Boston Weekly Cultural & Artistic Picks 7/16-7/22, 2012
Harvard Film Archives Celebrates Paramount Pictures Centennial
By: Nelida Nassar - 07/14/2012
The Pick of the Week:
Harvard Film Archives Celebrates Paramount Pictures Centennial Anniversary
The Harvard Film Archives pay tribute to Paramount Pictures. Adolph Zukor, a wealthy entrepreneur formed in 1912 Famous Players Film Company, a production and distribution company that became one of the most important studios in American cinema whose slogan is “Famous Players in Famous Films.” Hungarian born, Zukor had been an early investor in the penny arcades, nickelodeons, and small movies theatres that featured programs of one-reel films. A visionary, he was convinced that there was financial gain in longer films, thus in July 12, 1912, he imported a four-reel French film starring Sarah Berhardt as Elizabeth I that opened in New York.
Elisabeth's success attracted illustrious stage performers into film studios and re-oriented moviemakers towards feature films. Meanwhile, in 1913, Jesse Lasky, an aspiring director, opened The Lasky Company and hired its first employee, a stage director Cecil B. DeMille to shoot a Western. DeMille found a suitable location site in Hollywood, near Los Angeles, for his first feature film, The Squaw Man. Its success led to the relocation of the US film industry from New York to Hollywood.
Beginning in 1914, both Lasky and Famous Players released their films through a start-up company, Paramount Pictures Corporation, organized early that year by a Utah theatre owner, W.W. Hodkinson, who had bought and merged several smaller firms. Hodkinson and the actor, director, producer, Hobat Bosworth, had started production of a series of Jack London movies. Paramount was the first successful nation-wide distributor. Until this time, films were sold on a state or regional basis which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation. Soon the ambitious Zukor, unused to taking a secondary role, began courting Hodkinson and Lasky. On September 28, 1916, Zukor maneuvered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount becoming Paramount Pictures.
In the 1930s, Paramount Pictures, faithful to its slogan, attracted a prominent roster of movie stars among them Marlene Dietrich, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr., W.C. Fields, William Holden, Mariam Hopkins, Alan Ladd, Veronica Lake, Mary Pickford, Wallace Reid, Barbara Stanwyck and Gloria Swanson.
The Harvard Archives’s tribute will focus on Paramount Pictures two golden eras the 1930s and early 1940s, the 1960s through the mid-1970s and the transitional time in between. In 1930, the studio has attracted Hollywood’s most talented filmmakers many of them émigrés such as Ernst Lubitsch, Rouben Mamoulian, Josef von Sternberg and Billy Wilder. Under their influence, the films were imbued with a European refinement, sensibility and sophistication.
Paramount Pictures’ second golden age was ushered with Robert Evans appointment as the studio’s production director from the late 1960s through the mid-1970s. During that period, Chinatown, the two Godfathers films, Rosemary’s Baby, Serpico and The Conversation were released thus propelling the studio to the heart of the new “American cinema” of the time.
Seminal movies such as Billy Wilder’s A Foreign Affair, Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat, Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Robert Altman’s Popeye are just a few among the rich selection the Archives promises us.
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CINEMA – FILM
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Monday, July 16, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012
Saturday, July 21, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Harvard Film Archives
: Paramount Pictures Centennial Tribute
http://hcl.harvard.edu/hfa
Wednesday, July 18, 2012 to Sunday, July 22, 2012
Museum of Fine Arts
: French Film Festival
http://www.mfa.org/programs/film
Monday, July 18, 2012 to Sunday, July 22, 2012
Kendall Square Cinema
http://www.landmarktheatres.com/market/boston/kendallsquarecinema.htm
Monday, July 18, 2012 to Sunday, July 22, 2012
Coolidge Corner Theatre
http://www.coolidge.org
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Goethe Institut at Coolidge Corner Theatre
http://www.coolidge.org
Monday, July 16, 2012 to Sunday, July 22, 2012
Fenway Regal Theatre
http://www.movies?hl=en&near=fenway
Friday, July 20, 2012
MIT Films
http://www.lsc.mit.edu/
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MUSIC – CONCERTS
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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra Tanglewood: Vocal Concert
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra Tanglewood: Brahms Complete Works for Piano, Program 1
Thursday 19, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Brahms Complete Works for Piano, Program 2
Friday, July 20,, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Tanglewood: All Mozart Program
Friday, July 20, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra: Bernstein and Tchaikovsky - Berkshire Night
Saturday, July 22, 2012
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Boston Symphony Orchestra: All-Mozart Program
http://www.bso.org/
Monday, July 16, 2012
to Sunday, July 22, 2012
Friday, July 20, 2012 and Sunday July 22, 2012
Berklee College of Music: Summer Festival in the City
http://www.berklee.edu/
Concerts resume July 26, 2012
Longy School of Music of Bard College
http://www.longy.edu/concerts/concerts_calendar.htm
Friday, July 22, 2012
New England Conservatory
http://necmusic.edu/jordan-hall
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Music/CRASHarts: DEBO Band / Grupo Fantasma
http://www.CRASHarts.org/
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Boston Landmark Orchestra
http://www.landmarkorchestra.org/
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DANCE
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Tuesday, July 17, 2012
FlamencoBoston: Flamenco and Tapas
Bar Lola
http://www.barlola.com/
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OPERA
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THEATRE – PLAYS
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Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Thursday, July 19, 2012
American Repertory Theatre – OBERON: Roller Disco the Musical!
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/roller-disco
Friday, July 20, 2012
American Repertory Theatre – OBERON: Bye Bye Liver: The Boston Drinking Play
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/boston-drinking-play
Saturday, July 21, 2012
American Repertory Theatre – OBERON: The Donkey Show
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/the-donkey-show
Sunday July 22, 2012
American Repertory Theatre – OBERON: Mortified
http://www.americanrepertorytheater.org/events/show/mortified
Plays resume September 7, 2012
Lyric Stage Company of Boston
http://www.lyricstage.com
Plays resume September 14, 2012
Huntington Theatre Company
http://www.huntingtontheatre.org/
Plays resume August 14, 2012
BCA Plaza Theatre
https://www.baonline.org/
Sunday, July 22, 2012
Fort Point Theatre Channel: Indiscreet Discretion
http://www.fortpointtheatrechannel.org/productions/
No shows this week
Reagle Music Theatre of Greater Boston
https://www.reagleplayers.com/current.html/
No shows this week
Regent Arlington Theatre of Greater Boston
https://www.regenttheatre.com