Resumo de Book Of Facts - Reader's Digest

CINEMA AND TELEVISION

HOW OSCAR GOT HIS NAME.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the body which awards annual Oscars, was born on May 4, 1927. It was then that more than 30 leading figures in the US film industry met to establish a non-profit-making organization to improve the artistic quality of the medium. The group included stars like Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks, and art director Cedric Gibbons who, on a tablecloth at a banquet in Hollywood?s Biltmore Hotel, sketched the design for a golden statuette. His design became the model for the academy?s trophies and the first were presented in May 1929.
At first, the trophy was known simply as the statuette. It was not until four years after the inaugural banquet that Oscar was christened. In 1931 Margaret Herrick, then the academy?s librarian, spotted a copy of the statuette on the executive?s desk. ?Why,? she exclaimed, ?he looks just like my Uncle Oscar!? Her off-the-cuff remark was repeated around the academy- and the name stuck.

FLIGHT INTO THE FUTURE
The first film which realistically portrayed space travel and also featured the first use of the countdown to zero which marks a rocket launch- was Die Frau Im Mond (The Woman in the moon), made in Germany in 1928 by director Fritz Lang. One of his technical advisers was an engineer named Hermann Oberth, who in the late 1930s and early 1940s helped to design the ?flying bombs?- the V1 and V2- that brought death and destruction to London. The shape of the rocket in Lang?s film so much resembled the German rocket bombs that Nazi leader Adolf Hitler later demanded that all prints of the film be seized as a threat to military security.
Lang successfully predicted the future of space flight by showing his rocket ship as having several stages which fired in succession- just like the Saturn rockets which took man to the Moon. And the scene in which the craft is trundled on tracks out of a hanger in the direction of the launching pad heralded the real life activities at Cape Canaveral a generation later.

BIRTH OF THE ?TALKIES?
The film industry changed from ?silents? to ?talkies? in the late 1920s, after the success in 1927 of The Jazz Singer, starring Al Jolson. Overnight, films without spoken dialogue were converted into those with speech. And one of the first directors to make the change was Alfred Hitchcock- whose Blackmail, in 1929, became the first British ?talkie?. The film had originally been made as a ?silent?, but Hitchcock- who had shrewdly kept most of the sets intact- reshot it entirely with dialogue.
His greatest problem concerned his leading lady, Anny Ondra, a Czech whose fractured English was impossible to understand. Her voice had to be dubbed. Later that year the silent version was released for those cinemas not yet converted to sound.
The Times of London was in no doubt about which of the two versions was better. In a leading article on August 14, 1929, the paper declared; ?The comparison is much in favour of the silent version.? The paper was also in no doubt about the future of films with dialogue. ?The talkie is an unsuitable marriage of two dramatic forms,? it declared in the same article. ?We cannot believe that it will endure.?

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