Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s [Print Replica] [Kindle Edition] Author: Matthew Kennedy | Language: English | ISBN:
B00HFPV20K | Format: PDF, EPUB
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Download books file now Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s [Print Replica] [Kindle Edition] Epub Free from with Mediafire Link Download Link Full-page newspaper ads announced the date. Reserved seats went on sale at premium prices. Audience members dressed up and arrived early to peruse the program during the overture that preceded the curtain's rise. And when the show began, it was--a rather disappointing film musical.
In Roadshow!, film historian Matthew Kennedy tells the fascinating story of the downfall of the big-screen musical in the late 1960s. It is a tale of revolutionary cultural change, business transformation, and artistic missteps, all of which led to the obsolescence of the roadshow, a marketing extravaganza designed to make a movie opening in a regional city seem like a Broadway premier. Ironically, the Hollywood musical suffered from unexpected success. Facing doom after its bygone heyday, it suddenly broke box-office records with three rapid-fire successes in 1964 and 1965: Mary Poppins, My Fair Lady, and The Sound of Music. Studios rushed to catch the wave, but everything went wrong. Kennedy takes readers inside the making of such movies as Hello, Dolly! and Man of La Mancha, showing how corporate management imposed financial pressures that led to poor artistic decisions-for example, the casting of established stars regardless of vocal or dancing talent (such as Clint Eastwood in Paint Your Wagon). And Kennedy explores the impact of profound social, political, and cultural change. The traditional-sounding Camelot and Doctor Dolittle were released in the same year as Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, representing a vast gulf in taste. The artifice of musicals seemed outdated to baby boomers who grew up with the Cuban missile crisis, the Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. assassinations, race riots, and the Vietnam War.
From Julie Andrews to Barbra Streisand, from Fred Astaire to Rock Hudson, Roadshow! offers a brilliant, gripping history of film musicals and their changing place in our culture. Direct download links available for Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s [Print Replica] [Kindle Edition] Epub Free
- File Size: 6414 KB
- Print Length: 320 pages
- Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (December 3, 2013)
- Sold by: Amazon Digital Services, Inc.
- Language: English
- ASIN: B00HFPV20K
- Text-to-Speech: Enabled
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- Lending: Enabled
- Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #78,209 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
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in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Arts & Photography > Music > Musical Genres > Musicals - #25
in Books > Arts & Photography > Music > Musical Genres > Musicals - #30
in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Humor & Entertainment > Movies & Video > History & Criticism
The phenomenon of gargantuan roadshow film musicals (with their high-priced reserved seat tickets, intermissions, souvenir booklets) engulfed Hollywood in the mid-1960s to the early 1970s. The huge commercial success of Twentieth Century-Fox’s 'The Sound of Music' (1964) seemed—at the time—to provide a heaven-sent salvation for Hollywood studios then buckling under the strain of diminished filmgoer attendance, changing tastes of moviegoers, and the downfall of the studio system. Using the philosophy that much bigger is always much better, Tinseltown studio honchos recklessly rushed to make mammoth song-and-dance screen projects such as 'Doctor Dolittle' (1967), 'Camelot' (1967), 'Star!' (1968), 'Hello, Dolly!' (1969), 'Paint Your Wagon' (1969), and 'Man of La Mancha' (1972). How these already gigantic financial investments skyrocketed into astounding fiscal irresponsibility and sank at the box office from lack of sufficient creative control is the meat of Matthew Kennedy’s fine new book 'Roadshow!: The Fall of Film Musicals in the 1960s'.
Kennedy weaves an engrossing tapestry from an impressive array of facts as he relates how these overblown productions were born in haste, went awry in the craziest ways, and then floundered disastrously at the box office. What makes this excellent book so absorbing is the author’s colorful, highly readable chronicle. It smartly juggles the antics of dictatorial studio executives, often misguided creative talents, and desperate marketing gurus as they jumped blindly over the cliff of reason and entertainment value. What resulted from this chaos were colossal movie musicals misfires.
Kennedy’s study of this little-explored area of Hollywood film history is an extremely satisfactory mix of detailed research, astute observations, and flavorful narrative.
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