University Press of Mississippi

Intellectual Property and the Hollywood Superhero

With a career spanning four decades, Wes Craven (1939–2015) bridged independent exploitation cinema and Hollywood big-budget horror. A pioneer of the modern horror cinema, Craven directed such landmark films as The Last House on the Left, The Hills Have Eyes, A Nightmare on Elm Street, and Scream―considered not only classics of the genre, but examples of masterful filmmaking.

The Screen Is Red dépeint l'ambivalence d'Hollywood à l'égard de l'ex-Union soviétique avant, pendant et après la guerre froide. Dans les années 1930, le communisme combattait son alter ego, le fascisme, mais tous deux menaçaient de saper le système capitaliste, valeur fondamentale de l'industrie cinématographique. Hollywood a présenté le fascisme comme la plus grande menace et le communisme comme une aberration adoptée par de jeunes idéalistes inconscients de son côté obscur. Dans Ninotchka, tout ce dont une femme commissaire a besoin c'est d'un voyage à Paris pour la convertir au capitalisme et au luxe qu'il peut offrir.

Collected interviews with the Academy Award–winning director of the critically and commercially successful films The French Connection and The Exorcist.

Otto Preminger (1905–1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir Laura, the social-realist melodrama The Man with the Golden Arm, the CinemaScope musical Carmen Jones, and the riveting courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder. As a screen actor, he forged an indelible impression as a sadistic Nazi in Billy Wilder’s Stalag 17 and as the diabolical Mr. Freeze in television’s Batman.

Conversations with Filmmakers Series

A survey and rediscovery of the many noir films directed by a master of the Western

Best known for powerful 1950s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk (1897–1987) brought to all his work a distinctive style that led to his reputation as one of twentieth-century film’s great directors. Sirk worked in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s.