Ebook: The Big Screen: The Story of the Movies

The Big Screen tells the enthralling story of the movies: their rise and spread, their remarkable influence in the war years, and their long, slow decline to a form that is often richly entertaining but no longer lays claim to our lives the way it once did.

The Big Screen is not another history of the movies. Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. At first, film was a waking dream, the gift of appearance delivered for a nickel to huddled masses sitting in the dark. But soon, and abruptly, movies began transforming our society and our perception of the world. David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media--moving from Eadweard Muybridge to Steve Jobs, from Sunrise to I Love Lucy, from John Wayne to George Clooney, from television commercials to picture bytes on the Internet--to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways in...