Columbia Pictures: Portrait of a Studio

The recent $3.4 billion purchase of Columbia Pictures by Sony Corporation focused attention on a studio that had survived one of Hollywood’s worst scandals under David Begelman, as well as ownership by Coca-Cola and David Puttnam’s misguided attempt to bring back the studio’s glory days. Columbia Pictures traces Columbia’s history from its beginnings as the CBC Film Sales Company (nicknamed “Corned Beef and Cabbage”) through the regimes of Harry Cohn and his successors, and concludes with a vivid portrait of today’s corporate Hollywood, with its investment bankers, entertainment lawyers, agents, and financiers. Bernard F. Dick’s highly readable studio chronicle is followed by thirteen original essays by leading film scholars, writing about the stars, films, genres, writers, producers, and directors responsible for Columbia’s emergence from Poverty Row status to world class. This is the first attempt to integrate film history with film criticism of a single studio. Both the historical introduction and the essays draw on previously untapped archival material—budgets that kept Columbia in the black during the 1930s and 1940s, letters that reveal the rapport between Depression audiences and director Frank Capra, and an interview with Oscar-winning screenwriter Daniel Taradash. The book also offers new perspectives on the careers of Rita Hayworth and Judy Holliday, a discussion of Columbia’s unique brands of screwball comedy and film noir, and analyses of such classics as The Awful Truth, Born Yesterday, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Anatomy of a Murder, Easy Rider, Taxi Driver, The Big Chill, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Last Emperor. Amply illustrated with film stills and photos of stars and studio heads, Columbia Pictures includes a brief chronology and a complete 1920-1991 filmography. Designed for both the film lover and the film scholar, the book is ideal for film history courses. For anyone seeking a frank, readable history of the movie business, this ‘Portrait of a Studio’ sheds light on one part of a frenzied, fractious industry. —New York Times Book Review An excellent reading experience for movie buffs and historians. —West Coast Review of Bookshttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1007/thumbnail.jp

Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars

Hal Wallis might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced—Casablanca, Jezebel, Now Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies)—have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America’s film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked and no full-length study has yet assessed his incredible career. A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the business of film as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater in 1922. He attracted the notice of the Warner brothers, who hired him as a publicity assistant. Within three months he was director of the department, and appointments to studio manager and production executive quickly followed. Wallis went on to oversee dozens of productions and formed his own production company in 1944. Bernard F. Dick draws on numerous sources such as Wallis’s personal production files and exclusive interviews with many of his contemporaries to finally tell the full story of his illustrious career. Dick combines his knowledge of behind-the-scenes Hollywood with fascinating anecdotes to create a portrait of one of Hollywood’s early power players. Bernard F. Dick, professor of communications and English at Fairleigh Dickinson University, is the author of numerous books on film history, including Engulfed: the Death of Paramount Pictures and the Birth of Corporate Hollywood. This readable and well-documented book is enhanced by interviews with Wallis\u27s widow and with numerous individuals who worked with Wallis in Hollywood. . . . Recommended —Choice Includes enough good gossip to keep movie addicts reading. —Hollywood Reporter Heston remarked, \u27Hal was very good. Surely one of the two or three best of them all.\u27 Hal Wallis: Producer to the Stars offers plenty of reasons to take that assessment seriously, and it gives a great filmmaker his due. —Hollywood Reporter For someone whose name appears in the credits of hundreds of movies, Hal Wallis doesn\u27t get a lot of credit. Bernard F. Dick has tried to rectify that with the first biography of the great Hollywood producer. —Philadelphia Inquirer A masterful job of charting Wallis\u27s career and examining his roles as production executive and independent producer. This is an engaging and illuminating narrative. —Film Quarterly It is one thing to understand the complex operation of the film industry, particularly in the wake of the studios having been absorbed into conglomerates. It is quite another to tell the story of the producers involved in this industry with insight and wit, in a way that appeals to the general reader as well as to film scholars. Bernard Dick has accomplished this feat once again in his book on Hal Wallis. —Gene Phillips, Loyola Universityhttps://uknowledge.uky.edu/upk_film_and_media_studies/1021/thumbnail.jp

Development and evaluation of land use regression models for black carbon based on bicycle and pedestrian measurements in the urban environment

Land use regression (LUR) modelling is increasingly used in epidemiological studies to predict air pollution exposure. The use of stationary measurements at a limited number of locations to build a LUR model, however, can lead to an overestimation of its predictive abilities. We use opportunistic mobile monitoring to gather data at a high spatial resolution to build LUR models to predict annual average concentrations of black carbon (BC). The models explain a significant part of the variance in BC concentrations. However, the overall predictive performance remains low, due to input uncertainty and lack of predictive variables that can properly capture the complex characteristics of local concentrations. We stress the importance of using an appropriate cross-validation scheme to estimate the predictive performance of the model. By using independent data for the validation and excluding those data also during variable selection in the model building procedure, overly optimistic performance estimates are avoided. (C) 2017 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved