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161-464: It was the first film that Cassavetes produced for a major Hollywood studio, Paramount , and Darin's first nonsinging role. "Ghost" Wakefield is the leader of a struggling jazz band. At a party he meets the attractive singer Jess, who is in a relationship with the Ghost's agent, Benny. At Ghost's insistence, she joins the band, and he begins a relationship with her, antagonizing Benny. Benny arranges for

322-500: A fourth commercial network . Paramount Pictures purchased the Hughes Television Network (HTN) including its satellite time in planning for PTVS in 1976. Paramount sold HTN to Madison Square Garden Corporation in 1979. But Diller believed strongly in the concept, and so took his fourth-network idea with him when he moved to 20th Century Fox in 1984, where Fox's then freshly installed proprietor, Rupert Murdoch

483-618: A "higher order" for paperback houses that specialized in soft-core "adult" reading, two under the pseudonym "Max Gareth"; and novelizations of Jack the Ripper , The Stranglers of Bombay , and The Enemy General , the last also as Gareth. His by-line would disappear for almost three decades until the late '80s, when he re-emerged as the author of three consecutive espionage novels published as lead titles by Bantam Books . Paramount Pictures Paramount Pictures Corporation , commonly known as Paramount Pictures or simply Paramount ,

644-421: A "trilogy", though this is against the author's own explicit wishes—the prose becomes increasingly bare and stripped down. Molloy , for instance, still retains many of the characteristics of a conventional novel (time, place, movement, and plot) and it makes use of the structure of a detective novel . In Malone Dies , movement and plot are largely dispensed with, though there is still some indication of place and

805-583: A 1956 remake of his 1923 film The Ten Commandments . DeMille died in 1959. Like some other studios, Paramount saw little value in its film library and sold 764 of its pre-1950 films to MCA Inc. / EMKA, Ltd. (known today as Universal Television ) in February 1958. By the early 1960s, Paramount's future was doubtful. The high-risk movie business was wobbly; the theater chain was long gone; investments in DuMont and in early pay-television came to nothing; and

966-576: A DVD of the film was released, that "there’s something Beckett -like in the incantatory force of Cassavetes’s dialogue and images, as well as in his blend of degradation and exaltation." This film and A Child Is Waiting are often viewed "as footnotes at best, or compromised failures at worst", film critic Dennis Lim commented in the Los Angeles Times in 2012. But the Cassavetes hallmarks ("the delicate way of handling emotional messiness,

1127-416: A Lesser God and The Accused . During this period, responsibility for running the studio passed from Eisner and Katzenberg to Frank Mancuso, Sr. (1984) and Ned Tanen (1984) to Stanley R. Jaffe (1991) and Sherry Lansing (1992). More so than most, Paramount's slate of films included many remakes and television spin-offs ; while sometimes commercially successful, there have been few compelling films of

1288-467: A Paramount network from 25 years earlier. In 1999, Viacom bought out United Television's interests, and handed responsibility for the start-up network to the newly acquired CBS unit, which Viacom bought in 2000 – an ironic confluence of events as Paramount had once invested in CBS, and Viacom had once been the syndication arm of CBS, as well. During this period the studio acquired some 30 TV stations to support

1449-524: A bid for a merger with Paramount Communications; this quickly escalated into a bidding war with Barry Diller 's QVC . But Viacom prevailed, ultimately paying $ 10 billion for the Paramount holdings. Viacom and Paramount had planned to merge as early as 1989. Paramount is the last major film studio located in Hollywood proper. When Paramount moved to its present home in 1927, it was in the heart of

1610-559: A career in theatre for its author. Beckett went on to write successful full-length plays, including Fin de partie ( Endgame ) (1957), Krapp's Last Tape (1958, written in English), Happy Days (1961, also written in English), and Play (1963). In 1961, Beckett received the International Publishers' Formentor Prize in recognition of his work, which he shared that year with Jorge Luis Borges . The 1960s were

1771-544: A deep dive into Germany's galleries and underground collections. This lasting engagement with the visual arts seeped into his creative process, often shaping his literary output and incentivising him to collaborate with artists such as Joan Mitchell and Geneviève Asse . After the German occupation of France in 1940, Beckett joined the French Resistance , in which he worked as a courier. On several occasions over

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1932-700: A five-month battle with QVC , and completed the merger in July. At the time, Paramount's holdings included Paramount Pictures, Madison Square Garden , the New York Rangers , the New York Knicks , and the Simon & Schuster publishing house. The deal had been planned as early as 1989, when the company was still known as Gulf and Western. Though Davis was named a member of the board of National Amusements , which controlled Viacom, he ceased to manage

2093-676: A foot in the door at the networks, the newly reincorporated Paramount Television eventually became known as a specialist in half-hour situation comedies. In 1968, Paramount formed Films Distributing Corp to distribute sensitive film product, including Sin With a Stranger , which was one of the first films to receive an X rating in the United States when the MPAA introduced their new rating system . In 1970, Paramount teamed with Universal Pictures to form Cinema International Corporation ,

2254-509: A left-handed batsman and a left-arm medium-pace bowler . Later, he played for Dublin University and played two first-class games against Northamptonshire . As a result, he became the only Nobel literature laureate to have played first-class cricket. Beckett studied French, Italian, and English at Trinity College Dublin from 1923 to 1927 (one of his tutors – not a teaching role in TCD –

2415-432: A lively history, has been turned into a post-production and music-scoring facility for Warners, known simply as "The Lot". For a time the semi-industrial neighborhood around Paramount was in decline, but has now come back. The recently refurbished studio has come to symbolize Hollywood for many visitors, and its studio tour is a popular attraction. In 1983, Gulf and Western began a restructuring process that would transform

2576-529: A moment of stillness in the present. They also deal with the theme of the self-confined and observed, with a voice that either comes from outside into the protagonist's head (as in Eh Joe ) or else another character comments on the protagonist silently, by means of gesture (as in Not I ). Beckett's most politically charged play, Catastrophe (1982), which was dedicated to Václav Havel , deals relatively explicitly with

2737-412: A movie factory, turning out sixty to seventy pictures a year. Such were the benefits of having a huge theater chain to fill, and of block booking to persuade other chains to go along. In 1933, Mae West would also add greatly to Paramount's success with her suggestive movies She Done Him Wrong and I'm No Angel . However, the sex appeal West gave in these movies would also lead to the enforcement of

2898-464: A much-quoted article, the critic Vivian Mercier wrote that Beckett "has achieved a theoretical impossibility—a play in which nothing happens, that yet keeps audiences glued to their seats. What's more, since the second act is a subtly different reprise of the first, he has written a play in which nothing happens, twice." The play was published in 1952 and premièred in 1953 in Paris; an English translation

3059-458: A musical frame (taking excerpts from Beethoven and Schubert , respectively) to structure his text and borrows well-known images from art history to create evocative stills that suggest themes of longing, ambiguity, hope, and suffering. Such experimentation with genre, music, and the visual arts, characterises Beckett's work during the 1970s and '80s. Beckett's prose pieces during the late period were not as prolific as his theatre, as suggested by

3220-480: A new company that would distribute films by the two studios outside the United States. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer would become a partner in the mid-1970s. Both Paramount and CIC entered the video market with Paramount Home Video (now Paramount Home Entertainment ) and CIC Video , respectively. Robert Evans abandoned his position as head of production in 1974; his successor, Richard Sylbert , proved to be too literary and too tasteful for Gulf and Western's Bluhdorn. By 1976,

3381-512: A new, television-trained team was in place headed by Barry Diller and his "Killer-Dillers", as they were called by admirers or "Dillettes" as they were called by detractors. These associates, made up of Michael Eisner , Jeffrey Katzenberg , Dawn Steel and Don Simpson would each go on and head up major movie studios of their own later in their careers. The Paramount specialty was now simpler. " High concept " pictures such as Saturday Night Fever and Grease hit big, hard, and fast all over

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3542-526: A nurse. His parents were both 35 when he was born, and had married in 1901. Beckett had one older brother named Frank Edward (1902–1954). At the age of five, he attended a local playschool in Dublin, where he started to learn music, and then moved to Earlsfort House School near Harcourt Street in Dublin. The Becketts were members of the Church of Ireland ; raised as an Anglican , Beckett later became agnostic ,

3703-839: A perspective which informed his writing. Beckett's family home, Cooldrinagh, was a large house and garden complete with a tennis court built in 1903 by Beckett's father. The house and garden, its surrounding countryside where he often went walking with his father, the nearby Leopardstown Racecourse , the Foxrock railway station, and Harcourt Street station would all feature in his prose and plays. Around 1919 or 1920, he went to Portora Royal School in Enniskillen , which Oscar Wilde had also attended. He left in 1923 and entered Trinity College Dublin , where he studied modern literature and Romance languages, and received his bachelor's degree in 1927. A natural athlete, he excelled at cricket as

3864-447: A pivotal moment in his entire career". Beckett fictionalised the experience in his play Krapp's Last Tape (1958). While listening to a tape he made earlier in his life, Krapp hears his younger self say "clear to me at last that the dark I have always struggled to keep under is in reality my most...", at which point Krapp fast-forwards the tape (before the audience can hear the complete revelation). Beckett later explained to Knowlson that

4025-435: A poet and close confidant of Beckett who also worked there. This meeting had a profound effect on the young man. Beckett assisted Joyce in various ways, one of which was research towards the book that became Finnegans Wake . In 1929, Beckett published his first work, a critical essay titled "Dante... Bruno. Vico.. Joyce". The essay defends Joyce's work and method, chiefly from allegations of wanton obscurity and dimness, and

4186-524: A preliminary hearing, Beckett asked his attacker for the motive behind the stabbing. Prudent replied: "Je ne sais pas, Monsieur. Je m'excuse" ["I do not know, sir. I apologise"]. Beckett eventually dropped the charges against his attacker – partially to avoid further formalities, partly because he found Prudent likeable and well-mannered. After his own near-fatal stabbing in 2022, author Salman Rushdie referenced Beckett's example when talking about his reasons for not interviewing his attacker. For Beckett,

4347-416: A prostitute, and goes with her to the other band members, who reject him but begin playing their old music with Jess singing. The film's musical score was by David Raksin , and was performed by eminent musicians, including Benny Carter . Cassavetes wanted Montgomery Clift and Gena Rowlands , his wife and frequent leading lady, for the main roles, and the production of the film was rushed. However,

4508-696: A relationship that was to last, in parallel with that with Suzanne, for the rest of his life." Bray died in Edinburgh on 25 February 2010. In 1969 the avant-garde filmmaker Rosa von Praunheim shot an experimental short film portrait about Beckett, which he named after the writer. In October 1969 while on holiday in Tunis with Suzanne, Beckett heard that he had won the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature . Anticipating that her intensely private husband would be saddled with fame from that moment on, Suzanne called

4669-719: A second channel, the Sci-Fi Channel (now known as Syfy ), in 1992. As its name implied, it focused on films and television series within the science fiction genre. Much of the initial programming was owned either by Paramount or Universal. Paramount bought one more television station in 1993: Cox Enterprises ' WKBD-TV in Detroit, Michigan, at the time an affiliate of the Fox Broadcasting Company . In February 1994, Viacom acquired 50.1% of Paramount Communications Inc. shares for $ 9.75 billion, following

4830-518: A series of Jack London movies. Paramount was the first successful nationwide distributor; until this time, films were sold on a statewide or regional basis, which had proved costly to film producers. Also, Famous Players and Lasky were privately owned while Paramount was a corporation. In 1916, Zukor engineered a three-way merger of his Famous Players, the Lasky Company, and Paramount. Zukor and Lasky bought Hodkinson out of Paramount, and merged

4991-424: A stable of exclusively-contracted film personnel (outside of Eddie Murphy ); this effort proved unsuccessful and studio president Dawn Steel decided to shut down the department on July 30, 1986. In 1987, Paramount Pictures, MGM/UA Communications Co. and Universal Pictures teamed up in order to market feature film and television product to China, a response to the 25-billion admission tickets that were clocked in

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5152-475: A stage director with virtually no film experience, Cecil B. DeMille , who would find a suitable site in Hollywood. This place was a rented old horse barn converted into a production facility with an enlarged open-air stage located between Vine Street , Selma Avenue, Argyle Avenue and Sunset Boulevard . It was later known as the Lasky-DeMille Barn . In 1914, their first feature film, The Squaw Man

5313-492: A star on the logo. In 1967, the number of stars was reduced to 22 and their hidden meaning was dropped. In 2014, Paramount Pictures became the first major Hollywood studio to distribute all of its films in digital form only. The company's headquarters and studios are located at 5555 Melrose Avenue, Hollywood, California. The most commerciay successful film franchises from Paramount Pictures include  Transformers , Mission: Impossible and Star Trek . Additionally,

5474-558: A stock-swap merger deal between Time and Warner Communications. This caused Time to raise its bid for Warner to $ 14.9 billion in cash and stock. Gulf and Western responded by filing a lawsuit in a Delaware court to block the Time-Warner merger. The court ruled twice in favor of Time, forcing Gulf and Western to drop both the Time acquisition and the lawsuit, and allowing the formation of Time Warner . Paramount used cash acquired from

5635-462: A theme echoing Beckett's earlier work, though possibly amplified by the sickness he experienced late in life. Jack MacGowran was the first actor to perform a one-man show based on the works of Beckett. He debuted End of Day in Dublin in 1962, revising it as Beginning To End (1965). The show went through further revisions before Beckett directed it in Paris in 1970; MacGowran won the 1970–1971 Obie for Best Performance By an Actor when he performed

5796-456: A time of change for Beckett, both on a personal level and as a writer. In 1961, he married Suzanne in a secret civil ceremony in England (its secrecy due to reasons relating to French inheritance law). The success of his plays led to invitations to attend rehearsals and productions around the world, leading eventually to a new career as a theatre director. In 1957, he had his first commission from

5957-399: A will, in the beginning. But it's always the same thing. Yes, it's like the funny story we have heard too often, we still find it funny, but we don't laugh any more." Beckett's outstanding achievements in prose during the period were the three novels Molloy (1951), Malone meurt (1951; Malone Dies ) and L'innommable (1953: The Unnamable ). In these novels—sometimes referred to as

6118-477: A writer can be roughly divided into three periods: his early works, up until the end of World War II in 1945; his middle period, stretching from 1945 until the early 1960s, during which he wrote what are probably his best-known works; and his late period, from the early 1960s until Beckett's death in 1989, during which his works tended to become shorter and his style more minimalist . Beckett's earliest works are generally considered to have been strongly influenced by

6279-427: Is a favourite: it is not only performed frequently but has globally inspired playwrights to emulate it. This is the sole play the manuscript of which Beckett never sold, donated or gave away. He refused to allow the play to be translated into film but did allow it to be played on television. During this time in the 1950s, Beckett became one of several adults who sometimes drove local children to school; one such child

6440-526: Is an American film production and distribution company and the flagship namesake subsidiary of Paramount Global . It is the sixth-oldest film studio in the world, the second-oldest film studio in the United States (behind Universal Pictures ), and the sole member of the "Big Five" film studios located within the city limits of Los Angeles . In 1916, film producer Adolph Zukor put 24 actors and actresses under contract and honored each with

6601-750: Is considered one of the last modernist writers, and a key figure in what Martin Esslin called the Theatre of the Absurd . A resident of Paris for most of his adult life, Beckett wrote in both French and English. During the Second World War , Beckett was a member of the French Resistance group Gloria SMH ( Réseau Gloria ) and was awarded the Croix de Guerre in 1949. He received the 1969 Nobel Prize in Literature "for his writing, which—in new forms for

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6762-424: Is often falsely labelled as an existentialist (this is based on the assumption that Camus was an existentialist, though he in fact broke off from the existentialist movement and founded his own philosophy ). Though many of the themes are similar, Beckett had little affinity for existentialism as a whole. Broadly speaking, the plays deal with the subject of despair and the will to survive in spite of that despair, in

6923-607: Is the last major film studio still headquartered in the Hollywood district of Los Angeles . Paramount Pictures dates its existence from the 1912 founding date of the Famous Players Film Company . Hungarian-born founder Adolph Zukor , who had been an early investor in nickelodeons , saw that movies appealed mainly to working-class immigrants. With partners Daniel Frohman and Charles Frohman he planned to offer feature-length films that would appeal to

7084-600: The BBC Third Programme for a radio play, All That Fall . He continued writing sporadically for radio and extended his scope to include cinema and television. He began to write in English again, although he also wrote in French until the end of his life. He bought some land in 1953 near a hamlet about 60 kilometres (40 mi) northeast of Paris and built a cottage for himself with the help of some locals. From

7245-462: The Bankruptcy Act . On June 4, 1935, John E. Otterson became president of the re-emerged and newly renamed Paramount Pictures Inc. Zukor returned to the company and was named production chief but after Barney Balaban was appointed president on July 2, 1936, he was soon replaced by Y. Frank Freeman and symbolically named chairman of the board. On August 28, 1935, Paramount Pictures

7406-702: The Kaufman Astoria Studios , and Hollywood, California ), and became an early investor in radio, acquiring for the corporation a 50% interest in the new Columbia Broadcasting System in 1928 (selling it within a few years; this would not be the last time Paramount and CBS crossed paths). By acquiring the successful Balaban & Katz chain in 1926, Zukor gained the services of Barney Balaban (who would eventually become Paramount's president in 1936), his brother A. J. Balaban (who would eventually supervise all stage production nationwide and produce talkie shorts), and their partner Sam Katz (who would run

7567-483: The Nazi savagery that was overtaking the country. Returning to Ireland briefly in 1937, he oversaw the publication of Murphy (1938), which he translated into French the following year. He fell out with his mother, which contributed to his decision to settle permanently in Paris. Beckett remained in Paris following the outbreak of World War II in 1939, preferring, in his own words, "France at war to Ireland at peace". His

7728-614: The Paramount Publix Corporation . Eventually, Zukor shed most of his early partners; the Frohman brothers, Hodkinson and Goldwyn were out by 1917 while Lasky hung on until 1932, when, blamed for the near-collapse of Paramount in the Great Depression years, he was also tossed out. In 1931, to solve the financial problems of the company Zukor hired taxi/rental car magnate John D. Hertz as chairman of

7889-607: The Paramount Stations Group , while KECO was renamed to Paramount Parks . Paramount Television launched Wilshire Court Productions in conjunction with USA Networks, before the latter was renamed NBCUniversal Cable , in 1989. Wilshire Court Productions (named for a side street in Los Angeles) produced television films that aired on the USA Networks, and later for other networks. USA Networks launched

8050-710: The Production Code , as the newly formed organization the Catholic Legion of Decency threatened a boycott if it was not enforced. Paramount cartoons produced by Fleischer Studios continued to be successful, with characters such as Betty Boop and Popeye the Sailor becoming widely successful. One Fleischer series, Screen Songs , featured live-action music stars under contract to Paramount hosting sing-alongs of popular songs. The animation studio would rebound with Popeye , and in 1935, polls showed that Popeye

8211-510: The Toulouse poet Jean du Chas, founder of a movement called le Concentrisme . It was a literary parody, for Beckett had in fact invented the poet and his movement that claimed to be "at odds with all that is clear and distinct in Descartes ". Beckett later insisted that he had not intended to fool his audience. When Beckett resigned from Trinity at the end of 1931, his brief academic career

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8372-413: The poioumenon "trilogy" of novels: Molloy (1951); Malone meurt (1951), Malone Dies (1958); L'innommable (1953), The Unnamable (1960). Despite being a native English speaker, Beckett wrote in French because, as he himself claimed, it was easier for him thus to write "without style". Waiting for Godot , like most of his works after 1947, was first written in French. Beckett worked on

8533-628: The "revelation" experienced in his mother's room in Dublin—in which he realised that his art must be subjective and drawn wholly from his own inner world—that would result in the works for which Beckett is best remembered today. During the 15 years following the war, Beckett produced four major full-length stage plays: En attendant Godot (written 1948–1949; Waiting for Godot ), Fin de partie (1955–1957; Endgame ), Krapp's Last Tape (1958), and Happy Days (1961). These plays—which are often considered, rightly or wrongly, to have been instrumental in

8694-677: The 13th slasher series, as well as joining forces with Lucasfilm and Steven Spielberg to create the Indiana Jones franchise. Other examples are the Star Trek film series and a string of films starring comedian Eddie Murphy like Trading Places , Coming to America and Beverly Hills Cop and its sequels . While the emphasis was decidedly on the commercial, there were occasional less commercial but more artistic and intellectual efforts like I'm Dancing as Fast as I Can , Atlantic City , Reds , Witness , Children of

8855-592: The 1930s was a decade of artistic exploration. He started to take a serious interest in art history, frequenting Ireland's National Gallery , studying a range of painters and movements (specifically the Dutch Golden Age ), and even visiting private collections. In 1933 Beckett applied for the position of assistant curator at London's National Gallery . Later, in the winter of 1936–37, having sailed from Cobh in East Cork to Hamburg on 26 September 1936, he took

9016-432: The 1960s and into the 1970s, Beckett's works exhibited an increasing tendency—already evident in much of his work of the 1950s—towards compactness. This has led to his work sometimes being described as minimalist . The extreme example of this, among his dramatic works, is the 1969 piece Breath , which lasts for only 35 seconds and has no characters (though it was likely intended to offer ironic comment on Oh! Calcutta! ,

9177-682: The Dublin literary periodical Envoy . After the war, he returned to France in 1946 where he worked as a stores manager at the Irish Red Cross Hospital based in Saint-Lô . Beckett described his experiences in an untransmitted radio script, " The Capital of the Ruins ". In 1945, Beckett returned to Dublin for a brief visit. During his stay, he had a revelation in his mother's room: his entire future direction in literature appeared to him. Beckett had felt that he would remain forever in

9338-543: The FCC that Paramount controlled DuMont. Both DuMont and Paramount Television Network suffered as a result, with neither company able to acquire five O&Os. Meanwhile, CBS, ABC, and NBC had each acquired the maximum of five stations by the mid-1950s. When ABC accepted a merger offer from UPT in 1953, DuMont quickly realized that ABC now had more resources than it could possibly hope to match. It quickly reached an agreement in principle to merge with ABC. However, Paramount vetoed

9499-551: The Golden Age of Hollywood had just ended, even the flagship Paramount Building in Times Square was sold to raise cash, as was KTLA (sold to Gene Autry in 1964 for a then-phenomenal $ 12.5 million). Their only remaining successful property at that point was Dot Records , which Paramount had acquired in 1957, and even its profits started declining by the middle of the 1960s. Founding father Adolph Zukor (born in 1873)

9660-511: The Hedgehog film series. On August 25, 1983, Paramount Studios caught fire. Two or three sound stages and four outdoor sets were destroyed. When Charles Bluhdorn died unexpectedly, his successor Martin Davis dumped all of Gulf and Western's industrial, mining, and sugar-growing subsidiaries and refocused the company, renaming it Paramount Communications in 1989. With the influx of cash from

9821-677: The Madison Square Garden properties (which also included MSG Network ), a 50% stake in USA Networks (the other 50% was owned by MCA / Universal Pictures ) and Simon & Schuster, Prentice Hall , Pocket Books , Allyn & Bacon , Cineamerica (a joint venture with Warner Communications ), and Canadian cinema chain Famous Players Theatres . That same year, the company launched a $ 12.2 billion hostile bid to acquire Time Inc. in an attempt to end

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9982-466: The November 28, 1956, episode of The 20th Century Fox Hour . Nick Dennis had also worked with Cassavetes when he played a supporting role in "The Poet's Touch", the November 26, 1959 episode of Cassavetes' series, Johnny Staccato . Another familiar face among the cast of Too Late Blues , playing a member of the band, was Seymour Cassel , who appeared in most of Cassavetes films over the years. At

10143-766: The Paramount-Publix theatre chain in New York City from the thirty-five-story Paramount Theatre Building on Times Square ). Balaban and Katz had developed the Wonder Theater concept, first publicized around 1918 in Chicago. The Chicago Theater was created as a very ornate theater and advertised as a "wonder theater". When Publix acquired Balaban, they embarked on a project to expand the wonder theaters, and starting building in New York City in 1927. While Balaban and Public were dominant in Chicago, Loew's

10304-701: The Sunset and Vine lot to the new building. At present, those facilities are still part of the Paramount Pictures headquarters. Zukor hired independent producer B. P. Schulberg , an unerring eye for new talent, to run the new West Coast operations. On April 1, 1927, the company name was changed to Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation . In September 1927, the Paramount Famous Lasky Corporation studio in Astoria (New York City)

10465-524: The UPN network, also acquiring and merging in the assets of Republic Pictures, Spelling Television and Viacom Productions, almost doubling the size of the studio's television library. The television division produced the dominant prime time show for the decade in Frasier , as well as such long running hits as NCIS and Becker and the dominant prime time magazine show Entertainment Tonight. Paramount also gained

10626-726: The West Coast. The Chicago station got a commercial license as WBKB in 1943, but was sold to UPT along with Balaban & Katz in 1948 and was eventually resold to CBS as WBBM-TV . In 1938, Paramount bought a stake in television manufacturer DuMont Laboratories . Through this stake, it became a minority owner of the DuMont Television Network . Paramount also launched its own network, Paramount Television Network , in 1948 through its television unit, Television Productions, Inc. Paramount management planned to acquire additional owned-and-operated stations ("O&Os");

10787-463: The actor Jack MacGowran , is animated by a camera that steadily closes into a tight focus upon the face of the title character. The play Not I (1972) consists almost solely of, in Beckett's words, "a moving mouth with the rest of the stage in darkness". Following from Krapp's Last Tape , many of these later plays explore memory, often in the form of a forced recollection of haunting past events in

10948-615: The artistic acclaim the Fleischer brothers achieved under their management. In 1940, Paramount agreed to a government-instituted consent decree: block booking and "pre-selling" (the practice of collecting up-front money for films not yet in production) would end. Immediately, Paramount cut back on production, from 71 films to a more modest 19 annually in the war years. Still, with more new stars like Bob Hope , Alan Ladd , Veronica Lake , Paulette Goddard , and Betty Hutton , and with war-time attendance at astronomical numbers, Paramount and

11109-639: The award a "catastrophe". While Beckett did not devote much time to interviews, he sometimes met the artists, scholars, and admirers who sought him out in the anonymous lobby of the Hotel PLM Saint-Jacques in Paris – where he arranged his appointments and often had lunch – near his Montparnasse home. Although Beckett was an intensely private man, a review of the second volume of his letters by Roy Foster on 15 December 2011 issue of The New Republic reveals Beckett to be not only unexpectedly amiable but frequently prepared to talk about his work and

11270-440: The band to cut a record. In a party at a bar celebrating the recording session, Benny encourages a tough guy, Tommy, to pick a fight with the band. Ghost avoids fighting, causing a rift with Jess. She leaves the band, and it breaks up. Ghost becomes the protege of a rich patron, playing the piano in night clubs, his career in decline, while the rest of the band plays inferior music to make a living. Ghost locates Jess, who has become

11431-517: The companies were separate, the FCC ruled that Paramount's partial ownership of DuMont meant that DuMont and Paramount were in theory branches of the same company. Since DuMont owned three television stations and Paramount owned two, the federal agency ruled neither network could acquire additional television stations. The FCC requested that Paramount relinquish its stake in DuMont, but Paramount refused. According to television historian William Boddy, "Paramount's checkered antitrust history" helped convince

11592-597: The company applied to the FCC for additional stations in San Francisco, Detroit, and Boston. The FCC, however, denied Paramount's applications. A few years earlier, the federal regulator had placed a five-station cap on all television networks: no network was allowed to own more than five VHF television stations. Paramount was hampered by its minority stake in the DuMont Television Network. Although both DuMont and Paramount executives stated that

11753-543: The company's subsidiaries. Its sugar plantations in Florida and the Dominican Republic were sold in 1985; the consumer and industrial products branch was sold off that same year. In 1989, Davis renamed the company Paramount Communications Incorporated after its primary asset, Paramount Pictures. In addition to the Paramount film, television, home video, and music publishing divisions, the company continued to own

11914-456: The company. During this time period, Paramount Pictures went under the guidance of Jonathan Dolgen, chairman and Sherry Lansing , president. During their administration over Paramount, the studio had an extremely successful period of films with two of Paramount's ten highest-grossing films being produced during this period. The most successful of these films, Titanic , co-produced with 20th Century Fox and Lightstorm Entertainment , became

12075-518: The company. The company remained under the control of trustees for more than a year in order to restructure the debt and pursue a reorganization plan. On December 3, 1934, the reorganization plan was formally proposed. After prolonged hearings in court, final confirmation was obtained on April 25, 1935, when Federal Judge Alfred C. Coxe Jr. approved the reorganization of the Paramount-Publix Corporation under Section 77-B of

12236-452: The confined and observed self, as well as with the positioning of bodies in space, as the opening phrases of Company make clear: "A voice comes to one in the dark. Imagine." "To one on his back in the dark. This he can tell by the pressure on his hind parts and by how the dark changes when he shuts his eyes and again when he opens them again. Only a small part of what is said can be verified. As for example when he hears, You are on your back in

12397-477: The corporation from a bloated conglomerate consisting of subsidiaries from unrelated industries to a more focused entertainment and publishing company. The idea was to aid financial markets in measuring the company's success, which, in turn, would help place better value on its shares. Though its Paramount division did very well in recent years, Gulf and Western's success as a whole was translating poorly with investors. This process eventually led Davis to divest many of

12558-643: The country (as Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: The Next Generation were). Paramount Pictures was not connected to either Paramount Records (1910s–1935) or ABC-Paramount Records (1955–66) until it purchased the rights to use the name (but not the latter's catalog) in the late 1960s. The Paramount name was used for soundtrack albums and some pop re-issues from the Dot Records catalog which Paramount had acquired in 1957. By 1970, Dot had become an all-country label and in 1974, Paramount sold all of its record holdings to ABC Records , which in turn

12719-520: The country in 1986. Worldwide Media Sales, a division of the New York-based Worldwide Media Group had been placed in charge of the undertaking. That year, Paramount Pictures decided to consolidate its distribution operations, closing a number of branch offices that were designed for the studio and relocating staff and major activities in an effort to cut costs and provide for a more efficient centralization; this decision

12880-421: The dark" Following this work, it was almost another decade before Beckett produced a work of non-dramatic prose. How It Is is generally considered to mark the end of his middle period as a writer. time she stopped sitting at her window quiet at her window only window facing other windows other only windows all eyes all sides high and low time she stopped From Rockaby (1980) Throughout

13041-497: The dark. Then he must acknowledge the truth of what is said." Themes of aloneness and the doomed desire to successfully connect with other human beings are expressed in several late pieces, including Company and Rockaby . In the hospital and nursing home where he spent his final days, Beckett wrote his last work, the 1988 poem "What is the Word" ("Comment dire"). The poem grapples with an inability to find words to express oneself,

13202-464: The face of an uncomprehending and incomprehensible world. The words of Nell—one of the two characters in Endgame who are trapped in ashbins, from which they occasionally peek their heads to speak—can best summarise the themes of the plays of Beckett's middle period: "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness, I grant you that. ... Yes, yes, it's the most comical thing in the world. And we laugh, we laugh, with

13363-570: The film community. Since then, former next-door neighbor RKO closed up shop in 1957 (Paramount ultimately absorbed their former lot); Warner Bros. (whose old Sunset Boulevard studio was sold to Paramount in 1949 as a home for KTLA ) moved to Burbank in 1930; Columbia joined Warners in Burbank in 1973 then moved again to Culver City in 1989; and the Pickford-Fairbanks-Goldwyn-United Artists lot, after

13524-530: The film had already wrapped by the time production started on Ben Casey . Cassavetes and Edwards had known each other since they were classmates at the American Academy of Dramatic Arts in the late 1940s. In 1955 they both co-starred as escaped convicts in Andrew L. Stone 's The Night Holds Terror and the following year portrayed brothers in conflict over their father's legacy in "The Last Patriarch",

13685-454: The film has an aggregate score of 80% based on 8 positive and 2 negative critic reviews. The conflicts in the film paralleled Cassavetes' own difficulties adapting to the studio system, embodied by the Ghost's conflict with Benny. Ghost is portrayed as a purist dedicated only to his art, while Benny seeks to make Ghost compromise to make money. When Ghost refuses, Benny seeks to destroy him. New Yorker critic Richard Brody observed in 2012, when

13846-415: The film's credits, Nick Dennis , who portrays a bar owner named "Nick" and 5th-billed Vincent Edwards , playing "Tommy", the tough guy encouraged by Benny to start a fight with "Ghost", were both cast, at the time, in the long-running (1961–66) medical series, Ben Casey , with Edwards playing the title role of the uncompromisingly ill-tempered neurosurgeon and Dennis at the bottom of the supporting cast as

14007-511: The finance committee in order to assist vice-president and treasurer Ralph A. Kohn. However, on January 6, 1933, Hertz resigned from his position when it become evident that his measures to lift the company had failed. The over-expansion and use of overvalued Paramount stock for purchases created a $ 21 million debt which led the company into receivership on January 26, 1933, and later filing bankruptcy on March 14, 1933. On April 17, 1933, bankruptcy trustees were appointed and Zukor lost control of

14168-626: The highest-grossing film up to that time, grossing over $ 1.8 billion worldwide. Also during this time, three Paramount Pictures films won the Academy Award for Best Picture; Titanic , Braveheart , and Forrest Gump . Paramount's most important property, however, was Star Trek . Studio executives had begun to call it "the franchise" in the 1980s due to its reliable revenue, and other studios envied its "untouchable and unduplicatable" success. By 1998, Star Trek television shows, movies, books, videotapes, and licensing provided so much of

14329-504: The hospital orderly named, again, "Nick". The series was already cast and production on initial episodes started when press notices announcing the upcoming series were published in TV columns during mid-May 1961. It is unclear whether a halt in the filming of Ben Casey , which premiered as part of ABC 's Monday night schedule on October 2, 1961, enabled Dennis and Edwards to fit their scenes into Cassavetes' schedule or if his brief 30-day shoot for

14490-426: The idea of dictatorship. After a long period of inactivity, Beckett's poetry experienced a revival during this period in the ultra-terse French poems of mirlitonnades , with some as short as six words. These defied Beckett's usual scrupulous concern to translate his work from its original into the other of his two languages; several writers, including Derek Mahon , have attempted translations, but no complete version of

14651-515: The job for eight years, restoring Paramount's reputation for commercial success with The Odd Couple , Rosemary's Baby , Love Story , The Godfather , Chinatown , and 3 Days of the Condor . Gulf and Western also bought the neighboring Desilu Productions television studio (once the lot of RKO Pictures ) from Lucille Ball in 1967. Using some of Desilu's established shows such as Star Trek , Mission: Impossible , and Mannix as

14812-465: The kind that once made Paramount the industry leader. Around the end of 1981, Paramount Pictures took over fellow Gulf and Western subsidiary Sega from the company's manufacturing division in an effort to get into the video game business. Paramount would go on to sell Sega following the Video Game Crash of 1983 , and the two companies would later work together on the live action/CGI Sonic

14973-668: The late 1920s and the early 1930s, talkies brought in a range of powerful draws: Richard Arlen , Nancy Carroll , Maurice Chevalier , Gary Cooper , Marlene Dietrich , Charles Ruggles , Ruth Chatterton , William Powell , Mae West , Sylvia Sidney , Bing Crosby , Claudette Colbert , the Marx Brothers , W.C. Fields , Fredric March , Jack Oakie , Jeanette MacDonald (whose first two films were shot at Paramount's Astoria, New York , studio), Carole Lombard , George Raft , Miriam Hopkins , Cary Grant and Stuart Erwin , among them. In this period Paramount can truly be described as

15134-447: The late 1950s until his death, Beckett had a relationship with Barbara Bray , a widow who worked as a script editor for the BBC . Knowlson wrote of them: "She was small and attractive, but, above all, keenly intelligent and well-read. Beckett seems to have been immediately attracted by her and she to him. Their encounter was highly significant for them both, for it represented the beginning of

15295-475: The late 1950s, however, he created one of his most radical prose works, Comment c'est (1961; How It Is ). An early variant version of Comment c'est , L'Image , was published in the British arts review, X: A Quarterly Review (1959), and is the first appearance of the novel in any form. This work relates the adventures of an unnamed narrator crawling through the mud while dragging a sack of canned food. It

15456-470: The loss of the theater chain, Paramount Pictures went into a decline, cutting studio-backed production, releasing its contract players, and making production deals with independents. By the mid-1950s, all the great names were gone; only Cecil B. DeMille , associated with Paramount since 1913, kept making pictures in the grand old style. Despite Paramount's losses, DeMille would, however, give the studio some relief and create his most successful film at Paramount,

15617-469: The medium of another language, was in process of simplifying his style, a change also evidenced in Watt . who may tell the tale of the old man? weigh absence in a scale? mete want with a span? the sum assess of the world's woes? nothingness in words enclose? From Watt (1953) After World War II, Beckett turned definitively to the French language as a vehicle. It was this, together with

15778-616: The middle class by featuring the leading theatrical players of the time (leading to the slogan "Famous Players in Famous Plays"). By mid-1913, Famous Players had completed five films, and Zukor was on his way to success. Its first film was Les Amours de la reine Élisabeth , which starred Sarah Bernhardt . That same year, another aspiring producer, Jesse L. Lasky , opened his Lasky Feature Play Company with money borrowed from his brother-in-law, Samuel Goldfish, later known as Samuel Goldwyn . The Lasky company hired as their first employee

15939-440: The missing words on the tape are "precious ally". In 1946, Jean-Paul Sartre 's magazine Les Temps modernes published the first part of Beckett's short story " Suite " (later to be called " La Fin ", or "The End"), not realising that Beckett had only submitted the first half of the story; co-editor Simone de Beauvoir refused to publish the second part. Beckett also began to write his fourth novel, Mercier et Camier , which

16100-660: The new United Paramount Theaters on December 31, 1949. Leonard Goldenson , who had headed the chain since 1938, remained as the new company's president. The Balaban and Katz theatre division was spun off with UPT; its trademark eventually became the property of the Balaban and Katz Historical Foundation. The foundation later acquired ownership of the Famous Players trademark. Cash-rich and controlling prime downtown real estate, Goldenson began looking for investments. Barred from film-making by prior antitrust rulings, he acquired

16261-805: The next two years he was nearly caught by the Gestapo . In August 1942, his unit was betrayed and he and Suzanne fled south on foot to the safety of the small village of Roussillon , in the Vaucluse département in Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur . During the two years that Beckett stayed in Roussillon he indirectly helped the Maquis sabotage the German army in the Vaucluse mountains, though he rarely spoke about his wartime work in later life. He

16422-476: The novel and drama—in the destitution of modern man acquires its elevation". In 1961 he shared the inaugural Prix International with Jorge Luis Borges . He was the first person to be elected Saoi of Aosdána in 1984. Samuel Barclay Beckett was born in the Dublin suburb of Foxrock on 13 April 1906, the son of William Frank Beckett (1871–1933), a quantity surveyor of Huguenot descent, and Maria Jones Roe,

16583-399: The novels of this period, is essentially pessimistic, the will to live seems to win out in the end; witness, for instance, the famous final phrase of The Unnamable : "you must go on, I can't go on, I'll go on". After these three novels, Beckett struggled for many years to produce a sustained work of prose, a struggle evidenced by the brief "stories" later collected as Texts for Nothing . In

16744-565: The offer due to antitrust concerns. For all intents and purposes, this was the end of DuMont, though it lingered on until 1956. In 1951, Paramount bought a stake in International Telemeter , an experimental pay TV service which operated with a coin inserted into a box. The service began operating in Palm Springs, California on November 27, 1953, but due to pressure from the FCC, the service ended on May 15, 1954. With

16905-740: The other integrated studio-theatre combines made more money than ever. At this, the Federal Trade Commission and the Justice Department decided to reopen their case against the five integrated studios. Paramount also had a monopoly over Detroit movie theaters through subsidiary company United Detroit Theaters. This led to the Supreme Court decision United States v. Paramount Pictures, Inc. (1948) holding that movie studios could not also own movie theater chains. This decision broke up Adolph Zukor's creation, with

17066-724: The ownership rights to the Rysher library, after Viacom acquired the rights from Cox Enterprises . Samuel Beckett Samuel Barclay Beckett ( / ˈ b ɛ k ɪ t / ; 13 April 1906 – 22 December 1989) was an Irish-born existentialist writer of novels, plays, short stories and poems. His literary and theatrical work features bleak, impersonal, and tragicomic experiences of life, often coupled with black comedy and nonsense . His work became increasingly minimalist as his career progressed, involving more aesthetic and linguistic experimentation, with techniques of stream of consciousness repetition and self-reference . He

17227-486: The passage of time; the "action" of the book takes the form of an interior monologue . Finally, in The Unnamable , almost all sense of place and time are abolished, and the essential theme seems to be the conflict between the voice's drive to continue speaking so as to continue existing, and its almost equally strong urge towards silence and oblivion. Despite the widely held view that Beckett's work, as exemplified by

17388-405: The physical inactivity of the character Belacqua; the character's immersion in his own head and thoughts; the somewhat irreverent comedy of the final sentence. Similar elements are present in Beckett's first published novel, Murphy (1938), which also explores the themes of insanity and chess (both of which would be recurrent elements in Beckett's later works). The novel's opening sentence hints at

17549-423: The play between October 1948 and January 1949. His partner, Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil , was integral to its success. Dechevaux-Dumesnil became his agent and sent the manuscript to multiple producers until they met Roger Blin , the soon-to-be director of the play. Blin's knowledge of French theatre and vision, alongside Beckett's knowing what he wanted the play to represent, contributed greatly to its success. In

17710-405: The process behind it. Suzanne died on 17 July 1989. Confined to a nursing home and suffering from emphysema and possibly Parkinson's disease , Beckett died on 22 December 1989. The two were interred together in the cimetière du Montparnasse in Paris and share a simple granite gravestone that follows Beckett's directive that it should be "any colour, so long as it's grey". Beckett's career as

17871-810: The production of the film was less traumatic for Cassavetes than he would experience with A Child Is Waiting (1963), his other early studio film, which was taken from him during editing. Announcements about the projected film appeared in December 1960, February 1961 and July 1961, when two photographs of Stella Stevens being directed by two actors, Edmond O'Brien in Man-Trap and John Cassavetes in Too Late Blues (the second photograph included Bobby Darin), were published in The New York Times Sunday Magazine . Billed 4th in

18032-558: The production side, Hiram Abrams in charge of distribution, and Zukor making great plans. With only the exhibitor-owned First National as a rival, Famous Players–Lasky and its "Paramount Pictures" soon dominated the business. The fusion was finalized on November 7, 1916. Because Zukor believed in stars, he signed and developed many of the leading early stars, including Mary Pickford , Marguerite Clark , Pauline Frederick , Douglas Fairbanks , Gloria Swanson , Rudolph Valentino , and Wallace Reid . With so many important players, Paramount

18193-461: The sale of Gulf and Western's industrial properties in the mid-1980s, Paramount bought a string of television stations and KECO Entertainment 's theme park operations, renaming them Paramount Parks . These parks included Paramount's Great America , Paramount Canada's Wonderland , Paramount's Carowinds , Paramount's Kings Dominion , and Paramount's Kings Island . In May 1985, Paramount decided to start its own talent department, an attempt to form

18354-693: The sale of Gulf and Western's non-entertainment properties to take over the TVX Broadcast Group chain of television stations (which at that point consisted mainly of large-market stations which TVX had bought from Taft Broadcasting , plus two mid-market stations which TVX owned prior to the Taft purchase), and the KECO Entertainment chain of theme parks from Taft successor Great American Broadcasting. Both of these companies had their names changed to reflect new ownership: TVX became known as

18515-462: The sequence has been published in English. Beckett's late style saw him experiment with technology to create increasingly transdisciplinary works. This sampling of a range of artistic mediums and styles – classical music, painting, sculpture, television, and literature – to create a new and original form, or genre, is evident in his television plays. In works like Ghost Trio (broadcast in 1977) and Nacht und Träume (broadcast in 1983) Beckett uses

18676-425: The shadow of Joyce, certain to never beat him at his own game. His revelation prompted him to change direction and acknowledge both his own stupidity and his interest in ignorance and impotence: "I realised that Joyce had gone as far as one could in the direction of knowing more, [being] in control of one's material. He was always adding to it; you only have to look at his proofs to see that. I realised that my own way

18837-421: The six months that he felt it needed. The film was released on DVD and Blu-ray for the first time on May 29, 2012 by Olive Films. Concurrent with the release of the film, Lancer Books issued a novelization of the screenplay, by Stuart James (1926 – ?). James's previous published work included over 300 short stories sold to crime, mystery, adventure and men's-interest pulp magazines; five original novels of

18998-414: The so-called " Theatre of the Absurd "—deal in a darkly humorous way with themes similar to those of the roughly contemporary existentialist thinkers . The term "Theatre of the Absurd" was coined by Martin Esslin in a book of the same name; Beckett and Godot were centrepieces of the book. Esslin argued these plays were the fulfilment of Albert Camus 's concept of "the absurd"; this is one reason Beckett

19159-504: The somewhat pessimistic undertones and black humour that animate many of Beckett's works: "The sun shone, having no alternative, on the nothing new". Watt , written while Beckett was in hiding in Roussillon during World War II, is similar in terms of themes but less exuberant in its style. It explores human movement as if it were a mathematical permutation , presaging Beckett's later preoccupation—in both his novels and dramatic works—with precise movement. Beckett's 1930 essay Proust

19320-447: The struggling ABC television network in February 1953, leading it first to financial health, and eventually, in the mid-1970s, to first place in the national Nielsen ratings, before selling out to Capital Cities in 1985 (Capital Cities would eventually sell out, in turn, to The Walt Disney Company in 1996). United Paramount Theaters was renamed ABC Theaters in 1965 and was sold to businessman Henry Plitt in 1977. The movie theater chain

19481-480: The studio's library includes many individual films such as The Godfather and  Titanic , both of which became the  highest-grossing films of all time  during their initial releases. Paramount Pictures is a member of the  Motion Picture Association (MPA). Paramount is the sixth oldest surviving film studio in the world; after Gaumont Film Company (1895), Pathé (1896), Titanus (1904), Nordisk Film (1906), and Universal Pictures (1912). It

19642-467: The studio's profit that "it is not possible to spend any reasonable amount of time at Paramount and not be aware of [its] presence"; filming for Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space Nine required up to nine of the largest of the studio's 36 sound stages . In 1995, Viacom and Chris-Craft Industries ' United Television launched United Paramount Network (UPN) with Star Trek: Voyager as its flagship series, fulfilling Barry Diller's plan for

19803-512: The studios' West Coast productions. On January 5, 1926, Lasky reached an agreement to buy the Robert Brunton Studios, a 26-acre facility owned by United Pictures and located at 5451 Marathon Street, for $ 1.0   million (equivalent to $ 13.8   million in 2023). On March 29, the company began an eight-month building program to renovate the existing facilities and erect new ones. On May 8, Lasky finally moved operations from

19964-410: The theater chain being split into a new company, United Paramount Theaters , and effectively brought an end to the classic Hollywood studio system . With the separation of production and exhibition forced by the U.S. Supreme Court, Paramount Pictures Inc. was split in two. Paramount Pictures Corporation was formed to be the production distribution company, with the 1,500-screen theater chain handed to

20125-406: The theatrical revue for which it served as an introductory piece). In his theatre of the late period, Beckett's characters—already few in number in the earlier plays—are whittled down to essential elements. The ironically titled Play (1962), for instance, consists of three characters immersed up to their necks in large funeral urns. The television drama Eh Joe (1963), which was written for

20286-428: The three companies into one. The new company Lasky and Zukor founded on June 28, Famous Players–Lasky Corporation , although it continued to use the name "Paramount," as well. As a result, it became the largest film company at the time with a value of US$ 12.5   million (equivalent to $ 241.8   million in 2023). The corporation was able to grow quickly, with Lasky and his partners Goldwyn and DeMille running

20447-578: The time of its release, the film received a poor reception from critics and had a mediocre box office performance. Darin's acting was criticized, as was the film's plot. At the release of a DVD of the film in 2012 however, Dennis Lim of the Los Angeles Times said Darin and Stevens were surprisingly good in the lead roles, with Darin "willing to appear both arrogant and weak", and Stevens proving her "range and nerve". He also praised Chambers' "indelible, cold-eyed performance". On Rotten Tomatoes ,

20608-536: The title of the 1976 collection of short prose texts Fizzles (which the American artist Jasper Johns illustrated). Beckett experienced something of a renaissance with the novella Company (1980), which continued with Ill Seen Ill Said (1982) and Worstward Ho (1983), later collected in Nohow On . In these three " 'closed space' stories," Beckett continued his pre-occupation with memory and its effect on

20769-557: The tough but ultimately generous view of human behavior") were evident in the film. Lim described the film as "something like a confessional manifesto from the emerging director, 31 when he made it." In a 1971 interview with Playboy magazine, Cassavetes lamented that Too Late Blues never had a chance. He regretted that he succumbed to studio pressure and shot the film in California, not in New York, and in only 30 days, and not

20930-557: The work of MacGreevy, Brian Coffey , Denis Devlin and Blanaid Salkeld , despite their slender achievements at the time, comparing them favourably with their Celtic Revival contemporaries and invoking Ezra Pound , T. S. Eliot , and the French symbolists as their precursors. In describing these poets as forming "the nucleus of a living poetic in Ireland", Beckett was tracing the outlines of an Irish poetic modernist canon. In 1935 –

21091-453: The work of his friend James Joyce . They are erudite and seem to display the author's learning merely for its own sake, resulting in several obscure passages. The opening phrases of the short-story collection More Pricks than Kicks (1934) afford a representative sample of this style: It was morning and Belacqua was stuck in the first of the canti in the moon. He was so bogged that he could move neither backward nor forward. Blissful Beatrice

21252-406: The world, while its fortuitous earlier acquisition of the Star Trek property, which had grown into a cult favorite , enabled Paramount to have a long running science fiction film and television franchise to compete with the outstanding popular success of Star Wars . Diller's television background led him to propose one of his longest-standing ideas to the board: Paramount Television Service ,

21413-534: The year that he successfully published a book of his poetry, Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates – Beckett worked on his novel Murphy . In May, he wrote to MacGreevy that he had been reading about film and wished to go to Moscow to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography . In mid-1936 he wrote to Eisenstein and Vsevolod Pudovkin to offer himself as their apprentice. Nothing came of this, however, as Beckett's letter

21574-510: Was André Roussimoff, who would later become a famous professional wrestler under the name André the Giant . They had a surprising amount of common ground and bonded over their love of cricket, with Roussimoff later recalling that the two rarely talked about anything else. Beckett translated all of his works into English himself, with the exception of Molloy , for which he collaborated with Patrick Bowles. The success of Waiting for Godot opened up

21735-471: Was Beckett's contribution to Our Exagmination Round His Factification for Incamination of Work in Progress (a book of essays on Joyce which also included contributions by Eugene Jolas , Robert McAlmon , and William Carlos Williams ). Beckett's close relationship with Joyce and his family cooled, however, when he rejected the advances of Joyce's daughter Lucia . Beckett's first short story, "Assumption",

21896-598: Was a more interested listener. However, the television division would be playing catch-up for over a decade after Diller's departure in 1984 before launching its own television network – UPN – in 1995. Lasting eleven years before being merged with The WB network to become The CW in 2006, UPN would feature many of the shows it originally produced for other networks, and would take numerous gambles on series such as Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise that would have otherwise either gone direct-to-cable or become first-run syndication to independent stations across

22057-433: Was able to introduce " block booking ", which meant that an exhibitor who wanted a particular star's films had to buy a year's worth of other Paramount productions. It was this system that gave Paramount a leading position in the 1920s and 1930s, but which led the government to pursue it on antitrust grounds for more than twenty years. By the mid-1920s, the old Lasky-DeMille barn property was not big enough to handle all of

22218-526: Was also one of the first Hollywood studios to release what were known at that time as "talkies", and in 1929, released their first musical, Innocents of Paris . Richard A. Whiting and Leo Robin composed the score for the film; Maurice Chevalier starred and sang the most famous song from the film, " Louise ". The driving force behind Paramount's rise was Zukor. He built a chain of nearly 2,000 screens, ran two production studios (in Astoria, New York , now

22379-1025: Was at an end. He commemorated it with the poem "Gnome", which was inspired by his reading of Johann Wolfgang Goethe 's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and eventually published in The Dublin Magazine in 1934: Spend the years of learning squandering Courage for the years of wandering Through a world politely turning From the loutishness of learning Beckett travelled throughout Europe. He spent some time in London, where in 1931 he published Proust , his critical study of French author Marcel Proust . Two years later, following his father's death, he began two years' treatment with Tavistock Clinic psychoanalyst Dr. Wilfred Bion . Aspects of it became evident in Beckett's later works, such as Watt and Waiting for Godot . In 1932, he wrote his first novel, Dream of Fair to Middling Women , but after many rejections from publishers decided to abandon it (it

22540-593: Was awarded the Croix de guerre and the Resistance Medal by the French government for his efforts in fighting the German occupation; to the end of his life, however, Beckett would refer to his work with the French Resistance as "boy scout stuff". While in hiding in Roussillon, Beckett continued work on the novel Watt . He started the novel in 1941 and completed it in 1945, but it was not published until 1953; however, an extract had appeared in

22701-429: Was even more popular than Mickey Mouse . After an unsuccessful expansion into feature films, as well as the fact that Max and Dave Fleischer were no longer speaking to one another, Fleischer Studios was acquired by Paramount, which renamed the operation Famous Studios . That incarnation of the animation studio continued cartoon production until 1967, but has been historically dismissed as having largely failed to maintain

22862-563: Was eventually published in 1992). Despite his inability to get it published, however, the novel served as a source for many of Beckett's early poems, as well as for his first full-length book, the 1933 short-story collection More Pricks Than Kicks . Beckett published essays and reviews, including "Recent Irish Poetry" (in The Bookman , August 1934) and "Humanistic Quietism", a review of his friend Thomas MacGreevy's Poems (in The Dublin Magazine , July–September 1934). They focused on

23023-495: Was in impoverishment, in lack of knowledge and in taking away, in subtracting rather than in adding." Knowlson argues that "Beckett was rejecting the Joycean principle that knowing more was a way of creatively understanding the world and controlling it ... In future, his work would focus on poverty, failure, exile and loss – as he put it, on man as a 'non-knower' and as a 'non-can-er. ' " The revelation "has rightly been regarded as

23184-631: Was lost owing to Eisenstein's quarantine during the smallpox outbreak, as well as his focus on a script re-write of his postponed film production. In 1936, a friend had suggested he look up the works of Arnold Geulincx , which Beckett did and he took many notes. The philosopher's name is mentioned in Murphy and the reading apparently left a strong impression. Murphy was finished in 1936 and Beckett departed for extensive travel around Germany, during which time he filled several notebooks with lists of noteworthy artwork that he had seen and noted his distaste for

23345-585: Was made in response to a change in distribution practices that had occurred among the various major studios. In August 1987, Paramount Overseas Productions declared that the subsidiary would be in service not just for the upcoming film Experts , which was shot on a budget of $ 12 million in Canada , but also for other films filmed there worldwide, including the United Kingdom and Canada . In 1993, Sumner Redstone 's entertainment conglomerate Viacom made

23506-429: Was not published until 1970. The novel preceded his most famous work, the play En attendant Godot ( Waiting for Godot ) , which was written not long afterwards. More importantly, Mercier and Camier was Beckett's first long work written in French, the language of most of his subsequent works which were strongly supported by Jérôme Lindon, director of his Parisian publishing house Les Éditions de Minuit , including

23667-568: Was performed two years later. The play was a critical, popular, and controversial success in Paris. It opened in London in 1955 to mainly negative reviews, but the tide turned with positive reactions from Harold Hobson in The Sunday Times and, later, Kenneth Tynan . After the showing in Miami, the play became extremely popular, with highly successful performances in the US and Germany. The play

23828-542: Was published in Jolas's periodical transition . The next year he won a small literary prize for his hastily composed poem "Whoroscope", which draws on a biography of René Descartes that Beckett happened to be reading when he was encouraged to submit. In 1930, Beckett returned to Trinity College as a lecturer. In November 1930, he presented a paper in French to the Modern Languages Society of Trinity on

23989-585: Was re-listed on the New York Stock Exchange and when the company was under Balaban's leadership, the studio was successfully relaunched. As always, Paramount films continued to emphasize stars; in the 1920s there were Gloria Swanson , Wallace Reid , Rudolph Valentino , Florence Vidor , Thomas Meighan , Pola Negri , Bebe Daniels , Antonio Moreno , Richard Dix , Esther Ralston , Emil Jannings , George Bancroft , Betty Compson , Clara Bow , Adolphe Menjou , and Charles Buddy Rogers . By

24150-520: Was released. On May 8, 1914, Paramount Pictures Corporation (previously known as Progressive Pictures) was founded by a Utah theatre owner, W. W. Hodkinson , who had bought and merged five smaller firms. On May 15, 1914, Hodkinson signed a five-year contract with the Famous Players Film Company, the Lasky Company and Bosworth, Inc. to distribute their films. Actor, director and producer Hobart Bosworth had started production of

24311-483: Was renamed Plitt Theaters. In 1985, Cineplex Odeon Corporation merged with Plitt. In later years, Paramount's TV division would develop a strong relationship with ABC, providing many hit series to the network. Paramount Pictures had been an early backer of television, launching experimental stations in 1939 in Los Angeles and Chicago. The Los Angeles station eventually became KTLA , the first commercial station on

24472-503: Was sold to MCA (now Universal Music Group ) in 1979. Paramount's successful run of pictures extended into the 1980s and 1990s, generating hits like Airplane! , American Gigolo , Ordinary People , An Officer and a Gentleman , Flashdance , Terms of Endearment , Footloose , Pretty in Pink , Top Gun , Crocodile Dundee , Fatal Attraction , Ghost , the Friday

24633-481: Was soon a known face in and around Left Bank cafés, where he strengthened his allegiance with Joyce and forged new ones with artists Alberto Giacometti and Marcel Duchamp , with whom he regularly played chess . Sometime around December 1937, Beckett had a brief affair with Peggy Guggenheim , who nicknamed him "Oblomov" (after the character in Ivan Goncharov 's novel ). In January 1938 in Paris, Beckett

24794-413: Was stabbed in the chest and nearly killed when he refused the solicitations of a notorious pimp (who went by the name of Prudent). Joyce arranged a private room for Beckett at the hospital. The publicity surrounding the stabbing attracted the attention of Suzanne Dechevaux-Dumesnil , who knew Beckett slightly from his first stay in Paris. This time, however, the two would begin a lifelong companionship. At

24955-460: Was still chairman emeritus; he referred to chairman Barney Balaban (born 1888) as "the boy". Such aged leadership was incapable of keeping up with the changing times, and in 1966, a sinking Paramount was sold to Charles Bluhdorn 's industrial conglomerate, Gulf and Western Industries . Bluhdorn immediately put his stamp on the studio, installing a virtually unknown producer named Robert Evans as head of production. Despite some rough times, Evans held

25116-493: Was strongly influenced by Schopenhauer 's pessimism and laudatory descriptions of saintly asceticism. At this time Beckett began to write creatively in the French language. In the late 1930s, he wrote a number of short poems in that language and their sparseness—in contrast to the density of his English poems of roughly the same period, collected in Echo's Bones and Other Precipitates (1935)—seems to show that Beckett, albeit through

25277-502: Was temporarily closed with the objective of equipping it with the technology for the production of sound films . In the same year, Paramount began releasing Inkwell Imps , animated cartoons produced by Max and Dave Fleischer 's Fleischer Studios in New York City. The Fleischers, veterans in the animation industry, were among the few animation producers capable of challenging the prominence of Walt Disney . The Paramount newsreel series Paramount News ran from 1927 to 1957. Paramount

25438-624: Was the Berkeley scholar A. A. Luce , who introduced him to the work of Henri Bergson ). He was elected a Scholar in Modern Languages in 1926. Beckett graduated with a BA and, after teaching briefly at Campbell College in Belfast , took up the post of lecteur d'anglais at the École Normale Supérieure in Paris from November 1928 to 1930. While there, he was introduced to renowned Irish author James Joyce by Thomas MacGreevy ,

25599-454: Was the big player in New York City, and did not want the Publix theaters to overshadow theirs. The two companies brokered a non-competition deal for New York City and Chicago, and Loew's took over the New York City area projects, developing five wonder theaters . Publix continued Balaban's wonder theater development in its home area. On April 24, 1930, Paramount-Famous Lasky Corporation became

25760-426: Was there, Dante also, and she explained the spots on the moon to him. She shewed him in the first place where he was at fault, then she put up her own explanation. She had it from God, therefore he could rely on its being accurate in every particular. The passage makes reference to Dante 's Commedia , which can serve to confuse readers not familiar with that work. It also anticipates aspects of Beckett's later work:

25921-409: Was written as a sequence of unpunctuated paragraphs in a style approaching telegraphese : "You are there somewhere alive somewhere vast stretch of time then it's over you are there no more alive no more than again you are there again alive again it wasn't over an error you begin again all over more or less in the same place or in another as when another image above in the light you come to in hospital in

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