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The Cotton Club (film)
''The Cotton Club'' is a 1984 American crime drama film co-written and directed by Francis Ford Coppola and based on James Haskins' 1977 book of the same name. The story centers on the Cotton Club, a Harlem jazz club in the 1930s. The film stars Richard Gere, Gregory Hines, Diane Lane and Lonette McKee, with Bob Hoskins, James Remar, Nicolas Cage, Allen Garfield, Gwen Verdon, Fred Gwynne and Laurence Fishburne in supporting roles. The film was noted for its over-budget production costs, and took a total of five years to make. Despite being a disappointment at the box-office, the film received generally positive reviews and was nominated for several awards, including Golden Globes for Best Director and Best Picture (Drama) and Oscars for Best Art Direction ( Richard Sylbert, George Gaines) and Best Film Editing. Plot A musician named Dixie Dwyer begins working with mobsters to advance his career but falls in love with Vera Cicero, the girlfriend of Jewish-American organized ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Francis Ford Coppola
Francis Ford Coppola (; ; born April 7, 1939) is an American film director, producer, and screenwriter. He is considered one of the major figures of the New Hollywood filmmaking movement of the 1960s and 1970s. Coppola is the recipient of five Academy Awards, six Golden Globe Awards, two Palmes d'Or, and a British Academy Film Award (BAFTA). After directing ''The Rain People'' in 1969, Coppola co-wrote ''Patton'' (1970), which earned him the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay along with Edmund H. North. Coppola's reputation as a filmmaker was cemented with the release of ''The Godfather'' (1972), which revolutionized the gangster genre of filmmaking, receiving strong commercial and critical reception. ''The Godfather'' won three Academy Awards: Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay (shared with Mario Puzo). His film ''The Godfather Part II'' (1974) became the first sequel to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. Highly regarded by critics, the film ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stephen Goldblatt
Stephen Goldblatt, A.S.C., B.S.C. (born 29 April 1945) is a South African-born British cinematographer, noted for his work on numerous high-profile action films, including the first two entries in the ''Lethal Weapon'' series, as well as for his recent collaborations with director Mike Nichols and Tate Taylor. Early life Goldblatt was born on 29 April 1945 in Johannesburg, South Africa, to a Jewish family. When he was seven years old, he and his family moved to London, where at the age of 18 he started working as a photojournalist for the ''London Sunday Times''. Goldblatt attended Guildford School of Art for photography, but later discovered his interest in film while working on a special assignment for Lion Films at Shepperton Studios. It was this interest that motivated him to attend London's Royal College of Art Film School. Career Upon graduation, he went to work shooting documentaries and animation, much of it in 16mm. Among his assignments were two '' Disappearing ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Academy Awards
The Academy Awards, better known as the Oscars, are awards for artistic and technical merit for the American and international film industry. The awards are regarded by many as the most prestigious, significant awards in the entertainment industry worldwide. Given annually by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), the awards are an international recognition of excellence in cinematic achievements, as assessed by the Academy's voting membership. The various category winners are awarded a copy of a golden statuette as a trophy, officially called the "Academy Award of Merit", although more commonly referred to by its nickname, the "Oscar". The statuette, depicting a knight rendered in the Art Deco style, was originally sculpted by Los Angeles artist George Stanley from a design sketch by art director Cedric Gibbons. The 1st Academy Awards were held in 1929 at a private dinner hosted by Douglas Fairbanks in The Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. The Academy Awards cerem ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Golden Globe
The Golden Globe Awards are accolades bestowed by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association beginning in January 1944, recognizing excellence in both American and international film and television. Beginning in 2022, there are 105 members of the HFPA. The annual ceremony at which the awards are presented is normally held every January and has been a major part of the film industry's awards season, which culminates each year in the Academy Awards, although the Golden Globes' relevance has been declining in recent years. The eligibility period for the Golden Globes corresponds to the calendar year (from January 1 through December 31). History The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) was founded in 1943 by Los Angeles-based foreign journalists seeking to develop a better organized process of gathering and distributing cinema news to non-U.S. markets. One of the organization's first major endeavors was to establish a ceremony similar to the Academy Awards to honor film achi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Box-Office Bomb
A box-office bomb, or box-office disaster, is a film that is unprofitable or considered highly unsuccessful during its theatrical run. Although any film for which the production, marketing, and distribution costs combined exceed the revenue after release has technically "bombed", the term is more frequently used for major studio releases that were highly anticipated, extensively marketed and expensive to produce that ultimately failed commercially. Causes Negative word of mouth With the advent of social media platforms such as Facebook and Twitter in the 2000s, word of mouth regarding new films is easily spread and has had a marked effect on box office performance. A film's ability or failure to attract positive or negative commentary can strongly impact its performance at the box office, especially on the opening weekend. External circumstances Occasionally, films may underperform because of issues largely unrelated to the content of the film, such as the timing of the film's re ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Jazz
Jazz is a music genre that originated in the African-American communities of New Orleans, Louisiana in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, with its roots in blues and ragtime. Since the 1920s Jazz Age, it has been recognized as a major form of musical expression in traditional and popular music. Jazz is characterized by swing and blue notes, complex chords, call and response vocals, polyrhythms and improvisation. Jazz has roots in European harmony and African rhythmic rituals. As jazz spread around the world, it drew on national, regional, and local musical cultures, which gave rise to different styles. New Orleans jazz began in the early 1910s, combining earlier brass band marches, French quadrilles, biguine, ragtime and blues with collective polyphonic improvisation. But jazz did not begin as a single musical tradition in New Orleans or elsewhere. In the 1930s, arranged dance-oriented swing big bands, Kansas City jazz (a hard-swinging, bluesy, improvisationa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Harlem, Manhattan
Harlem is a neighborhood in Upper Manhattan, New York City. It is bounded roughly by the Hudson River on the west; the Harlem River and 155th Street on the north; Fifth Avenue on the east; and Central Park North on the south. The greater Harlem area encompasses several other neighborhoods and extends west and north to 155th Street, east to the East River, and south to Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, Central Park, and East 96th Street. Originally a Dutch village, formally organized in 1658, it is named after the city of Haarlem in the Netherlands. Harlem's history has been defined by a series of economic boom-and-bust cycles, with significant population shifts accompanying each cycle. Harlem was predominantly occupied by Jewish and Italian Americans in the 19th century, but African-American residents began to arrive in large numbers during the Great Migration in the 20th century. In the 1920s and 1930s, Central and West Harlem were the center of the Harlem Renaissance, a ma ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Cotton Club (New York City)
The Cotton Club was a New York City nightclub from 1923 to 1940. It was located on 142nd Street and Lenox Avenue (1923–1936), then briefly in the midtown Theater District (1936–1940).Elizabeth Winter"Cotton Club of Harlem (1923- )" Black Past (retrieved September 9, 2014). The club operated during the United States' era of Prohibition and Jim Crow era racial segregation. Black people initially could not patronize the Cotton Club, but the venue featured many of the most popular black entertainers of the era, including musicians Fletcher Henderson, Duke Ellington, Jimmie Lunceford, Chick Webb, Louis Armstrong, Count Basie, Fats Waller, Willie Bryant; vocalists Adelaide Hall,Iain Cameron Williams, Chapter 15, ''Underneath A Harlem Moon: The Harlem to Paris Years of Adelaide Hall'', Continuum, 2002. Ethel Waters, Cab Calloway, Bessie Smith, Aida Ward, Avon Long, the Dandridge Sisters, the Will Vodery Choir, The Mills Brothers, Nina Mae McKinney, Billie Holiday, Lena Horne, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Drama (film And Television)
In film and television, drama is a category or genre of narrative fiction (or semi-fiction) intended to be more serious than humorous in tone. Drama of this kind is usually qualified with additional terms that specify its particular super-genre, macro-genre, or micro-genre, such as soap opera, police crime drama, political drama, legal drama, historical drama, domestic drama, teen drama, and comedy-drama (dramedy). These terms tend to indicate a particular setting or subject-matter, or else they qualify the otherwise serious tone of a drama with elements that encourage a broader range of moods. To these ends, a primary element in a drama is the occurrence of conflict—emotional, social, or otherwise—and its resolution in the course of the storyline. All forms of cinema or television that involve fictional stories are forms of drama in the broader sense if their storytelling is achieved by means of actors who represent ( mimesis) characters. In this broader sense, dra ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Crime Film
Crime films, in the broadest sense, is a film genre inspired by and analogous to the crime fiction literary genre. Films of this genre generally involve various aspects of crime and its detection. Stylistically, the genre may overlap and combine with many other genres, such as drama or gangster film, but also include comedy, and, in turn, is divided into many sub-genres, such as mystery, suspense or noir. Screenwriter and scholar Eric R. Williams identified crime film as one of eleven super-genres in his Screenwriters Taxonomy, claiming that all feature-length narrative films can be classified by these super-genres. The other ten super-genres are action, fantasy, horror, romance, science fiction, slice of life, sports, thriller, war and western. Williams identifies drama in a broader category called "film type", mystery and suspense as "macro-genres", and film noir as a "screenwriter's pathway" explaining that these categories are additive rather than exclusionary. '' C ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Orion Pictures
Orion Pictures (legal name Orion Releasing, LLC) is an American film production and distribution company owned by Amazon through its Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) subsidiary. In its original operating period, the company produced and released films from 1978 until 1999 and was also involved in television production and syndication throughout the 1980s until the early 1990s. It was formed in 1978 as a joint venture between Warner Bros. and three former senior executives at United Artists. From its founding until its buyout by MGM in the late 1990s, Orion was considered one of the largest mini-major studios. Woody Allen, James Cameron, Jonathan Demme, Oliver Stone, and several other prominent directors worked with Orion during its most successful years from 1978 to 1992. Of the films distributed by Orion, four won Academy Awards for Best Picture: ''Amadeus'' (1984), ''Platoon'' (1986), ''Dances with Wolves'' (1990), and ''The Silence of the Lambs (film), The Silence of the Lambs'' (19 ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Producers Sales Organization
Producers Sales Organization (PSO; also known as PSO Productions, Inc.) was an independent motion picture production and sales company founded in 1977. Initiated by Mark Damon, an actor-turned-producer, PSO mostly handled foreign sales of independent films. It was initially a partnership between Damon, producer Sandy Howard, and Richard St. Johns, who worked for Arthur Guinness Son & Co. At one point, it was a subsidiary of Guinness. In its final years of existence, PSO briefly became a full-fledged production company, setting up operations on March 27, 1984, through subsidiary PSO Presentations. On April 10, 1984, a major shake-up happened in the sales and acquisition department and executive Eleanor Powell moved position to become deputy managing director of the company. In November 1984, PSO merged with film financing firm The Delphi Companies; the resulting company, PSO-Delphi, forged a domestic theatrical distribution deal with TriStar Pictures and a home video distribution d ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
