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Shawn Levy (writer)
Shawn Anthony Levy (born 1961) is an American film critic, author, podcaster, and blogger. Born in New York City, and educated at the University of Pennsylvania and the University of California, Irvine, Levy was the film critic of ''The Oregonian'' newspaper in Portland, Oregon, from 1997 to 2012 and of KGW-TV, Portland's NBC affiliate, from 2009 to 2016. He is a former Senior Editor of ''American Film'' and a former Associate Editor of ''Box Office''. His work has appeared in major newspapers and magazines in the United States and England including ''The New York Times'', the ''Los Angeles Times'', the ''San Francisco Chronicle'', ''The Guardian'', ''The Independent'', ''Film Comment'', ''Movieline'', ''Premiere'', and ''Sight & Sound''. Levy has written biographies of film actors Paul Newman, Clint Eastwood, Robert De Niro and Jerry Lewis, a history of the famed hotel Chateau Marmont, and books on pop culture scenes and phenomena such as the Rat Pack, 1950s film-making in Rom ...
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New York City
New York, often called New York City (NYC), is the most populous city in the United States, located at the southern tip of New York State on one of the world's largest natural harbors. The city comprises five boroughs, each coextensive with a respective county. The city is the geographical and demographic center of both the Northeast megalopolis and the New York metropolitan area, the largest metropolitan area in the United States by both population and urban area. New York is a global center of finance and commerce, culture, technology, entertainment and media, academics, and scientific output, the arts and fashion, and, as home to the headquarters of the United Nations, international diplomacy. With an estimated population in 2024 of 8,478,072 distributed over , the city is the most densely populated major city in the United States. New York City has more than double the population of Los Angeles, the nation's second-most populous city.
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The Independent
''The Independent'' is a British online newspaper. It was established in 1986 as a national morning printed paper. Nicknamed the ''Indy'', it began as a broadsheet and changed to tabloid format in 2003. The last printed edition was published on Saturday 26 March 2016, leaving only the online edition. The daily edition was named National Newspaper of the Year at the 2004 British Press Awards. ''The Independent'' won the Brand of the Year Award in The Drum Awards for Online Media 2023. History 1980s Launched in 1986, the first issue of ''The Independent'' was published on 7 October in broadsheet format.Dennis Griffiths (ed.) ''The Encyclopedia of the British Press, 1422–1992'', London & Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992, p. 330. It was produced by Newspaper Publishing plc and created by Andreas Whittam Smith, Stephen Glover and Matthew Symonds. All three partners were former journalists at ''The Daily Telegraph'' who had left the paper towards the end of Lord Hartwell' ...
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David Lynch
David Keith Lynch (January 20, 1946 – January 16, 2025) was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. Widely considered one of the greatest filmmakers of all time, Lynch was often called a "visionary" and received acclaim for David Lynch filmography, films distinguished by their Surrealist cinema, surrealist and experimental film, experimental qualities. In a career spanning more than five decades, he received List of accolades received by David Lynch, numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Academy Honorary Award in 2019. Lynch studied painting and made short films before making his first feature, the independent body horror film ''Eraserhead'' (1977), which found success as a midnight movie. He earned critical acclaim and nominations for the Academy Award for Best Director for the biographical drama ''The Elephant Man (1980 film), The Elephant Man'' (1980) and the neo-noir mystery ar ...
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Swinging London
The Swinging Sixties was a youth-driven cultural revolution that took place in the United Kingdom during the mid-to-late 1960s, emphasising modernity and fun-loving hedonism, with Swinging London denoted as its centre. It saw a flourishing in art, music and fashion, and was symbolised by the city's "pop and fashion exports", such as the Beatles, as the multimedia leaders of the British Invasion of musical acts; the mod and psychedelic subcultures; Mary Quant's miniskirt designs; popular fashion models such as Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton; the iconic status of popular shopping areas such as London's King's Road, Kensington and Carnaby Street; the political activism of the anti-nuclear movement; and the sexual liberation movement. Music was an essential part of the revolution, with "the London sound" being regarded as including the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, the Who, the Kinks and the Small Faces, bands that were additionally the mainstay of pirate radio stations lik ...
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Rat Pack
The Rat Pack was an informal group of singers that, in its second iteration, ultimately made films and appeared together in Las Vegas casino venues. They originated in the late 1940s and early 1950s as a group of A-list show business friends, such as Errol Flynn, Nat King Cole, Mickey Rooney, Judy Garland, Frank Sinatra and others who met casually at the Holmby Hills home of Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. In the 1960s, the group featured Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Joey Bishop, and (before falling out with Sinatra in 1962) Peter Lawford, among others. They appeared together on stage and in films in the 1950s and 1960s, including the films '' Ocean's 11'' and '' Sergeants 3''; after Lawford's expulsion, they filmed '' Robin and the 7 Hoods'' with Bing Crosby in what was to have been Lawford's role. Sinatra, Martin, and Davis were regarded as the group's lead members after Bogart's death. 1950s The name "Rat Pack" was first used to call a group of friends i ...
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Pop Culture
Popular culture (also called pop culture or mass culture) is generally recognized by members of a society as a set of practices, beliefs, artistic output (also known as popular art pop_art.html" ;"title="f. pop art">f. pop artor mass art, sometimes contrasted with fine art) and cultural objects, objects that are dominant or prevalent in a society at a given point in time. Popular culture also encompasses the activities and feelings produced as a result of interaction with these dominant objects. The primary driving forces behind popular culture, especially when speaking of Western popular cultures, are the mass media, mass appeal, marketing and capitalism; and it is produced by what philosopher Theodor Adorno refers to as the " culture industry". Heavily influenced in modern times by mass media, this collection of ideas permeates the everyday lives of people in a given society. Therefore, popular culture has a way of influencing an individual's attitudes towards certain top ...
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Chateau Marmont
The Chateau Marmont is a hotel located at 8221 Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles, California. The hotel was designed by architects Arnold A. Weitzman and William Douglas Lee and completed in 1929. It was modeled loosely after the Château d'Amboise, a royal retreat in France's Loire Valley. The hotel is known as both a long- and short-term residence for celebrities – historically "populated by people either on their way up or on their way down" – as well as a home for New Yorkers in Hollywood. The hotel complex has 63 rooms, suites, cottages, and 4 bungalows. In 2020, the hotel announced plans to become a members-only hotel. These plans were withdrawn in 2022. History Design and construction In 1926, Fred Horowitz, a prominent Los Angeles attorney, chose the site at Marmont Lane and Sunset Boulevard to construct an apartment building. Horowitz had recently traveled to Europe for inspiration and returned to California with photos of a Gothic Chateau ( Chateau d'Amboise ...
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Jerry Lewis
Jerry Lewis (born Joseph Levitch; March 16, 1926 – August 20, 2017) was an American comedian, actor, singer, filmmaker and humanitarian, with a career spanning seven decades in film, stage, television and radio. Famously nicknamed as "The King of Comedy", he is regarded as one of the greatest comedians of the 20th century. His fame rose to prominence together with singer Dean Martin, billed as Martin and Lewis, in 1946 and for ten years, the two did a series of sixteen buddy-comedy films, along with The Colgate Comedy Hour, their televised run on ''The Colgate Comedy Hour'', live stage performances, guest spots on other shows and a The Martin and Lewis Show, radio series. After the team's split in 1956, Lewis became a highly popular solo movie star in twenty-nine motion pictures from 1957 to 1972, including the critically acclaimed smash hit ''The Nutty Professor (1963 film), The Nutty Professor'' (1963). For television, he hosted ''The Jerry Lewis Show'' (both the Ameri ...
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Robert De Niro
Robert Anthony De Niro ( , ; born August 17, 1943) is an American actor, director, and film producer. He is considered to be one of the greatest and most influential actors of his generation. De Niro is the recipient of List of awards and nominations received by Robert De Niro, various accolades, including two Academy Awards and a Golden Globe Award as well as nominations for eight BAFTA Awards and four Emmy Awards. He was honored with the AFI Life Achievement Award in 2003, the Kennedy Center Honors in 2009, the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award, Cecil B. DeMille Award in 2011, the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2016, the Screen Actors Guild Life Achievement Award in 2019, and the Honorary Palme d'Or in 2025. De Niro studied acting at HB Studio, Stella Adler Conservatory, and Lee Strasberg's Actors Studio. He went on to earn two Academy Awards, his first for Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actor for his role as Vito Corleone in the crime drama ...
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Clint Eastwood
Clinton Eastwood Jr. (born May 31, 1930) is an American actor and film director. After achieving success in the Western (genre), Western TV series ''Rawhide (TV series), Rawhide'', Eastwood rose to international fame with his role as the "Man with No Name" in Sergio Leone's ''Dollars Trilogy'' of spaghetti Westerns during the mid-1960s and as antihero cop Dirty Harry (character), Harry Callahan in the five ''Dirty Harry (film series), Dirty Harry'' films throughout the 1970s and 1980s. These roles, among others, have made Eastwood an enduring cultural icon of masculinity. Elected in 1986, Eastwood served for two years as the mayor of Carmel-by-the-Sea, California. Eastwood's greatest commercial successes are the adventure comedy ''Every Which Way but Loose'' (1978) and its action comedy sequel ''Any Which Way You Can'' (1980). Other popular Eastwood films include the Westerns ''Hang 'Em High'' (1968), ''The Outlaw Josey Wales'' (1976) and ''Pale Rider'' (1985), the action-wa ...
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Paul Newman
Paul Leonard Newman (January 26, 1925 – September 26, 2008) was an American actor, film director, race car driver, philanthropist, and activist. He was the recipient of List of awards and nominations received by Paul Newman, numerous awards, including an Academy Award, a British Academy Film Awards, BAFTA Award, seven Golden Globe Awards, a Screen Actors Guild Award, a Primetime Emmy Award, a Silver Bear for Best Actor, a Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Actor, and nominations for two Grammy Awards and a Tony Award. Along with his Best Actor Academy Award win, Newman also received two additional Oscars, both meritorious: the Academy Honorary Award and the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award. Born in Cleveland Heights, Ohio, Cleveland Heights, Ohio, and raised in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Shaker Heights, the eastern suburbs of Cleveland, Newman showed an interest in theater as a child and at age 10 performed in a theatrical production, stage production of ''Saint George and the D ...
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Sight & Sound
''Sight and Sound'' (formerly written ''Sight & Sound'') is a monthly film magazine published by the British Film Institute (BFI). Since 1952, it has conducted the well-known decennial ''Sight and Sound'' Poll of the Greatest Films of All Time. History and content ''Sight and Sound'' was first published in Spring 1932 as "A quarterly review of modern aids to learning published under the auspices of the British Institute of Adult Education". In 1934, management of the magazine was handed to the nascent British Film Institute (BFI), which still publishes the magazine today. ''Sight and Sound'' was published quarterly for most of its history until the early 1990s, apart from a brief run as a monthly publication in the early 1950s, but in 1991 it merged with another BFI publication, the ''Monthly Film Bulletin'', and started to appear monthly. In 1949, Gavin Lambert, co-founder of film journal ''Sequence'', was hired as the editor, and also brought with him ''Sequence'' editor ...
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