This work features contributions from academics and media professionals who ask: what is the history of involvement between film and television in the US, Europe, Britain and Ireland; what are the sources of television finance for film; and what are the consequences for the type of film made?

Take On Hollywood and Make It as a Television Writer. From mediabistro.com, the media industry’s most well-respected source for jobs, professional development, and community, this inside-the-business guide gives you the knowledge and tools you need to infiltrate Hollywood and land a job as a TV writer. That’s right—Small Screen, Big Picture gives you a competitive edge over millions of other aspiring writers who share your talent, creativity, and determination . . . because after reading these pages, you’ll have the one thing they lack: an understanding of the business of television. This journey into Hollywood’s inner workings not only details how networks, studios, and production companies work together, it teaches you how the process affects the creation and writing of TV series, how shows make money, and—ultimately—how you can use this information to break into the industry. You’ll learn: • What really goes on in the inner sanctum of the writers’ room—and how to be a part of it • How today’s TV business model works—and how rapidly it’s changing • Who has the power to buy a show idea—and how to pitch your own • How new media formats are changing television—and how to use them to your advantage • Which jobs will kick-start your TV writing career—and how to get hired • And much more . . . Armed with this solid foundation of knowledge, you’ll be ready to plan your entry into the industry and begin your successful TV writing career.

An interdisciplinary tour de force, this book describes how television converts social concerns, cultural conundrums and metaphysical questions into stories that explore and even shape who we are and would like to be--the building blocks of religious speculation.--Robert Thompson, Professor of Television and Popular Culture, Syracuse University "CHOICE"

A chronicle of the massive transformation in Hollywood since the turn of the century and the huge changes yet to come, drawing on interviews with key players, as well as documents from the 2014 Sony hack

Film production veteran Tom Reilly has worked on the sets of critically praised films and commercial blockbusters for more than three decades?including seventeen years alongside director Woody Allen. In The Big Picture, he explores the art and the craft of filmmaking from the vantage point of someone actually running the movie set. Using examples unlike any of those in other books on film, Reilly exposes not only the power and the personalities, but the secrets of the pros. He shares the insights he gleaned while working with more than sixty Oscar-winning professionals?from Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, and Vanessa Redgrave to Sydney Pollack, Sven Nykvist, and Barbra Streisand. In these fifty entertaining, illuminating short essays, Reilly invites you to join him on the film set. What is it like to shoot a love scene? How do you do a full body burn? What is it like to film in the Everglades or in a morgue? What is blocking or matching, and how long should a script be? How do you decide when to build a set? Why is the color palette so critical? Is night shooting worth the suffering? The Big Picture delivers the surprising answers to these and other fascinating questions about what it takes to make a feature film, offering a glimpse into what it's like when the lights are bright, the camera is rolling, and the moviemakers are calling the shots.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY KIRKUS REVIEWS In a memoir of family bonding and cutting-edge physics for readers of Brian Greene’s The Hidden Reality and Jim Holt’s Why Does the World Exist?, Amanda Gefter tells the story of how she conned her way into a career as a science journalist—and wound up hanging out, talking shop, and butting heads with the world’s most brilliant minds. At a Chinese restaurant outside of Philadelphia, a father asks his fifteen-year-old daughter a deceptively simple question: “How would you define nothing?” With that, the girl who once tried to fail geometry as a conscientious objector starts reading up on general relativity and quantum mechanics, as she and her dad embark on a life-altering quest for the answers to the universe’s greatest mysteries. Before Amanda Gefter became an accomplished science writer, she was a twenty-one-year-old magazine assistant willing to sneak her and her father, Warren, into a conference devoted to their physics hero, John Wheeler. Posing as journalists, Amanda and Warren met Wheeler, who offered them cryptic clues to the nature of reality: The universe is a self-excited circuit, he said. And, The boundary of a boundary is zero. Baffled, Amanda and Warren vowed to decode the phrases—and with them, the enigmas of existence. When we solve all that, they agreed, we’ll write a book. Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn is that book, a memoir of the impassioned hunt that takes Amanda and her father from New York to London to Los Alamos. Along the way, they bump up against quirky science and even quirkier personalities, including Leonard Susskind, the former Bronx plumber who invented string theory; Ed Witten, the soft-spoken genius who coined the enigmatic M-theory; even Stephen Hawking. What they discover is extraordinary: the beginnings of a monumental paradigm shift in cosmology, from a single universe we all share to a splintered reality in which each observer has her own. Reality, the Gefters learn, is radically observer-dependent, far beyond anything of which Einstein or the founders of quantum mechanics ever dreamed—with shattering consequences for our understanding of the universe’s origin. And somehow it all ties back to that conversation, to that Chinese restaurant, and to the true meaning of nothing. Throughout their journey, Amanda struggles to make sense of her own life—as her journalism career transforms from illusion to reality, as she searches for her voice as a writer, as she steps from a universe shared with her father to at last carve out one of her own. It’s a paradigm shift you might call growing up. By turns hilarious, moving, irreverent, and profound, Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn weaves together story and science in remarkable ways. By the end, you will never look at the universe the same way again. Praise for Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn “Nothing quite prepared me for this book. Wow. Reading it, I alternated between depression—how could the rest of us science writers ever match this?—and exhilaration.”—Scientific American “To Do: Read Trespassing on Einstein’s Lawn. Reality doesn’t have to bite.”—New York “A zany superposition of genres . . . It’s at once a coming-of-age chronicle and a father-daughter road trip to the far reaches of this universe and 10,500 others.”—The Philadelphia Inquirer