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The Producers (1967 Film)
''The Producers'' is a 1967 American satirical black comedy film written and directed by Mel Brooks in his directorial debut and starring Zero Mostel, Gene Wilder, Dick Shawn, and Kenneth Mars. The film is about a theater producer and his accountant who, as part of a scam, decide to stage the worst stage musical they can create. They find a script centering on Adolf Hitler and the Nazis and bring it to the stage. Because of this theme, ''The Producers'' was controversial from the start and received mixed reviews. It became a cult film and found a more positive critical reception later. ''The Producers'' was Brooks's directorial debut. For the film, he won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay. In 1996, the film was selected for preservation in the National Film Registry and placed eleventh on the AFI's 100 Years...100 Laughs list. It was later adapted by Brooks and Thomas Meehan as a stage musical, which itself was adapted into a film. Plot Max Bialystock ( Zero Mos ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Mel Brooks
Mel Brooks (born Melvin James Kaminsky; June 28, 1926) is an American actor, comedian and filmmaker. With a career spanning over seven decades, he is known as a writer and director of a variety of successful broad farces and parodies. He began his career as a comic and a writer for Sid Caesar's variety show ''Your Show of Shows'' (1950–1954) alongside Woody Allen, Neil Simon and Larry Gelbart. With Carl Reiner, he created the comic character The 2000 Year Old Man. He wrote, with Buck Henry, the hit television comedy series ''Get Smart'' (1965–1970). In middle age, Brooks became one of the most successful film directors of the 1970s, with many of his films being among the top 10 moneymakers of their respective years of release. His best-known films include '' The Producers'' (1967), ''The Twelve Chairs'' (1970), '' Blazing Saddles'' (1974), ''Young Frankenstein'' (1974), '' Silent Movie'' (1976), '' High Anxiety'' (1977), ''History of the World, Part I'' (1981), '' Spaceba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Stage Musical
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the musical theatre wor ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Christopher Hewett
Christopher George Hewett (5 April 1921 – 3 August 2001) was an English actor and theatre director best known for his role as Lynn Aloysius Belvedere on the ABC sitcom ''Mr. Belvedere''. Career Hewett was born in Worthing, Sussex to Christopher Fitzsimon Hewett (an army officer and a descendant of Daniel O'Connell), and his wife Eleanor Joyce Watts (an actress whose professional name was Rhoda Cleighton). He was educated at Beaumont College and at Wimbledon College, and at aged 7, made his acting debut in Dublin stage production of ''A Midsummer Night's Dream''. At age 16 Hewett joined the Royal Air Force, leaving in 1940. Hewett then joined the Oxford Repertory Company and made his West End theatre debut in 1943. He later appeared on Broadway in the musicals ''My Fair Lady'', '' First Impressions'', '' The Unsinkable Molly Brown'', '' Music Is'' and '' Kean'' and in the plays ''Sleuth'' and '' The Affair'', among others, and directed the 1960 Broadway revue ''From A to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A Gay Romp With Adolf And Eva At Berchtesgaden
A, or a, is the first letter and the first vowel of the Latin alphabet, used in the modern English alphabet, the alphabets of other western European languages and others worldwide. Its name in English is ''a'' (pronounced ), plural ''aes''. It is similar in shape to the Ancient Greek letter alpha, from which it derives. The uppercase version consists of the two slanting sides of a triangle, crossed in the middle by a horizontal bar. The lowercase version can be written in two forms: the double-storey a and single-storey ɑ. The latter is commonly used in handwriting and fonts based on it, especially fonts intended to be read by children, and is also found in italic type. In English grammar, " a", and its variant " an", are indefinite articles. History The earliest certain ancestor of "A" is aleph (also written 'aleph), the first letter of the Phoenician alphabet, which consisted entirely of consonants (for that reason, it is also called an abjad to distinguish it f ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Rio De Janeiro
Rio de Janeiro ( , , ; literally 'River of January'), or simply Rio, is the capital of the state of the same name, Brazil's third-most populous state, and the second-most populous city in Brazil, after São Paulo. Listed by the GaWC as a beta global city, Rio de Janeiro is the sixth-most populous city in the Americas. Part of the city has been designated as a World Heritage Site, named "Rio de Janeiro: Carioca Landscapes between the Mountain and the Sea", on 1 July 2012 as a Cultural Landscape. Founded in 1565 by the Portuguese, the city was initially the seat of the Captaincy of Rio de Janeiro, a domain of the Portuguese Empire. In 1763, it became the capital of the State of Brazil, a state of the Portuguese Empire. In 1808, when the Portuguese Royal Court moved to Brazil, Rio de Janeiro became the seat of the court of Queen Maria I of Portugal. She subsequently, under the leadership of her son the prince regent João VI of Portugal, raised Brazil to the dignity ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Theatrical Producer
A theatrical producer is a person who oversees all aspects of mounting a theatre production. The producer is responsible for the overall financial and managerial functions of a production or venue, raises or provides financial backing, and hires personnel for creative positions (writer, director, designers, composer, choreographer—and in some cases, performers). The independent producer usually initiates the production—finding the script and starting the process. The producer finds the director and pursues the primary goals, to balance and coordinate business and financial aspects in the service of the creative realization of the playwright's vision. This may include casting, but often only includes casting approval. The producer may secure funds for the production, either through their own company or by bringing investors into the production in a limited partnership agreement. In this business structure, the producer becomes the general partner with unlimited liability, a ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Broadway (theater)
Broadway theatre,Although ''theater'' is generally the spelling for this common noun in the United States (see American and British English spelling differences), 130 of the 144 extant and extinct Broadway venues use (used) the spelling ''Theatre'' as the proper noun in their names (12 others used neither), with many performers and trade groups for live dramatic presentations also using the spelling ''theatre''. or Broadway, are the theatrical performances presented in the 41 professional theatres, each with 500 or more seats, located in the Theater District and the Lincoln Center along Broadway, in Midtown Manhattan, New York City. Broadway and London's West End together represent the highest commercial level of live theater in the English-speaking world. While the thoroughfare is eponymous with the district and its collection of 41 theaters, and it is also closely identified with Times Square, only three of the theaters are located on Broadway itself (namely the Broadwa ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Producers (2005 Film)
''The Producers'' is a 2005 American musical comedy film directed by Susan Stroman and written by Mel Brooks and Thomas Meehan based on the eponymous 2001 Broadway musical, which in turn was based on Brooks's 1967 film of the same name. The film stars an ensemble cast led by Nathan Lane, Matthew Broderick, Uma Thurman, Will Ferrell, Gary Beach, Roger Bart, and Jon Lovitz. Creature effects were provided by Jim Henson's Creature Shop. The film was released in the United States by Universal Pictures in a limited release on December 16, 2005, followed by a wide release on December 25. It garnered generally mixed reviews from critics and was a Box-office bomb, commercial failure, earning $38 million worldwide from a $45 million budget. Plot In 1959, following the flop of the theatrical musical ''Funny Boy'' (based on William Shakespeare's ''Hamlet'') ("Opening Night"), the show's washed-up producer, Max Bialystock, hires the neurotic Leo Bloom as his accountant. While studying Max ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
The Producers (musical)
''The Producers'' is a musical comedy with music and lyrics by Mel Brooks, and a book by Brooks and Thomas Meehan. It is adapted from Brooks's 1967 film of the same name. The story concerns two theatrical producers who scheme to get rich by fraudulently overselling interests in a Broadway flop. Complications arise when the show unexpectedly turns out to be successful. The humor of the show draws on ridiculous accents, caricatures of gay people and Nazis, and many show business in-jokes. After 33 previews, the original Broadway production opened at the St. James Theatre on April 19, 2001, starring Nathan Lane and Matthew Broderick, and ran for 2,502 performances, winning a record-breaking 12 Tony Awards. It spawned a successful West End production running for just over two years, national tours in the US and UK, many productions worldwide and a 2005 film version. Background David Geffen persuaded Mel Brooks to turn his film into a stage musical. When Brooks met w ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thomas Meehan (writer)
Thomas Edward Meehan (August 14, 1929 – August 21, 2017) was an American playwright. He wrote the books for the musicals '' Annie'', '' The Producers'', ''Hairspray'', ''Young Frankenstein'' and ''Cry-Baby''. He co-wrote the books for '' Elf: The Musical'' and '' Limelight: The Story of Charlie Chaplin''. He received the Tony Award for Best Book of a Musical three times—in 1977 for ''Annie'', in 2001 for ''The Producers'' (shared with Mel Brooks), and in 2003 for ''Hairspray'' (shared with Mark O'Donnell). Early life Meehan was born in Ossining, New York, but grew up in Suffern, New York. His father, Thomas, was a businessman, and his mother, Helen Cecilia O’Neill, was an emergency department nurse. He graduated from Hamilton College."Thomas Meehan bio" cityfile.com, accessed March 12, 2011. according to this biography, Meehan ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
National Film Registry
The National Film Registry (NFR) is the United States National Film Preservation Board's (NFPB) collection of films selected for preservation, each selected for its historical, cultural and aesthetic contributions since the NFPB’s inception in 1988. History Through the 1980s, several prominent filmmakers and industry personalities in the United States, such as Frank Capra and Martin Scorsese, advocated for Congress to enact a film preservation bill in order to avoid commercial modifications (such as pan and scan and editing for TV) of classic films, which they saw as negative. In response to the controversy over the colorization of originally black and white films in the decade specifically, Representatives Robert J. Mrazek and Sidney R. Yates introduced the National Film Preservation Act of 1988, which established the National Film Registry, its purpose, and the criteria for selecting films for preservation. The Act was passed and the NFR's mission was subsequently r ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
