The Smith Tapes

Download The Smith Tapes PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Chronicle Books
ISBN 13 : 1616894857
Total Pages : 418 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (168 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Smith Tapes by : Ezra Bookstein

Download or read book The Smith Tapes written by Ezra Bookstein and published by Chronicle Books. This book was released on 2015-11-03 with total page 418 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 1960s were a period of radical cultural, social, and political upheaval in the United States and around the globe; yet in just three years, between 1969 and 1972, Village Voice "Scenes" columnist, WPLJ FM radio host, and cult figure Howard Smith got to the heart of it all by talking it out—both on and—off the record. As famous as those who passed through the airwaves, Smith encapsulated the end of an era through personal conversations and hard-hitting interviews with Mick Jagger, Frank Zappa, Andy Warhol, Buckminster Fuller, leaders of the feminist movement and the Gay Liberation Front, a NARC agent, John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and scores of other iconic and influential personalities, including musicians, artists, filmmakers, actors, writers, politicians, and social activists, from countercultural luminaries to everyday revolutionaries and everyone in between. The Smith Tapes transcribes, for the first time ever, sixty-one of those recorded sessions, from an archive of more than one hundred fifty reels unearthed after more than forty years. Edited by documentary film writer and director/producer Ezra Bookstein, this book reveals the time capsule that Smith ingeniously captured, and contains raw and unscripted talks that take you right into the midst of a transformative cultural and musical explosion.

Victim

Download Victim PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1446440613
Total Pages : 354 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (464 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Victim by : Matthew Smith

Download or read book Victim written by Matthew Smith and published by Random House. This book was released on 2011-08-31 with total page 354 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Suicide? Or murder? Marilyn Monroe's death in August 1962, apparently a suicide, shocked the world. A Hollywood star, a global icon, why would she have killed herself? Yet the coroner's report stated her death was due to a massive overdose of 47 Nembutal capsules. But what about the discrepancies between the official report and the scene of her death? What about the forensic evidence that went missing shortly after she died? Matthew Smith has constructed a startling new version of events. His interpretation is based not only on the full and true forensic evidence from the time, but also on the tapes that Marilyn made for her psychiatrist in the days and weeks before her death, tapes that portray a woman in full charge of her life and looking forward to a bright, busy, successful future. Forty years after her death, Marilyn remains an icon and a mystery. Matthew Smith's investigation into her death will lead to a new understanding of what really happened on the night of August 5th 1962 and in the weeks leading up to it.

Gene Smith's Sink

Download Gene Smith's Sink PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN 13 : 1429944455
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (299 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Gene Smith's Sink by : Sam Stephenson

Download or read book Gene Smith's Sink written by Sam Stephenson and published by Farrar, Straus and Giroux. This book was released on 2017-08-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An incisive biography of the prolific photo-essayist W. Eugene Smith Famously unabashed, W. Eugene Smith was photography’s most celebrated humanist. As a photo essayist at Life magazine in the 1940s and ’50s, he established himself as an intimate chronicler of human culture. His photographs of war and disaster, villages and metropolises, doctors and midwives, revolutionized the role of images in journalism, transforming photography for decades to come. When Smith died in 1978, he left behind eighteen dollars in the bank and forty-four thousand pounds of archives. He was only fifty-nine, but he was flat worn-out. His death certificate read “stroke,” but, as was said of the immortal jazzman Charlie Parker, Smith died of “everything,” from drug and alcohol benders to weeklong work sessions with no sleep. Lured by the intoxicating trail of people that emerged from Smith’s stupefying archive, Sam Stephenson began a quest to trace his footsteps. In Gene Smith’s Sink, Stephenson merges traditional biography with rhythmic digressions to revive Smith’s life and legacy. Traveling across twenty-nine states, Japan, and the Pacific, Stephenson profiles a lively cast of characters, including the playwright Tennessee Williams, to whom Smith likened himself; the avant-garde filmmaker Stan Brakhage, with whom he once shared a Swiss chalet; the artist Mary Frank, who was married to his friend Robert Frank; the jazz pianists Thelonious Monk and Sonny Clark, whose music was taped by Smith in his loft; and a series of obscure caregivers who helped keep Smith on his feet. The distillation of twenty years of research, Gene Smith’s Sink is an unprecedented look into the photographer’s potent legacy and the subjects around him.

The Jazz Loft Project

Download The Jazz Loft Project PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University of Chicago Press
ISBN 13 : 0226827003
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.2/5 (268 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jazz Loft Project by : Sam Stephenson

Download or read book The Jazz Loft Project written by Sam Stephenson and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 2023-06-27 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reissue of an acclaimed collection of images from photographer W. Eugene Smith’s time in a New York City loft among jazz musicians. In 1957, Eugene Smith walked away from his longtime job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue in New York City’s wholesale flower district. The loft was the late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them. Here, from 1957 to 1965, he made nearly 40,000 photographs and approximately 4,000 hours of recordings of musicians. Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists, and he turned his documentary impulses away from work on his major Pittsburg photo essay and toward his new surroundings. Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of this book, no one had seen his extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tales.

Tales of Times Square

Download Tales of Times Square PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Feral House
ISBN 13 : 1936239698
Total Pages : 306 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (362 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Tales of Times Square by : Josh Alan Friedman

Download or read book Tales of Times Square written by Josh Alan Friedman and published by Feral House. This book was released on 2012-09-23 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Friedman has drawn a vivid picture of the Times Square area and its denizens. He writes about the porn palaces with live sex shows, and the men and women who perform in them, prostitutes and their pimps, the runaways who will likely be the next decade's prostitutes, the clergymen who fight the smut merchants and the cops who feel impotent in the face of the judiciary.”—Publishers Weekly This classic account of the ultra-sleazy, pre-Disneyfied era of Times Square is now the subject of a documentary film of the same name to be theatrically released this year. With this edition, Tales of Times Square returns to print with seven new chapters.

The Dylan Tapes

Download The Dylan Tapes PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452961964
Total Pages : 562 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (529 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Dylan Tapes by : Anthony Scaduto

Download or read book The Dylan Tapes written by Anthony Scaduto and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2022-04-26 with total page 562 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The raw material and interviews behind Anthony Scaduto’s iconic biography of Bob Dylan draw an intimate and multifaceted portrait of the singer-songwriter who defined his era When Anthony Scaduto’s Bob Dylan: An Intimate Biography was first published in 1971, the Nobel Prize–winning songwriter, at thirty, had already released some of the most iconic albums of the 1960s, including Highway 61 Revisited and Blonde on Blonde. Scaduto’s book was one of the first to take an investigative journalist’s approach to its subject and set the standard for rock music biography. The Dylan Tapes, compiled from thirty-six hours of interviews, is a behind-the-scenes look at the making of Scaduto’s landmark book—and a close-up encounter with pivotal figures in Dylan’s life. These reel-to-reel tapes, found in a box in Scaduto’s basement, are a never-bootlegged trove of archival material about Dylan, drawn from conversations with those closest to him during the early years of his career. In the era of ten-second takes, these interviews offer uncommon depth and immediacy as we listen to friends and lovers recall the Dylan they knew as he created his professional persona and perfected his craft—from folk music, protest songs, and electric rock through the traumatic impact of a motorcycle crash to his later, more self-reflecting songwriting. Echo Helstrom, Dylan’s “Girl from the North Country,” is here, as are Suze Rotolo, who graced the cover of the Freewheelin’ album, and Joan Baez, remembering her relationship “to Bobby.” We hear from Mike Porco, who gave Dylan his first gig in New York City; Sid and Bob Gleason, who introduced him to his hero Woody Guthrie; folk artists from Greenwich Village, like Phil Ochs and Ramblin’ Jack Eliot; John Hammond Sr., who gave him his first record contract; plus a host of musicians, activists, folk historians, and archivists—and, of course, Dylan himself. From these reflections and frank conversations, many published here for the first time, a complex, finely observed picture emerges of one of the best known yet most enigmatic musicians of our time.

Marilyn's Last Words

Download Marilyn's Last Words PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Carroll & Graf Pub
ISBN 13 : 9780786713806
Total Pages : 327 pages
Book Rating : 4.7/5 (138 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Marilyn's Last Words by : Matthew Smith

Download or read book Marilyn's Last Words written by Matthew Smith and published by Carroll & Graf Pub. This book was released on 2004 with total page 327 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The author of Vendetta: The Kennedys reopens the Marilyn Monroe case, using previously unreleased tapes illuminating the emotional life of the actress, as well as forensic evidence, to reconstruct the last days of Monroe and prove that her "suicide" was actually foul play.

The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972

Download The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972 PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : HMH
ISBN 13 : 0544277376
Total Pages : 797 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (442 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972 by : Douglas Brinkley

Download or read book The Nixon Tapes: 1971–1972 written by Douglas Brinkley and published by HMH. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 797 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These transcripts document two years of the Richard Nixon presidency and take you directly inside the White House: “A treasure trove” (The Boston Globe). These are the famous—and infamous—Nixon White House tapes that reveal for the first time President Richard Milhous Nixon uncensored, unfiltered, and in his own words. President Nixon’s voice-activated taping system captured every word spoken in the Oval Office, Cabinet Room, other key locations in the White House, and at Camp David—3,700 hours of recordings between 1971 and 1973. Yet less than five percent of those conversations have ever been transcribed and published. Now, thanks to historian Luke Nichter’s massive effort to digitize and transcribe the tapes, the world can finally read an unprecedented account of one of the most important and controversial presidencies in US history. This volume of The Nixon Tapes offers a selection of fascinating scenes from the period in which Nixon opened relations with China, negotiated the SALT I arms agreement with the Soviet Union, and won a landslide reelection victory. All the while, the growing shadow of Watergate and Nixon’s political downfall crept ever closer. The Nixon Tapes provides a never-before-seen glimpse into a flawed president’s hubris, paranoia, and political genius—“essential for students of the era and fascinating for those who lived it” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).

Fire and Rain

Download Fire and Rain PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Da Capo Press
ISBN 13 : 030682213X
Total Pages : 392 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (68 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Fire and Rain by : David Browne

Download or read book Fire and Rain written by David Browne and published by Da Capo Press. This book was released on 2012-07-24 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set against a backdrop of world-changing historical and political events, Fire and Rain tells the extraordinary story of one pivotal year in the lives and music of four legendary artists, and reveals how these artists and their songs both shaped and reflected their times. Drawing on interviews, rare recordings, and newly discovered documents, acclaimed journalist David Browne “allows us to see—and to hear—the elusive moment when the '60s became the '70s in a completely fresh way” (Mark Harris, author of Pictures at a Revolution).

Kathy Smith's Getting Better All the Time

Download Kathy Smith's Getting Better All the Time PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Warner Books (NY)
ISBN 13 : 9780446518482
Total Pages : 300 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (184 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Kathy Smith's Getting Better All the Time by : Kathy Smith

Download or read book Kathy Smith's Getting Better All the Time written by Kathy Smith and published by Warner Books (NY). This book was released on 1998 with total page 300 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Advice on nutrition and fitness, based on the author's "seven keys to success: make it a priority, be consistent, shift your mind-set, find a passion, manage stress, keep a diary, one step at a time."--Page [v].

Do Not Sell At Any Price

Download Do Not Sell At Any Price PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 145166706X
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (516 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Do Not Sell At Any Price by : Amanda Petrusich

Download or read book Do Not Sell At Any Price written by Amanda Petrusich and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A celebration of 78 rpm record subculture reveals the growing value of rare records and the determined efforts of their collectors and archivists, exploring the music of blues artists who have been lost to the modern world.

The Jazz Loft Project

Download The Jazz Loft Project PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307962458
Total Pages : 290 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis The Jazz Loft Project by : Sam Stephenson

Download or read book The Jazz Loft Project written by Sam Stephenson and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2012-05-30 with total page 290 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1957, Eugene Smith, a thirty-eight-year-old magazine photographer, walked out of his comfortable settled world—his longtime well-paying job at Life and the home he shared with his wife and four children in Croton-on-Hudson, New York—to move into a dilapidated, five-story loft building at 821 Sixth Avenue (between Twenty-eighth and Twenty-ninth streets) in New York City’s wholesale flower district. Smith was trying to complete the most ambitious project of his life, a massive photo-essay on the city of Pittsburgh. 821 Sixth Avenue was a late-night haunt of musicians, including some of the biggest names in jazz—Charles Mingus, Zoot Sims, Bill Evans, and Thelonious Monk among them—and countless fascinating, underground characters. As his ambitions broke down for his quixotic Pittsburgh opus, Smith found solace in the chaotic, somnambulistic world of the loft and its artists. He turned his documentary impulses away from Pittsburgh and toward his offbeat new surroundings. From 1957 to 1965, Smith exposed 1,447 rolls of film at his loft, making roughly 40,000 pictures, the largest body of work in his career, photographing the nocturnal jazz scene as well as life on the streets of the flower district, as seen from his fourth-floor window. He wired the building like a surreptitious recording studio and made 1,740 reels (4,000 hours) of stereo and mono audiotapes, capturing more than 300 musicians, among them Roy Haynes, Sonny Rollins, Bill Evans, Roland Kirk, Alice Coltrane, Don Cherry, and Paul Bley. He recorded, as well, legends such as pianists Eddie Costa, and Sonny Clark, drummers Ronnie Free and Edgar Bateman, saxophonist Lin Halliday, bassist Henry Grimes, and multi-instrumentalist Eddie Listengart. Also dropping in on the nighttime scene were the likes of Doris Duke, Norman Mailer, Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and Salvador Dalí, as well as pimps, prostitutes, drug addicts, thieves, photography students, local cops, building inspectors, marijuana dealers, and others. Sam Stephenson discovered Smith’s jazz loft photographs and tapes eleven years ago and has spent the last seven years cataloging, archiving, selecting, and editing Smith’s materials for this book, as well as writing its introduction and the text interwoven throughout. W. Eugene Smith’s Jazz Loft Project has been legendary in the worlds of art, photography, and music for more than forty years, but until the publication of The Jazz Loft Project, no one had seen Smith’s extraordinary photographs or read any of the firsthand accounts of those who were there and lived to tell the tale(s) . . .

A Kid's Guide to Awesome Duct Tape Projects

Download A Kid's Guide to Awesome Duct Tape Projects PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1629148105
Total Pages : 699 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (291 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis A Kid's Guide to Awesome Duct Tape Projects by : Instructables.com

Download or read book A Kid's Guide to Awesome Duct Tape Projects written by Instructables.com and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2014-08-05 with total page 699 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a known fact of the universe that duct tape can fix anything. If it’s broken, just add duct tape! For generations this has been the case, and now thanks to Instructables.com, there’s one more thing duct tape can fix—boredom! Duct tape has come a long way since being a simple metallic roll that you’d find in your grandparent’s basement. Walk into any craft or DIY store and you’ll have your senses bombarded with all sorts of colors and patterns, like argyle, zebra print, and even penguins! And unlike fancy origami paper or glitter, duct tape is inexpensive and lasts forever. Only in this all-in-one Instructables collection can you find some of the most unique duct tape projects that will make you the coolest person you know. Everybody will be talking about your duct tape art, with projects including: The classic duct tape wallet A dapper duct tape bow tie A fabulous duct tape clutch Duct tape lilies for your valentine And so many more! Making paper snowflakes and beaded bracelets are so twentieth century; the future is here and it’s made from duct tape. Impress your friends, entertain guests, keep your creative juices flowing, and save tons of money on Christmas presents all at the same time! With A Kid’s Guide to Awesome Duct Tape Projects, you’ll be the talk of the town before you even know it.

In Cold Blood

Download In Cold Blood PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Modern Library
ISBN 13 : 0812994388
Total Pages : 417 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (129 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis In Cold Blood by : Truman Capote

Download or read book In Cold Blood written by Truman Capote and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

One Man Against the World

Download One Man Against the World PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 1627790845
Total Pages : 404 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (277 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis One Man Against the World by : Tim Weiner

Download or read book One Man Against the World written by Tim Weiner and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-06-16 with total page 404 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The New York Times Bestseller A shocking and riveting look at one of the most dramatic and disastrous presidencies in US history, from Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner Tim Weiner Based largely on documents declassified only in the last few years, One Man Against the World paints a devastating portrait of a tortured yet brilliant man who led the country largely according to a deep-seated insecurity and distrust of not only his cabinet and congress, but the American population at large. In riveting, tick-tock prose, Weiner illuminates how the Vietnam War and the Watergate controversy that brought about Nixon's demise were inextricably linked. From the hail of garbage and curses that awaited Nixon upon his arrival at the White House, when he became the president of a nation as deeply divided as it had been since the end of the Civil War, to the unprecedented action Nixon took against American citizens, who he considered as traitorous as the army of North Vietnam, to the infamous break-in and the tapes that bear remarkable record of the most intimate and damning conversations between the president and his confidantes, Weiner narrates the history of Nixon's anguished presidency in fascinating and fresh detail. A crucial new look at the greatest political suicide in history, One Man Against the World leaves us not only with new insight into this tumultuous period, but also into the motivations and demons of an American president who saw enemies everywhere, and, thinking the world was against him, undermined the foundations of the country he had hoped to lead.

Love Is a Mix Tape

Download Love Is a Mix Tape PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : Crown
ISBN 13 : 1400083036
Total Pages : 242 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 ( download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Love Is a Mix Tape by : Rob Sheffield

Download or read book Love Is a Mix Tape written by Rob Sheffield and published by Crown. This book was released on 2007-12-04 with total page 242 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The happiest, saddest, sweetest book about rock ‘n’ roll that I’ve ever experienced.”—Chuck Klosterman Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life. For Rob Sheffield, that time was one of miraculous love and unbearable grief. A time that spanned seven years, it started when he met the girl of his dreams, and ended when he watched her die in his arms. Using the listings of fifteen of his favorite mix tapes, Rob shows that the power of music to build a bridge between people is stronger than death. You’ll read these words, perhaps surprisingly, with joy in your heart and a song in your head—the one that comes to mind when you think of the love of your life. Praise for Love is a Mixtape “A memoir that manages, no small feat, to be funny and beautifully forlorn at the same time.”—The New York Times Book Review “Humorous, heartbreaking, and heroic.”—Entertainment Weekly “The finest lines ever written about rock ‘n’ roll . . . Like that song on the radio, every word of Rob’s book is true. Love is a mix tape.”—Rolling Stone “Many of us use pop culture as a mirror of our emotional lives, but Sheffield happily walks right through the looking glass.”—Los Angeles Times “Sheffield writes with such aching remembering, you feel like you are invading his privacy . . . and it’s the truth of those details that make this memoir so touching.”—Newsweek

Vitagraph

Download Vitagraph PDF Online Free

Author :
Publisher : University Press of Kentucky
ISBN 13 : 0813181216
Total Pages : 305 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (131 download)

DOWNLOAD NOW!


Book Synopsis Vitagraph by : Andrew A. Erish

Download or read book Vitagraph written by Andrew A. Erish and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the 2022 Peter C. Rollins Book Award and the 2022 Browne Best Edited Reference/Primary Source Work in Popular and American Culture Award In Vitagraph: America's First Great Motion Picture Studio, Andrew A. Erish provides a comprehensive examination and reassessment of the company most responsible for defining and popularizing the American movie. This history challenges long-accepted Hollywood mythology that Paramount and Fox invented the feature film, that Universal created the star system, and that these companies, along with MGM and Warner Bros., developed motion pictures into a multimillion-dollar business. In fact, the truth about Vitagraph is far more interesting than the myths that later moguls propagated about themselves. Established in 1897 by J. Stuart Blackton and Albert E. Smith, Vitagraph was the leading producer of motion pictures for much of the silent era. Vitagraph established America's studio system, a division of labor utilizing specialized craftspeople and artists and developed fundamental aspects of American movies, from framing, lighting, and performance style to emphasizing character-driven comedy and drama in stories that respected and sometimes poked fun at every demographic of Vitagraph's vast audience. For most of its existence America's most influential studio was headquartered in Brooklyn, New York, before relocating to Hollywood. A historically rigorous and thorough account of the most influential producer of American motion pictures during the silent era, Erish draws on valuable primary material long overlooked by other historians to introduce readers to the fascinating, forgotten pioneers of Vitagraph.