Musical film
Musical film is a film genre in which songs sung by the characters are interwoven into the narrative, sometimes accompanied by dancing. The songs advance the plot or develop the film's characters, but in some cases, they serve as breaks in the storyline as elaborate "production numbers." The musical film was a natural development of the stage musical after the emergence of sound film technology. The biggest difference between film and stage musicals is the use of lavish background scenery and locations that would be impractical in a theater. Musical films characteristically contain elements reminiscent of theater. In a sense, the viewer becomes the diegetic audience, as the performer looks directly into the camera and performs to it; the 1930's through the early 1950's are considered to be the golden age of the musical film, when the genre's popularity was at its highest in the Western world. Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the earliest Disney animated feature film, was a musical which won an honorary Oscar for Walt Disney at the 11th Academy Awards.
Musical short films were made by Lee de Forest in 1923–24. Beginning in 1926, thousands of Vitaphone shorts were made, many featuring bands and dancers; the earliest feature-length films with synchronized sound had only a soundtrack of music and occasional sound effects that played while the actors portrayed their characters just as they did in silent films: without audible dialogue. The Jazz Singer, released in 1927 by Warner Brothers, was the first to include an audio track including non-dietetic music and diegetic music, but it had only a short sequence of spoken dialogue; this feature-length film was a musical, featuring Al Jolson singing "Dirty Hands, Dirty Face", "Toot, Tootsie", "Blue Skies", "My Mammy". Historian Scott Eyman wrote, "As the film ended and applause grew with the houselights, Sam Goldwyn's wife Frances looked around at the celebrities in the crowd, she saw'terror in all their faces', she said, as if they knew that'the game they had been playing for years was over'." Still, only isolated sequences featured "live" sound.
In 1928, Warner Brothers followed this up with another Jolson part-talkie, The Singing Fool, a blockbuster hit. Theaters scrambled to install the new sound equipment and to hire Broadway composers to write musicals for the screen; the first all-talking feature, Lights of New York, included a musical sequence in a night club. The enthusiasm of audiences was so great that in less than a year all the major studios were making sound pictures exclusively; the Broadway Melody had a show-biz plot about two sisters competing for a charming song-and-dance man. Advertised by MGM as the first "All-Talking, All-Singing, All-Dancing" feature film, it was a hit and won the Academy Award for Best Picture for 1929. There was a rush by the studios to hire talent from the stage to star in lavishly filmed versions of Broadway hits; the Love Parade starred Maurice Chevalier and newcomer Jeanette MacDonald, written by Broadway veteran Guy Bolton. Warner Brothers produced the first screen operetta, The Desert Song in 1929.
They photographed a large percentage of the film in Technicolor. This was followed by the first all-color, all-talking musical feature, entitled On with the Show; the most popular film of 1929 was the second all-color, all-talking feature, entitled Gold Diggers of Broadway. This film broke all box office records and remained the highest-grossing film produced until 1939; the market became flooded with musicals and operettas. The following all-color musicals were produced in 1929 and 1930 alone: The Show of Shows, The Vagabond King, Follow Thru, Bright Lights, Golden Dawn, Hold Everything, The Rogue Song, Song of the Flame, Song of the West, Sweet Kitty Bellairs, Under a Texas Moon, Bride of the Regiment, Whoopee!, King of Jazz, Viennese Nights, Kiss Me Again. In addition, there were scores of musical features released with color sequences. Hollywood released more than 100 musical films in 1930, but only 14 in 1931. By late 1930, audiences had been oversaturated with musicals and studios were forced to cut the music from films that were being released.
For example, Life of the Party was produced as an all-color, all-talking musical comedy. Before it was released, the songs were cut out; the same thing happened to Fifty Million Frenchmen and Manhattan Parade both of, filmed in Technicolor. Marlene Dietrich sang songs in her films, Rodgers and Hart wrote a few well-received films, but their popularity waned by 1932; the public had come to associate color with musicals and thus the decline in their popularity resulted in a decline in color productions. The taste in musicals revived again in 1933 when director Busby Berkeley began to enhance the traditional dance number with ideas drawn from the drill precision he had experienced as a soldier during World War I. In films such as 42nd Street and Gold Diggers of 1933, Berkeley choreographed a number of films in his unique style. Berkeley's numbers begin on a stage but transcend the limitations of theatrical space: his ingenious routines, involving human bodies forming patterns like a kaleidoscope, could never fit onto a real stage and the intended perspective is viewing from straight above.
Musical stars such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers were among the most popular and highly
Kenny Baker (American performer)
Kenneth Laurence Baker was an American singer and actor who first gained notice as the featured singer on radio's The Jack Benny Program during the 1930s. At the height of his radio fame, after leaving the Benny show in 1939, he appeared in 17 film musicals, including Mr. Dodd Takes the Air, At the Circus, The Harvey Girls, he starred in the 1939 movie version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. He co-starred with Mary Martin in the original Broadway production of Kurt Weill and Ogden Nash's One Touch of Venus. After being on the Benny program 1935-1939, Baker returned to radio as a regular performer on Fred Allen's Texaco Star Theater program, he was heard on Blue Ribbon Town and Glamour Manor. He had the Kenny Baker Show and Sincerely -- Kenny Baker; the latter was syndicated by the Frederick W. Ziv Company via electrical transcription. After retiring from performing in the early 1950s, Baker became a Christian Science practitioner and motivational speaker and recorded a number of record albums of hymns for his church.
Baker died of a heart attack in Solvang, August 10, 1985, aged 72. King of Burlesque Mr. Dodd Takes the Air The King and the Chorus Girl Turn Off the Moon The Goldwyn Follies At the Circus as Jeff Wilson The Mikado Hit Parade of 1941 Doughboys in Ireland Stage Door Canteen The Harvey Girls Calendar Girl Kenny Baker on IMDb Kenny Baker at AllMovieAudio files Best of Jack Benny Spotlight Podcast! 1935-11-03 - Kenny Baker's First Show! with new introduction. Fred Allen Podcast 1940-10-02 Grab It Or Leave It - Kenny Baker's First Show with Fred Allen! with new introduction
Preston Foster
Preston Stratton Foster, was an American actor of stage, film and television, whose career spanned nearly four decades. He had a career as a vocalist. Born in Ocean City, New Jersey, in 1900, Foster was the eldest of three children of New Jersey natives Sallie R. and Walter Foster. Preston had two sisters and Anna. There his father supported the family working as a painter. Sometime between 1910 and 1918, the Fosters relocated to Pitman, New Jersey, where Preston's father was employed as a machinist; the census for 1920 and Preston's earlier draft registration card from 1918 document that he continued to reside at that time at his parents' home at the intersection of Laurel and Snyder avenues in Pitman. Those records document as well that he had a job as a clerk for the New York Ship Company in Camden, New Jersey, located about 17 miles north of Pitman. A decade additional census records show that Foster had moved to Queens, New York, where he was living with his first wife, Gertrude, a widow and stage actress, seven years his senior.
The federal census of 1930 lists Foster as an actor by one employed in "Legitimate Vaudeville". Foster began working in films in 1929 after acting on Broadway, where he was still performing as late as November 1931 in the cast of Two Seconds, he soon reprised that stage role in Hollywood in the filmed version of the play. Some of his subsequent films include Doctor X, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Annie Oakley, The Last Days of Pompeii, The Informer, Geronimo, My Friend Flicka, Roger Touhy, Gangster. Over the years, as Foster's film experience in Hollywood grew and directors gained increasing respect for his ability to play an array of characters, ranging from the "snarling family‐deserting criminal" in The People's Enemy in 1935 to the soft-spoken, fatherly chaplain on the Pacific battlefront in the 1943 film Guadalcanal Diary. Once, when asked if he regretted performing in villainous roles, Foster gave some insight into his family's reaction to them:I don't, but my mother does; every time I do a part like, she writes, ‘It was a nice picture, but do you have to play roles like that?’ Foster's career was interrupted by World War II, when he served with the United States Coast Guard.
While in active service he rose to the rank of captain, he was awarded the honorary rank of commodore. In addition to performing on stage and in numerous films, Foster was an accomplished singer who performed on both radio and in nightclubs, as well as a voice actor on radio. On July 25, 1943, Foster co-starred with Ellen Drew in "China Bridge," a presentation of Silver Theater on CBS radio. Foster enjoyed a secondary career as a vocalist. In 1948, he created a trio consisting of himself, his second wife Sheila, guitarist Gene Leis. Leis arranged the songs, the trio performed on radio and in clubs, appearing with Orrin Tucker, Peggy Ann Garner and Rita Hayworth. In 1950, Foster began performing on the young but expanding medium of television, his first credited role on the "small screen" was in September of that year on the NBC anthology series Cameo Theatre, in an episode titled "The Westland Case". After a few other appearances on series, he starred in the televised drama Waterfront, playing Captain John Herrick during the 1954-1955 broadcast season.
He guest-starred in 1963 in the ABC drama series Going My Way, starring Gene Kelly. Foster was married twice, the first time to actress Gertrude Elene Leonard, a widow, born in Woodbury, New Jersey in 1893; the two wed on June 1925, in Manhattan, where they both worked as actors. In the early 1930s, the couple relocated to Los Angeles. There, in 1939, they adopted Stephanie. Foster married actress Sheila Darcy in 1946, a union that lasted 24 years, until his death. During times between his performances in films and on television, Foster enjoyed boating and deep-sea fishing for marlin, off California's southern coast, he continued to accept acting offers in his years, although far less during the final decade of his life. His last film credit was in the role of Nick Kassel in Chubasco, released just two years before his death. During his years, Foster lived in the seaside community of La Jolla, part of the city of San Diego. In 1969, when the San Diego Padres made their debut as a Major League Baseball team, Foster wrote a song titled "Let's Go Padres", billed as the team's official song.
He sang it at some home games that season. Forster died in 1970 at age 69 in La Jolla after what The New York Times described as "a long illness", his gravesite is located at El Camino Memorial Park in California. Preston Foster has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame at 6801 Hollywood Blvd. Preston Foster at the Internet Broadway Database Preston Foster at Find a Grave
Harry Warren
Harry Warren was an American composer and lyricist. Warren was the first major American songwriter to write for film, he was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Song eleven times and won three Oscars for composing "Lullaby of Broadway", "You'll Never Know" and "On the Atchison and the Santa Fe". He wrote the music for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, choreographed by Busby Berkeley, with whom he would collaborate on many musical films. Over a career spanning four decades, Warren wrote more than 800 songs. Other well known Warren hits included "I Only Have Eyes for You", "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby", "Jeepers Creepers", "The Gold Diggers' Song", "That's Amore", "There Will Never Be Another You", "The More I See You", "At Last" and "Chattanooga Choo Choo". Warren was one of America's most prolific film composers, his songs have been featured in over 300 films. Warren was born Salvatore Antonio Guaragna, one of eleven children of Italian immigrants Antonio and Rachel De Luca Guaragna, grew up in Brooklyn, New York.
His father changed the family name to Warren. Although his parents could not afford music lessons, Warren had an early interest in music and taught himself to play his father's accordion, he sang in the church choir and learned to play the drums. He began to play the drums professionally by age 14 and dropped out of high school at 16 to play with his godfather's band in a traveling carnival. Soon he taught himself to play the piano and by 1915, he was working at the Vitagraph Motion Picture Studios, where he did a variety of administrative jobs, such as props man, played mood music on the piano for the actors, acted in bit parts and was an assistant director, he played the piano in cafés and silent-movie houses. In 1918 he joined the U. S. Navy, where he began writing songs. Warren wrote over 800 songs between 1981, publishing over 500 of them, they were written for 56 feature films or were used in other films that used Warren's newly written or existing songs. His songs appeared in over 300 films and 112 of Warner Bros.
Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies cartoons. 42 of his songs were on the top ten list of the radio program "Your Hit Parade", a measure of a song's popularity. 21 of these reached #1 on Your Hit Parade. "You'll Never Know" appeared 24 times. His song "I Only Have Eyes for You" is listed in the list of the 25 most-performed songs of the 20th Century, as compiled by the American Society of Composers and Publishers. Warren was the director of ASCAP from 1929 to 1932, he collaborated on some of his most famous songs with lyricists Al Dubin, Billy Rose, Mack Gordon, Leo Robin, Ira Gershwin and Johnny Mercer. In 1942 the Gordon-Warren song "Chattanooga Choo-Choo", as performed by the Glenn Miller Orchestra, became the first gold record in history, it was No.1 for nine weeks on the Billboard pop singles chart in 1941–1942, selling 1.2 million copies. Among his biggest hits were "There Will Never Be Another You", "I Only Have Eyes for You", "Forty-Second Street", "The Gold Diggers' Song", "Lullaby of Broadway", "Serenade In Blue", "At Last", "Jeepers Creepers", "You're Getting to Be a Habit with Me", "That's Amore", "Young and Healthy".
Warren's first hit song was "Rose of the Rio Grande", with lyrics by Edgar Leslie. He wrote a succession of hit songs in the 1920s, including "I Love My Baby" and "Seminola" in 1925, "Where Do You Work-a John?" and "In My Gondola" in 1926 and "Nagasaki" in 1928. In 1930, he composed the music for the song "Cheerful Little Earful" for the Billy Rose Broadway revue and Low, composed the music, with lyrics by Mort Dixon and Joe Young, for the Ed Wynn Broadway revue The Laugh Parade in 1931, he started working for Warner Brothers in 1932, paired with Dubin to write the score for the first blockbuster film musical, 42nd Street, continued to work there for six years, writing the scores for 32 more musicals. He worked for 20th Century Fox writing with Mack Gordon, he moved to MGM starting in 1944, writing for musical films such as The Harvey Girls and The Barkleys of Broadway, many starring Fred Astaire. He worked for Paramount, starting in the early 1950s, writing for the Bing Crosby movie Just for You and the Martin and Lewis movie The Caddy, the latter containing the hit song "That's Amore".
He continued to write songs for several more Jerry Lewis comedies. Warren is remembered for writing scores for the films of Busby Berkeley, his "uptempo songs are as memorable as Berkeley's choreography, as for the same reason: they capture, in a few snazzy notes, the vigorous frivolity of the Jazz Age."Warren won the Academy Award for Best Song three times, collaborating with three different lyricists: "Lullaby of Broadway" with Al Dubin in 1935, "You'll Never Know" with Mack Gordon in 1943, "On the Atchison and the Santa Fe" with Johnny Mercer in 1946. He was nominated for eleven Oscars. In 1955, Warren wrote "The Legend of Wyatt Earp", used in the ABC/Desilu Studios television series, The Life and Legend of Wyatt Earp, he wrote the opening theme, "Hey, Marty", for the film Marty, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture in 1955. The last musical score that Warren composed for Broadway was Shangri-La, a disastrous 1956 adaptation of James Hilton's Lost Horizon, which ran for only 21 performances.
In 1957, he received his last Academy Award nomination for "An Affair To Remember". He continued to write songs for movies throughou
Personal advertisement
A personal or personal ad is an item or notice traditionally in the newspaper, similar to a classified advertisement but personal in nature. In British English it is commonly known as an advert in a lonely hearts column. With its rise in popularity, the World Wide Web has become a common medium for personals referred to as online dating. Personals are meant to generate romance, friendship, or casual encounters, include a basic description of the person posting it, their interests. Newspapers and magazines that take personal advertisements provide a reply forwarding service; the publisher forwards replies in bulk for example each week. Another method of replying to Lonely Hearts adverts is via telephone; the usual business model is for the advertiser to be enticed to place an advert free of charge. Due to newspaper prices being based on characters or lines of text, a jargon of abbreviations and code words arose in personals and have carried over to the internet; the following are examples of single-letter abbreviations used in three-letter acronyms.
If a personal advert includes a TLA, it could be to describe the person, seeking and/or the kind of person they seek. The first letter describes the relationship state or sexuality of the person: D: Divorced G: Gay M: Married S: Single W: Widow or Widower The middle letter represents the ethnicity or nationality of the person posting the ad. Can be replaced by 4, standing for the word for. A: Asian B: Black H: Hispanic J: Jewish or Japanese L: Latino or Latina W: White The third letter describes the gender of the person. C: Couple F: Female M: Male T: Transgender W: Woman As well as three-letter abbreviations of the format described above, a number of other acronyms and abbreviated words have been popular in personal adverts at different times and in different places; this list is far from complete: ALA: all letters answered ALAWP: all letters answered with a photo GSOH: good sense of humor ISO: in search of LTR: long-term relationship MBA: mutual business arrangement NSc: non-scene OHAC: own house and car PnP: party and play WE: well endowed WLTM: would like to meet yo: years old NSA: No Strings Attached Contact magazine Gumtree Online dating service Single White Female http://www.stargazers.com/abbrevad.html http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/ https://archive.is/20130116005012/http://www.1-true-love.com/datingtips/abbr.shtml http://www.all-acronyms.com/?tg=personals&o=a Francesca Beauman, Shapely Ankle Preferr'd: A History of the Lonely Hearts Ad 1695-2010, Chatto & Windus, 2011
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios Inc. is an American media company, involved in the production and distribution of feature films and television programs. One of the world's oldest film studios, MGM's headquarters are located at 245 North Beverly Drive in Beverly Hills, California. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures, Louis B. Mayer Pictures. In 1971, it was announced that MGM was to merge with 20th Century Fox, but the plan never came to fruition. Over the next 39 years, the studio was bought and sold at various points in its history until, on November 3, 2010, MGM filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. MGM emerged from bankruptcy on December 20, 2010, at which time the executives of Spyglass Entertainment, Gary Barber and Roger Birnbaum, became co-chairmen and co-CEOs of the holding company of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer; as of 2017, MGM co-produces, co-finances, co-distributes a majority of its films with Sony Pictures, Paramount Pictures and Warner Bros.
MGM Resorts International, a Las Vegas-based hotel and casino company listed on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol "MGM", was created in 1973 as a division of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. The company was spun out in 1979, with the studio's owner Kirk Kerkorian maintaining a large share, but it ended all affiliation with Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer in 1986. MGM was the last studio to convert to sound pictures, but in spite of this fact, from the end of the silent film era through the late 1950s, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was the dominant motion picture studio in Hollywood. Always slow to respond to the changing legal and demographic nature of the motion picture industry during the 1950s and 1960s, although at times its films did well at the box office, the studio lost significant amounts of money throughout the 1960s. In 1966, MGM was sold to Canadian investor Edgar Bronfman Sr. whose son Edgar Jr. would buy Universal Studios. Three years an unprofitable MGM was bought by Kirk Kerkorian, who slashed staff and production costs, forced the studio to produce low-budget fare, shut down theatrical distribution in 1973.
The studio continued to produce five to six films a year that were released through other studios United Artists. Kerkorian did, commit to increased production and an expanded film library when he bought United Artists in 1981. MGM ramped up internal production, as well as keeping production going at UA, which included the lucrative James Bond film franchise, it incurred significant amounts of debt to increase production. The studio took on additional debt as a series of owners took charge in early 1990s. In 1986, Ted Turner bought MGM, but a few months sold the company back to Kerkorian to recoup massive debt, while keeping the library assets for himself; the series of deals left MGM more in debt. MGM was bought by Pathé Communications in 1990, but Parretti lost control of Pathé and defaulted on the loans used to purchase the studio; the French banking conglomerate Crédit Lyonnais, the studio's major creditor took control of MGM. More in debt, MGM was purchased by a joint venture between Kerkorian, producer Frank Mancuso, Australia's Seven Network in 1996.
The debt load from these and subsequent business deals negatively affected MGM's ability to survive as a separate motion picture studio. After a bidding war which included Time Warner and General Electric, MGM was acquired on September 23, 2004, by a partnership consisting of Sony Corporation of America, Texas Pacific Group, Providence Equity Partners, other investors. In 1924, movie theater magnate Marcus Loew had a problem, he had bought Metro Pictures Corporation in 1919 for a steady supply of films for his large Loew's Theatres chain. With Loew's lackluster assortment of Metro films, Loew purchased Goldwyn Pictures in 1924 to improve the quality. However, these purchases created a need for someone to oversee his new Hollywood operations, since longtime assistant Nicholas Schenck was needed in New York headquarters to oversee the 150 theaters. Approached by Louis B. Mayer, Loew addressed the situation by buying Louis B. Mayer Pictures on April 17, 1924. Mayer became head of the renamed Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, with Irving Thalberg as head of production.
MGM produced more than 100 feature films in its first two years. In 1925, MGM released the extravagant and successful Ben-Hur, taking a $4.7 million profit that year, its first full year. In 1925, MGM, Paramount Pictures and UFA formed a joint German distributor, Parufamet; when Samuel Goldwyn left he sued over the use of his name. Marcus Loew died in 1927, control of Loew's passed to Nicholas Schenck. In 1929, William Fox of Fox Film Corporation bought the Loew family's holdings with Schenck's assent. Mayer and Thalberg disagreed with the decision. Mayer was active in the California Republican Party and used his political connections to persuade the Justice Department to delay final approval of the deal on antitrust grounds. During this time, in the summer of 1929, Fox was badly hurt in an automobile accident. By the time he recovered, the stock market crash in the fall of 1929 had nearly wiped Fox out and ended any chance of the Loew's merger going through. Schenck and Mayer had never gotten along, the abortive Fox merger increased the animosity between the two men.
From the outset, MGM tapped into the audience's need for sophistication. Having inherited few big names from their predecessor companies and Thalberg began at once
The Harvey Girls (novel)
The Harvey Girls is a novel published in 1942 by Samuel Hopkins Adams. In 1946, it was adapted into an eponymous MGM musical film starring Judy Garland
