James Curtis – författare

When The Vertical Mosaic first appeared in 1965, it became an instant classic. Its key message was that Canada was not the classless democracy it fancied itself to be. In fact, Canada was a highly inegalitarian society comprising a ‘vertical mosaic’ of distinct classes and ethnic groups. This collection of papers by five of Canada’s top sociologists subjects John Porter’s landmark study to renewed scrutiny and traces the dramatic changes since Porter’s time – both in Canadian society and in the agenda of Canadian sociology.Based on papers written for a conference held in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Vertical Mosaic’s publication, the five essays revisit the central themes of the original work, including gender and race inequality; citizenship and social justice; and class, power, and ethnicity from the viewpoint of political economy. An introduction by the editors provides a historical biography of Porter and discusses his influence on Canadian sociology.

When The Vertical Mosaic first appeared in 1965, it became an instant classic. Its key message was that Canada was not the classless democracy it fancied itself to be. In fact, Canada was a highly inegalitarian society comprising a ‘vertical mosaic’ of distinct classes and ethnic groups. This collection of papers by five of Canada’s top sociologists subjects John Porter’s landmark study to renewed scrutiny and traces the dramatic changes since Porter’s time – both in Canadian society and in the agenda of Canadian sociology.Based on papers written for a conference held in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Vertical Mosaic’s publication, the five essays revisit the central themes of the original work, including gender and race inequality; citizenship and social justice; and class, power, and ethnicity from the viewpoint of political economy. An introduction by the editors provides a historical biography of Porter and discusses his influence on Canadian sociology.

In 1938, Warner Brothers production chief Hal Wallis grudgingly described David Lewis—one of his six "supervisors" and a veteran of 15 feature films—to director Michael Curtiz: "That Lewis is a genius at getting scripts out of people who can't write!" Wallis knew that writing ultimately defined the job of the creative producer and that David Lewis had an uncanny talent for coaxing the best filmic material from the screenwriters he supervised.In this memoir, Lewis describes his development as a production executive and how the associate producer helped make the famed studio system work. It was the producer (or "supervisor", at Warners) who saw the script budgeted, cast the film, helped choose the director, and gently influenced the filming itself. Once shooting was complete, it was the producer who stayed with the project through editing and previews.David Lewis (1903-1987) was an associate producer at RKO and later at MGM. He hit his stride at Warner Bros., where, between 1937 and 1942, he produced twelve films with such popular stars as James Cagney (Each Dawn I Die), Humphrey Bogart (It All Came True), Bette Davis (Dark Victory), Ronald Reagan (Kings Row), Errol Flynn (Four's a Crowd), and Charles Boyer (All This and Heaven Too). His films were nominated for a total of 15 Academy Awards, including three for Best Picture. Some of Lewis's films have rightfully become classics; all reflect an unerring instinct for character and structure, part of the filmmaking process he describes in The Creative Producer.

To the American public, she will always be remembered as the woman who had a grapefruit ground into her face by James Cagney in the 1931 film classic Public Enemy. In fact, in an acting career that spanned nearly four decades, Mae Clarke appeared in nearly 100 feature films and logged in nearly as many television appearances.During the two years before she died at the age of 82, Mae Clarke spent many hours reliving those years. In a series of candid and often poignant interviews, she talks about her years in Hollywood, her failed marriage, and her health problems.

The definitive biography of this innovative and influential directorJames Whale directed some of the most stylish movies of the 1930s, but he was most successful in a genre he virtually invented. Most famously in Frankenstein, but also in The Invisible Man and The Bride of Frankenstein, Whale created a new type of horror film-sophisticated, tragic, and morbidly humorous. Whale made grim war dramas, light comedy, adventure, mystery, and even a movie version of the musical Show Boat. However, his career faltered and, being openly gay, he found work increasingly hard to get. He quit his film work just ten years after the triumph of Frankenstein, and died as a result of suicide. James Curtis has written the definitive life of James Whale, taking him from poverty in rural England to the squalor of a German prison camp, to the excitement of London’s West End, and ultimately to Hollywood, where he profoundly influenced several generations of filmmakers.

The past decade has witnessed the broad adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies. However, a lack of oversight in their widespread implementation has resulted in some incidents and harmful outcomes that could have been avoided with proper risk management. Before we can realize AI/ML''s true benefit, practitioners must understand how to mitigate its risks.

This book describes approaches to responsible AI—a holistic framework for improving AI/ML technology, business processes, and cultural competencies that builds on best practices in risk management, cybersecurity, data privacy, and applied social science. Authors Patrick Hall, James Curtis, and Parul Pandey created this guide for data scientists who want to improve real-world AI/ML system outcomes for organizations, consumers, and the public.

Learn technical approaches for responsible AI across explainability, model validation and debugging, bias management, data privacy, and ML securityLearn how to create a successful and impactful AI risk management practiceGet a basic guide to existing standards, laws, and assessments for adopting AI technologies, including the new NIST AI Risk Management FrameworkEngage with interactive resources on GitHub and Colab

The past decade has witnessed the broad adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies. However, a lack of oversight in their widespread implementation has resulted in some incidents and harmful outcomes that could have been avoided with proper risk management. Before we can realize AI/ML''s true benefit, practitioners must understand how to mitigate its risks.

This book describes approaches to responsible AI—a holistic framework for improving AI/ML technology, business processes, and cultural competencies that builds on best practices in risk management, cybersecurity, data privacy, and applied social science. Authors Patrick Hall, James Curtis, and Parul Pandey created this guide for data scientists who want to improve real-world AI/ML system outcomes for organizations, consumers, and the public.

Learn technical approaches for responsible AI across explainability, model validation and debugging, bias management, data privacy, and ML securityLearn how to create a successful and impactful AI risk management practiceGet a basic guide to existing standards, laws, and assessments for adopting AI technologies, including the new NIST AI Risk Management FrameworkEngage with interactive resources on GitHub and Colab

The past decade has witnessed a wide adoption of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) technologies. However, a lack of oversight into their widespread implementation has resulted in harmful outcomes that could have been avoided with proper oversight. Before we can realize AI/ML's true benefit, practitioners must understand how to mitigate its risks. This book describes responsible AI, a holistic approach for improving AI/ML technology, business processes, and cultural competencies that builds on best practices in risk management, cybersecurity, data privacy, and applied social science.It's an ambitious undertaking that requires a diverse set of talents, experiences, and perspectives. Data scientists and nontechnical oversight folks alike need to be recruited and empowered to audit and evaluate high-impact AI/ML systems. Author Patrick Hall created this guide for a new generation of auditors and assessors who want to make AI systems better for organizations, consumers, and the public at large.Learn how to create a successful and impactful responsible AI practiceGet a guide to existing standards, laws, and assessments for adopting AI technologiesLook at how existing roles at companies are evolving to incorporate responsible AIExamine business best practices and recommendations for implementing responsible AILearn technical approaches for responsible AI at all stages of system development

He was the consummate designer of film architecture on a grand scale, influenced by German expressionism and the work of the great European directors. He was known for his visual flair and timeless innovation, a man who meticulously preplanned the color and design of each film through a series of continuity sketches that made clear camera angles, lighting, and the actors’ positions for each scene, translating dramatic conventions of the stage to the new capabilities of film. Here is the long-awaited book on William Cameron Menzies, Hollywood’s first and greatest production designer, a job title David O. Selznick invented for Menzies’ extraordinary, all-encompassing, Academy Award–winning work on Gone With the Wind (which he effectively co-directed). It was Menzies—winner of the first-ever Academy Award for Art Direction, jointly for The Dove (1927) and Tempest (1928), and who was as well a director (fourteen pictures) and a producer (twelve pictures)—who changed the way movies were (and still are) made, in a career that spanned four decades, from the 1920s through the 1950s. His more than 120 films include Rosita (1923), Things to Come (1936), Foreign Correspondent (1940), Kings Row (1942), Mr. Lucky (1943), The Pride of the Yankees (1943), For Whom the Bell Tolls (1943), Address Unknown (1944), It’s a Wonderful Life (1947), Invaders from Mars (1953), and Around the World in 80 Days (1956). Now, James Curtis, acclaimed film historian and biographer, writes of Menzies’ life and work as the most influential designer in the history of film. His artistry encompassed the large, scenic drawings of Douglas Fairbanks’ The Thief of Bagdad (1924), which created a new standard for beauty on the screen and whose exotic fairy-tale sets are still regarded as pure genius. (“I saw The Thief of Bagdad when it first came out,” said Orson Welles—he was, at the time, a nine-year-old boy. “I’ll never forget it.”) Curtis writes of Menzies’ design and supervision of John Barrymore’s Beloved Rogue (1927), a film that remains a masterpiece of craft and synthesis, one of the most distinctive pictures to emerge from Hollywood’s waning days of silent films, and of his extraordinary, opulent appointments for Gone With the Wind (1939). It was Menzies who defined and solidified the role of art director as having overall control of the look of the motion picture, collaborating with producers like David O. Selznick and Samuel Goldwyn; with directors such as D. W. Griffith, Raoul Walsh, Alfred Hitchcock, Lewis Milestone, and Frank Capra. And with actors as varied as Ingrid Bergman, W. C. Fields, Cary Grant, Clark Gable, John Barrymore, Barbara Stanwyck, Ronald Reagan, Gary Cooper, Vivien Leigh, Carole Lombard, Mary Pickford, Gloria Swanson, and David Niven. Interviewing colleagues, actors, directors, friends, and family, and with full access to the William Cameron Menzies family collection of original artwork, correspondence, scrapbooks, and unpublished writing, Curtis brilliantly gives us the path-finding work of the movies’ most daring and dynamic production designer: his evolution as artist, art director, production designer, and director. Here is a portrait of a man in his time that makes clear how the movies were forever transformed by his startling, visionary work.(With 16 pages of color illustrations, and black-and-white photographs throughout.)From the Hardcover edition.

When The Vertical Mosaic first appeared in 1965, it became an instant classic. Its key message was that Canada was not the classless democracy it fancied itself to be. In fact, Canada was a highly inegalitarian society comprising a ‘vertical mosaic’ of distinct classes and ethnic groups. This collection of papers by five of Canada’s top sociologists subjects John Porter’s landmark study to renewed scrutiny and traces the dramatic changes since Porter’s time – both in Canadian society and in the agenda of Canadian sociology.Based on papers written for a conference held in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Vertical Mosaic’s publication, the five essays revisit the central themes of the original work, including gender and race inequality; citizenship and social justice; and class, power, and ethnicity from the viewpoint of political economy. An introduction by the editors provides a historical biography of Porter and discusses his influence on Canadian sociology.

When The Vertical Mosaic first appeared in 1965, it became an instant classic. Its key message was that Canada was not the classless democracy it fancied itself to be. In fact, Canada was a highly inegalitarian society comprising a ‘vertical mosaic’ of distinct classes and ethnic groups. This collection of papers by five of Canada’s top sociologists subjects John Porter’s landmark study to renewed scrutiny and traces the dramatic changes since Porter’s time – both in Canadian society and in the agenda of Canadian sociology.Based on papers written for a conference held in commemoration of the thirtieth anniversary of The Vertical Mosaic’s publication, the five essays revisit the central themes of the original work, including gender and race inequality; citizenship and social justice; and class, power, and ethnicity from the viewpoint of political economy. An introduction by the editors provides a historical biography of Porter and discusses his influence on Canadian sociology.

During his lifetime, Spencer Tracy was known as Hollywood's 'actor's actor'. Critics wrote that what Olivier was to theatre, Tracy was to film. Over his career he was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and won two. But there has been no substantial, intimate biography of the man, until now. From his earliest days in stock theatre, Tracy was a publicist's trial, guarding his private life fiercely. Most of the people associated closely with him shunned the limelight - notably his wife, his children and the great actress Katharine Hepburn, with whom he had an affair that lasted over 26 years. Although his screen roles often depicted a happy, twinkling Irishman, Tracy struggled with alchoholism to the end, a fact which the studios managed to keep out of the papers.With the help of Tracy's daughter, Susie, and access to previously unseen papers, James Curtis has now produced the definitive biography of a tortured, complex and immensely talented man.The book contains 124 integrated photos, many published for the first time.

On December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (b. 1927) took the stage at San Francisco’s hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged—Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Through the extraordinary details of Sahl’s life, author James Curtis deftly illustrates why Sahl was dubbed by Steve Allen as “the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy.”Sahl came on the scene the same year Eisenhower and Nixon entered the White House, the year Playboy first hit the nation’s newsstands. Clad in an open collar and pullover sweater, he adopted the persona of a graduate student ruminating on current events. “It was like nothing I’d ever seen,” said Woody Allen, “and I’ve never seen anything like it after.” Sahl was billed, variously, as the Nation’s Conscience, America’s Only Working Philosopher, and, most tellingly, the Next President of the United States. Yet he was also a satirist so savage the editors of Time once dubbed him “Will Rogers with fangs.”Here, for the first time, is the whole story of Mort Sahl,America’s iconoclastic father of modern standup comedy. Written with Sahl’s full cooperation and the participation of many of his friends and contemporaries, it delves deeply into the influences that shaped him, the heady times in which he soared, and the depths to which he fell during the turbulent sixties when he took on the Warren Commission and nearly paid for it with his livelihood.

A Times Literary Supplement 2017 Book of the YearOn December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (1927–2021) took the stage at San Francisco''s hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged—Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Through the extraordinary details of Sahl''s life, author James Curtis deftly illustrates why Sahl was dubbed by Steve Allen as “the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy.”Sahl came on the scene the same year Eisenhower and Nixon entered the White House, the year Playboy first hit the nation''s newsstands. Clad in an open collar and pullover sweater, he adopted the persona of a graduate student ruminating on current events. “It was like nothing I''d ever seen,” said Woody Allen, “and I''ve never seen anything like it after.” Sahl was billed, variously, as the Nation''s Conscience, America''s Only Working Philosopher, and, most tellingly, the Next President of the United States. Yet he was also a satirist so savage the editors of Time once dubbed him “Will Rogers with fangs.”Here, for the first time, is the whole story of Mort Sahl, America''s iconoclastic father of modern standup comedy. Written with Sahl''s full cooperation and the participation of many of his friends and contemporaries, it delves deeply into the influences that shaped him, the heady times in which he soared, and the depths to which he fell during the turbulent sixties when he took on the Warren Commission and nearly paid for it with his career.

A Times Literary Supplement 2017 Book of the YearOn December 22, 1953, Mort Sahl (1927–2021) took the stage at San Francisco''s hungry i and changed comedy forever. Before him, standup was about everything but hard news and politics. In his wake, a new generation of smart comics emerged—Shelley Berman, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, Lenny Bruce, Bob Newhart, Dick Gregory, Woody Allen, and the Smothers Brothers, among others. He opened up jazz-inflected satire to a loose network of clubs, cut the first modern comedy album, and appeared on the cover of Time surrounded by caricatures of some of his frequent targets such as Dwight Eisenhower, Richard Nixon, Adlai Stevenson, and John F. Kennedy. Through the extraordinary details of Sahl''s life, author James Curtis deftly illustrates why Sahl was dubbed by Steve Allen as “the only real political philosopher we have in modern comedy.”Sahl came on the scene the same year Eisenhower and Nixon entered the White House, the year Playboy first hit the nation''s newsstands. Clad in an open collar and pullover sweater, he adopted the persona of a graduate student ruminating on current events. “It was like nothing I''d ever seen,” said Woody Allen, “and I''ve never seen anything like it after.” Sahl was billed, variously, as the Nation''s Conscience, America''s Only Working Philosopher, and, most tellingly, the Next President of the United States. Yet he was also a satirist so savage the editors of Time once dubbed him “Will Rogers with fangs.”Here, for the first time, is the whole story of Mort Sahl, America''s iconoclastic father of modern standup comedy. Written with Sahl''s full cooperation and the participation of many of his friends and contemporaries, it delves deeply into the influences that shaped him, the heady times in which he soared, and the depths to which he fell during the turbulent sixties when he took on the Warren Commission and nearly paid for it with his career.