
The Hollywood Studios
House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies
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Narrated by:
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Barrett Whitener
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By:
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Ethan Mordden
About this listen
These are the questions Ethan Mordden answers, with breezy erudition and irrepressible enthusiasm, in this fascinating and wonderfully readable book. Mordden illuminates how the style of each studio was primarily dictated by the personality, philosophy, and attitudes of its presiding mogul - and how all these factors affected the work and careers of individual actors, directors, writers, and technicians, and the success of the studio in general.
©1988 Ethan Mordden (P)1996 Blackstone Audio, Inc.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Critic reviews
"Accessible, well written, humorous and informed. Barrett Whitener is brisk and crisp - as always, a delight to listen to." ( AudioFile)
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Story
Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions—from Cinerama, Cinemascope and Vistavision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios, the end of the production code; and the invasion of the ultimate body snatcher: the “small screen” television.
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Captivating from start to finish
- By Steve C. on 02-01-25
By: Foster Hirsch
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Confidential Confidential
- The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine
- By: Samantha Barbas
- Narrated by: Donna Postel
- Length: 12 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out stars' sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the best-selling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall.
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Fascinating! Painstaking Research & Documentation
- By A reader lives a thousand lives before he dies. on 05-22-19
By: Samantha Barbas
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The Brothers Mankiewicz
- Hope, Heartbreak, and Hollywood Classics
- By: Sydney Ladensohn Stern
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 15 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Herman J. (1897-1953) and Joseph L. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) wrote, produced, and directed over 150 pictures. With Orson Welles, Herman wrote the screenplay for Citizen Kane and shared the picture's only Academy Award. Joe earned the second pair of his four Oscars for writing and directing All About Eve, which also won Best Picture.
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Golden age Hollywood comes alive.
- By Morton on 04-02-20
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Scandals of Classic Hollywood
- Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema
- By: Anne Helen Peterson
- Narrated by: Romy Nordlinger
- Length: 9 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Believe it or not, America's fascination with celebrity culture was thriving well before the days of TMZ, Perez Hilton, Charlie Sheen's breakdown, and allegations against Woody Allen. And the stars of yesteryear? They weren't always the saints that we make them out to be. Part biography, part cultural history, the stories contained in this book cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups.
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Riveting journey
- By Jennifer on 10-07-14
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Close-Up on Sunset Boulevard
- Billy Wilder, Norma Desmond, and the Dark Hollywood Dream
- By: Sam Staggs
- Narrated by: Donald Corren
- Length: 14 hrs and 18 mins
- Unabridged
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Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, a classic film noir and also a damning dissection of the Hollywood dream factory, evokes the glamour and ruin of the stars who subsist on that dream. It’s also one long in-joke about the movie industry and those who made it great - and who were, in turn, destroyed by it. One of the most critically admired films of the 20th century, Sunset Boulevard is also famous as silent-star Gloria Swanson’s comeback picture.
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ABRIDGED VERSION BADLY NEEDED!
- By The Louligan on 01-18-22
By: Sam Staggs
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20th Century-Fox
- Darryl F. Zanuck and the Creation of the Modern Film Studio
- By: Scott Eyman
- Narrated by: Suehyla El-Attar
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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March 20, 2019 marked the end of an era - Disney took ownership of the movie empire that was Fox. For almost a century before that historic date, Twentieth Century-Fox was one of the preeminent producers of films, stars, and filmmakers. Its unique identity in the industry and place in movie history is unparalleled - and one of the greatest stories to come out of Hollywood.
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Our media world is unlike anything we’ve ever known
- By Amy Evans on 12-04-21
By: Scott Eyman
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City of Nets
- A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940's
- By: Otto Friedrich, Glen David Gold - foreword
- Narrated by: P.J. Ochlan
- Length: 25 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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In 1939, 50 million Americans went to the movies every week, Louis B. Mayer was the highest-paid man in the country, and Hollywood produced 530 feature films a year. One decade and five thousand movies later, the studios were faltering....
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Disjointed and flawed
- By A. N. Onymous on 01-18-22
By: Otto Friedrich, and others
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Oscar Wars
- A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears
- By: Michael Schulman
- Narrated by: Charlie Thurston
- Length: 21 hrs
- Unabridged
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In Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman chronicles the remarkable, sprawling history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas—some iconic, others never-before-revealed—that have played out on the stage and off camera. Unlike other books on the subject, each chapter takes a deep dive into a particular year, conflict, or even category that tells a larger story of cultural change, from Louis B. Mayer to Moonlight. Schulman examines how the red carpet runs through contested turf, and the victors aren't always as clear as the names drawn from envelopes.
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Fascinating and FUN
- By Peter Riley on 06-11-23
By: Michael Schulman
What listeners say about The Hollywood Studios
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall
- Whyprsnapr
- 06-15-11
Very Entertaining and Informative
We often hear of the major directors and producers who shaped American cinema: Griffith, DeMille, Hawks, Ford, Houston, etc., in the former camp, Selznick, Thalberg, Goldwyn, etc, in the latter--but this is a lively and quite informative look at how the major studios each had a style and production system of their own. It provides discussions of several key films, notes how similar material was differently shaped in competing studios, and you end up with a nice list of "Must See" films from the Golden Age. A great read for those with more than a passing interest in films, especially given the poverty of audiobook titles of similar subject matter.
The author is opinionated (he dismisses Douglas Sirk out of hand and obviously prefers the musical over other genres, the latter more a problem as studios such as Universal and Warner Brothers were primarily known for other genres, the horror and gangster film respectively. Still, this is a good way to get a feeling for how each studio's style emerged and was refined, and the opinions take back seat to the films and personalities that characterize each studio's distinctive output.
I was disappointed by the brevity of the chapter on RKO, and some of the author's insights seem not to come so much from having viewed the films in question, but rather from documentaries about the era (his discussion of the early talkies is, in part, straight from the old HBO series, HOLLYWOOD, END OF AN ERA. These a minor quibbles, and I highly recommend this book as a starting point.
The reader is first rate. He has been attacked elsewhere, but I found him wonderful company during a long automobile trip just ended. Give the sample a listen and decide for yourself.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Bruce Balick
- 11-18-21
A Droll History of Hollywood's Studio System
I was put off at first by the flat narration, BUT the narrator improves as the book goes on AND a deadpan read seems to work for Mordden's style - he has a dry wit that invites the listener to pick up the jokes on his/her own. We visit Paramount, MGM, Warner Bros., RKO and other studios in Hollywood's Golden Age. Mordden is an opinionated writer - I can't imagine any reader would agree with everything he writes but that's part of what makes him so fun. I think he is so right on about RKO's Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby and ridiculously critical of MGM's Freed Unit but I don't expect you (or Mordden) to necessarily agree with me. All the greats are here. A sampling: Katherine Hepburn, George Cukor, Astaire and Rogers, Gloria Swanson, John Ford, Judy Garland - a small taste of what lies in store for the listener. I thoroughly enjoyed this book and think it's mandatory reading for TCM fans and anyone who wants a taste of Golden Age Hollywood. The book's span is from the earliest silent pictures through 1948, the year the Studios were, in a sense, broken up by the Government. (It's much more complicated then that and frankly I still don't understand what exactly happened.). I can't think of a more fun time and place to be than here in black-and-white/Technicolor land. Give it a listen.
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- Kindle Customer
- 04-07-21
Interesting book, bland reader
I love the subject of the studio system and the movies that were made. And while the narrator did mispronounce certain words and names that didn't bother Me as much as the overall blandness in which he read it. especially when he was quoting someone. It was passable I guess because I do like the subject matter.
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- Gary Maloney
- 04-12-21
Rare Audible offering of an Ethan Mordden book
should be a lot more of these available
Mordden is one of our great cultural historians
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Overall
- Eleanor
- 07-20-09
The reader falls quite short of the book
I very much enjoyed the book - but the reader is flat terrible. If someone is going to read a book about the movies, it behooves him to learn to pronounce names properly. It was AWFUL to listen to the mispronunciation of Paul Muni's name - over and over again. And this is just one example in a list of many. There are even words he doesn't pronounce properly, e.g., "acumen" - as if it were chili spice. Painful!
This same reader read another book - Picture a Revolution and had the same problem. Many of the names he mispronounces are quite famous and central to some of the passages. It truly drove me nuts. I will look to see if this reader has any more books and will not order them.
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25 people found this helpful
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Overall
- Chris
- 03-20-10
Informative and opinionated
The title of this review should have read "Informative and opinionated--not that there's anything wrong with that."
Ethan Mordden's THE HOLLYWOOD STUDIOS is an interesting book. Mordden describes the house style for each studio effectively, and he has some surprisingly good insights into some of the movies. Paramount's stock in trade in the 1930s, for example, was its European directors (not just Lubitsch but others) and the theme of "sex as theft" in its films. MGM relied on style rather than distinguished directors; Twentieth Century-Fox was "nineteenth-century Fox" for its folksy rural dramas, etc.
If Mordden doesn't like a movie, though, look out: he'll pick at anything--a minor factual error in a headline in a newspaper montage, for example--to trash it.
The narration is all right except for some mispronunciations, and it's an interesting listen.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Diana
- 08-20-12
Great book, bad reader
Would you recommend this audiobook to a friend? If so, why?
Maybe, because the book is terrific, but maybe not because the performance is terrible.
What didn’t you like about Barrett Whitener’s performance?
His ignorance of the subject matter is apparent in his routine mispronunciation of names and titles. Also, his performance is poor. Please get Mordden to read his own books!
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6 people found this helpful
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- Edward C. Foley
- 05-06-12
Fun Read
Would you consider the audio edition of The Hollywood Studios to be better than the print version?
Even though the book interested me I would never made time to read it. Fortunately I ordered the audio. It was great! It is encyclopedic yet never dry. The narrator was very good and obviously relished the book as much as I did.
What did you like best about this story?
The humor and witticisms. There was much I wanted to remember and quote
What about Barrett Whitener’s performance did you like?
See above
If you were to make a film of this book, what would be the tag line be?
Hollywood Answers
Any additional comments?
More Mordden please.
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3 people found this helpful
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- Peggy
- 08-01-15
Interesting and imformative
Would you listen to The Hollywood Studios again? Why?
I never listen to or read the same book more than once
What did you like best about this story?
That it was true
Have you listened to any of Barrett Whitener’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
no
Did you have an extreme reaction to this book? Did it make you laugh or cry?
no, just interesting listen
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1 person found this helpful
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- Gary S. Arkell
- 02-23-22
Great Historical book about Hollywood
It is a shame I did not get to finish this audiobook. It is a great historical book about movies and Hollywood. I almost wish I could have finished this book and listen to it again. But for some reason it is unavailable now
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