Sheldon Hall’s new book ‘Armchair Cinema: A History of Feature Films on British Television’ will be published by Edinburgh University Press on 30 June

Since broadcast television first emerged to challenge the cinema as a form of public entertainment, more people have seen films on TV than by any other means, including the cinema itself. Feature films created to be viewed on the big screen were initially withheld from TV by the film industry. But from the mid-1960s, thousands of films have been shown […]

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Hallam lecturer uncovers Kubrick plan to aquire Doctor Zhivago film rights

Senior lecturer in media, James Fenwick, has discovered that two of cinema’s most revered film-makers – Hollywood star Kirk Douglas and director Stanley Kubrick – tried in vain to acquire the movie rights to Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak’s classic love story set against the Russian revolution, in the 1950s. Fenwick has been taken aback to find a letter of 8 January 1959, in which […]

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Hidden Histories of Film and Media

James Fenwick discusses the concepts of unmade / unseen films and creative failure, which are central to his forthcoming book Stanley Kubrick Produces (Rutgers University Press) and his co-edited volume Shadow Cinema: Historical and Production Contexts of Unmade Films (Bloomsbury).   July 2019. I was in an overcrowded airport café in Amsterdam returning from a conference and desperately attempting to […]

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