artistic angles, and the human aspects. Most people who aren't familiar with this era in cinema tend to believe a lot of myths and clichés about it, all of which Mr. Eyman destroys in his quest for the truth about this era. For example, while a lot of people seem to believe that talking pictures didn't exist until 1927, the truth is that there had been experiments ever since the 1890s, though none of them caught on, and most of them had very crude and impractical technology. Many people also seem to believe that after 'The Jazz Singer' (which is actually about 75% silent, with most of the sound being songs instead of dialogues), the entire industry turned to sound overnight. Such a massive sea change did not and could not have happened overnight. Most people believed it was just a novelty and that before long films would go back to being silent, or perhaps would only use sound selectively, as in the transitional period of the late Twenties, or there would be films that were both sound and silent instead of all one or the other. This new technology developed by William Fox (Movietone) and the Warner Brothers (Vitaphone) happened to come about at just the right time for it to finally not only be a lot more practical than the various systems invented previously, but also at just the right time for the public to be ready for it. Other stories include both famous ones, such as the one about how poor Jack Gilbert did NOT have a high-pitched voice and was NOT laughed offscreen after his first talkie, and lesser-known ones, such as how there were still a fair number of theatres not wired for sound by 1930, the stories behind the creation of some famous early talkies and late silents, the slow progress on improving the primitive sound recording technology, how most silent stars actually had hugely successful talkie debuts, if only because their fans wanted to hear their voices, how film-making took a big step backwards in time when sound came in and took awhile to recover (and as many people who were there felt, the romance of making films came to a crashing halt when these sterile foreboding sound stages came in, together with how movies became less subtle and artistic in ways), and how silent actors were saying actual lines in an actual script and usually had good voices, contrary to the modern-day myth of how they just said any silly thing that came to mind because the audience couldn't hear them, and how they all had these horrible voices.
   
   Mr. Eyman really knows his subject, and pays respect to the silent era instead of treating it like some silly embarrassing clunky inferior relic of a distant past, as well as treating the early sound era in a balanced way, pointing out all of its shortcomings as well as the good things about it, how sound did make possible films that could have never been as good in the silent era. He almost puts one in the mindset of someone who was there when it happened, when all of these amazing changes, not all for the better, were taking place seemingly overnight, and when all of these historic films, such as 'Don Juan,' 'The Jazz Singer,' 'The Crowd,' 'Sunrise,' and 'The Lights of New York' came out, seeing the art of silent film-making at its greatest heights and then replaced by transitional hybrids that encorporated sound at certain points, and finally all of these crude clunky early talkies that nevertheless thrilled the audiences because they'd never heard and seen movies at the same time before. My only complaints about the book are that it kind of perpetuates the decades-old rumor about Marion Davies only having her career survive because of her association with William Randolph Hearst (not mentioning how she probably would have had an even more successful career if she hadn't been his consort, since non-Hearst owned papers also gave her great reviews, and it was actually due to his mismanagement of her career that she wasn't as successful as she could have been, since he insisted on putting her in serious costume pictures and dramas instead of recognising her proven forte of light comedy), and that, as other reviewers have noted, it does give a surprisingly short schrift to comedy, barely even mentioning people like Harold Lloyd or Charlie Chaplin, and not even mentioning a lot of other hugely popular comedians, like Lloyd Hamilton or Charley Chase, at all.



3. A history of the transition from silent cinema to sound, this book was much better than I expected, mostly because Eyman spends a lot of time on the technical details, which of course I enjoy. My work in film/video production from the time I was a teen to the digital technology I use no for my class Websites, make me very aware of the most complex and troublesome of issues--synchronization. Eyman's book does of course go into the personalities of the transition, from the movie Mongols like Fox and the Warner brothers, but the book never sinks into gossip. I was most impressed with Eyman's grasp and appreciation of the film art form and how that was forever lost, replaced with talking that often explains rather than do. That criticism is true right up to today's Hollywood movies that spend so much of their time explaining!



4. Scott Eyman's masterful research of the Talkie Revolution is a must-read for silent-film and early sound-film fans. He covers early unsuccessful sound-film attempts, some of the last great silent film classics like THE CROWD and SUNRISE, Warners' and Fox's different sound systems, and many other topics. The main scope of the book is the period from 1926-1930. The focus of the book is on how the business of filmmaking and the art of filmmaking was completely changed with the coming of the talking movie. Careers were born and destroyed overnight. Sometimes a performer's voice was a problem in sound films. In other cases, like John Gilbert's, the studio thought that he was too expensive and the type of film that was his forte became passe. For a couple of years, the sound-man was the most important person on a movie set.

   Eyeman's book is comprehensive, but not comprehensive enough. Curiously, he gives short shrift to some comedians like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, and Raymond Griffith. Except for a brief mention of the British change-over, the book focuses exclusively on Hollywood studios. He covers all of the bases such as legal wrangling over patents, financial profits and losses, the problems that studio artists encountered in making sound films, and the many poor films that were produced in the early sound era. If you like classic films, you will love this book.




5. If you have a passing interest in this period, this is not for you. It is a very detailed -- often overdetailed -- history of the coming of the talkies. Everyone who writes on silents tends to overpraise them,and Eyman is no exception, but this is not a screed and not overly nostalgic, just a good revealing history of the the time.

No comments about The Haunted Stage: The Theatre as Memory Machine (Theater: Theory/Text/Performance).

No comments about Dance in Its Time.

5 comments about Performing Glam Rock: Gender and Theatricality in Popular Music.

1. I have to disagree with other reviews of this book being accessible to the common reader. It is not. It's lengthy and dry and forced myself, a grad student and an avid rock fan, to skim over many of the lengthy and uninteresting descriptions.
   
   It's not that the book isn't complete, it just has an extremely narrow view as to what was going on in the rock world during the 70's, and though I understand it's about Glam Rock, the fact is for anyone who has ever studied anything about rock movements in the 50's - the 90's it's too narrow to actually make me want to add to my library.
   
   The really sad thing is that I was excited to read this book. It was assigned in our syllabus, which normally indicates that a student would be uninterested, but being required to study Glam Rock? Now that's just cool! I really wish I had better things to say.
   
   The performance aspects are interesting but not really new information. Personally I probably could have gotten more by watching a really well produced film. (Because frankly, you need audio and visual to have the full on Glam Rock experience.)



2. Glam Rock was a short lived moment in popular music that essentially lasted only about five or six years, say from 1970 to 1975. In 1970 we were long past the time when Ed Sullivan would only show Elvis from the waist up. The pill has made basic changes in the outlook of the young towards sex. Here in the US, the Viet Nam war, Watergate and Kent state were changing the view of the people.
   
   In music the time was ripe for a change and a series of musicians did that with a new form of rock that featured extremely theatrical performances with outrageous (for the time) costume, makeup and sets. This was called Glam Rock. It drew upon the history of previous styles of rock and added a theatrical aspect to music that was minimally modified.
   
   This book traces the history of Glam Rock from its beginnings with T. Rex and goes through the advent of Suzi Quatro. It explains what Glam Rock was and a bit about how it evolved into the next phase of music.



3. I recommend this book to rock music aficionados who hunger for deeper analysis and more thoughtful work than is the typical fare for books about this genre. It helps to have some interest or fond memories for glam rock, but the chapters about performers one may not know that well or never cared for (e.g., Suzie Quatro, for me) are as compelling as those about ones personal faves. While some of the discussion may be a tad academic for the casual reader, I urge the casual reader to read on, because he will learn something and be entertained. The author is well aware that writing a book is a performance of sorts, and does not ignore his obligation to keep the reader entertained even as some sophisticated and/or obscure concepts are dealt with.
   Full disclosure: the author is a college friend of mine and I am thanked in the credits for having read over a few chapters in draft. - Peter Shapiro



4. Performing Glam Rock does a brilliant job of explaining this elusive moment in rock history. For the first time we have a book which makes sense of glam: pretty boys (and one girl) in lurex and make up who swept away rock's no-performance code. As Phil Auslander shows, glam subverted rock's gender sterotyping too, and opened up the possiblity of new kinds of expression around sex and identity.
   
   Along the way we get some engaging, funny and always insighful anlysis of the performance of glam artists from Bolan to Quatro. It's too early to name a rock book of the year for 2006, but this is surely a candidate.
   
   Jason Toynbee
   Lecturer in Media Studies, Open University



5. Although I've only recently begun to read up on performance studies, it seems to me that Auslander has chosen a particularly illustrative case study in glam rock. Within a genre so explicitly focused on the construction and performance of identity, it's actually a bit surprising that this book hadn't already been written.
   
   While Auslander comes from the performance studies tradition, Performing Glam Rock also serves as a great overview of the genre. The book includes a great deal of history, making it a worthwhile read for anyone interested in the genre. The big guns are profiled in depth to illustrate the glam's traits: Bolan (style), Bowie (theatricality), Roxy Music (gender) and Suzi Quatro (more gender, specifically female masculinity).
   
   Overall, an accessible and compelling read.

3 comments about Mime Time.

1. It is better to invent your own routines, there is no technique, no history of mime, not much of value.



2. This book is ok. It has alot of routines, but not much help on how to teach mime.



3. This is the mime book for someone who learns by seeing and doing. Through 45 detailed scripts, the future mime learns the vocabulary and scope of the art. From a child eating ice cream to a sports fan, the reader sees examples of mime in the mind's eye. There is almost no theory in this book, just good, practical scripts for one, two, or more actors.

1 comments about What Every Dancer Needs to Know About the Body.

1. It great to be able to obtain the book that was so needed for my research paper in such a short time.
   
   I thorough enjoyed the book and the service provided by Amazon.

No comments about The Theatre of Societas Raffaello Sanzio.

1 comments about The Birdcage: The Shooting Script (Newmarket Shooting Script Series).

1. Birdcage's screenplay has a couple scenes that are written differently than in the movie--but reading them is just as funny as watching the movie itself. The written structure is wonderful.