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“I’ve seen Paris, France, and Paris, Paramount Pictures,” Ernst Lubitsch said, or so they say, “and on the whole I prefer Paris, Paramount Pictures.”

The great director’s preference for the Hollywood city of lights over the French one expresses a common enough affinity for illusion over reality, but the studio in question was not chosen for alliteration alone. If gritty Warner Bros. specialized in mean streets and threadbare apartments and glitzy MGM spent big on grand hotels and emerald cities, Paramount transported moviegoers into realms of dreamy exoticism, allegedly set in Vienna, Budapest or St. Petersburg, but conjured with better-than-the-original costuming, set design, lighting and dialogue. In an age before jumbo jets, who was to quibble over verisimilitude?

A new version of Paramount looks to be a-borning: Controlling stakeholder Shari Redstone may put her company on the auction block. Whatever conglomerate or mogul buys the assets, it’ll...

She’s the reason that rising female stars are often called “the It girl.” She starred in the first movie to win an Oscar for best picture. By 1930, she’d made in 45 movies in six years. By 1933, after struggles with men and mental illness, Clara Bow’s Hollywood career was over.

There’s been a surge of interest in the legendary actress who straddled the silent and sound eras this week after Taylor Swift revealed the tracklist for her upcoming album, “The Tortured Poets Department.” The last song on Side D is titled “Clara Bow.”

A native of Brooklyn, Bow grew up in poverty and got her start in pictures after she won a contest sponsored by a magazine. Her prizes were “an evening gown, a trophy and a promise to help the aspiring young actress gain entrée into the film industry,” according to Bow’s biography from Turner Classic Movies.

After Paramount’s “Top Gun: Maverick” soared with both critics and audiences last year it scored with the academy last month earning six Oscar nominations including Best Picture. The Tom Cruise blockbuster is in a dogfight for this top award with the likes of “Everything Everywhere All At Once,” “Avatar: The Way of Water,” “The Fabelmans” and “The Banshees of Inisherin.”

Turning the clock back over nine decades, the very first Best Picture winner in Oscars history was another high-flying Paramount release, 1927’s “Wings,” which also claimed the prize for best engineering effects. Directed by 30-year-old World War I vet William A. Wellman, who was snubbed, “Wings” revolves around two young smalltown men Jack (Charles “Buddy” Rogers) and David to compete against legions of other fans plus our experts and editors for best prediction accuracy scores. See our latest prediction champs. Can you top our esteemed leaderboards next? Always remember...

On November 20, 1945, in Nuremberg, Germany, once prime real estate for torchlit Nazi pageantry, currently reduced to ruins by Allied bombing, the International Military Tribunal, an unprecedented experiment in transnational jurisprudence, convened in the city’s Palace of Justice, one of the few buildings left standing. The four victorious powers — the United States, Great Britain, France, and the Soviet Union — had hauled the loser, Nazi Germany, before four judges and a global jury to be held accountable for violating a series of recently devised additions to the criminal code — crimes against humanity, crimes against peace, criminal conspiracy, and war crimes.

Twenty-one Nazi leaders were in the dock, defendants whose names most Americans had become familiar with in the years since 1933. The accused included Reich Marshall Herman Göring, Hitler’s brutal second in command; Joachim von Ribbentrop, Minister of Foreign Affairs, who in August 1939 negotiated the pact with the Soviet Union that ignited the conflagration; Rudolf Hess,...

The experts were right when they said that silent filmmaking was developing something unique and beautiful, before talkies came along and spoiled the party with all that noise. This ‘handy three-pack’ of once-obscure Josef von Sternberg classics proves the theory 100% — his intense dramas excite audiences with something that’s gone missing from the movies, or the cinema or whatever you want to call it: the magic of visual stylization in the service of basic human emotions. Before Marlene there was Evelyn Brent and Betty Compson: Sternberg presents them as shimmering visions.

3 Silent Classics by Josef von Sternberg

Blu-ray

The Criterion Collection 529, 530, 531

1927-28 / B&w / 1:33 Silent Ap / 81, 88, 75 min. / available through The Criterion Collection / Street Date October 8, 2019 / 79.96

Starring: George Bancroft, Evelyn Brent, Clive Brook; Emil Jannings, Evelyn Brent, William Powell; George Bancroft, Betty Compson, Olga Baclanova.

Cinematography: Bert Glennon; Bert Glennon; Harold Rosson

Original Music: multiple scores by Robert Israel,...

Frederica Sagor Maas, a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1920s, died January 5 at the Country Villa nursing facility in La Mesa, in the San Diego metropolitan area. She was 111. The daughter of Jewish Russian immigrants, she was born Frederica Alexandrina Sagor on July 6, 1900, in New York City. According to her autobiography, The Shocking Miss Pilgrim: A Writer in Early Hollywood, she studied journalism at Columbia University, but quit before graduation to work as an assistant story editor at Universal Pictures' New York office. While at Universal, she kept herself busy going to star-studded premieres and parties, and — as found in her book — having the studio buy the rights to Rex Beach's novel The Goose Woman, thus giving a solid boost to the careers of actresses Louise Dresser and Constance Bennett, and of future five-time Oscar-nominated director Clarence Brown. Sagor left Universal when film executive Al Lichtman and future...

On Tuesday morning, Wamg was invited to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ special press preview of John Ford’s Upstream (1927), one of 75 films recently found in the New Zealand Film Archive and repatriated to the U.S. with the cooperation of the National Film Preservation Foundation.

The 1927 silent film, that was thought lost for decades, had it’s re-premiere Wednesday night, September 1, at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. Many of the VIP’s on hand included Silent Film Historians and those involved with the restoration, as well as the general public.

Having seen the film on Tuesday, I must say the transfer is absolutely beautiful. I was so impressed by the special care taken with the film’s clarity and how vibrant the tinting is on the multiple color frames throughout. The smoky special effects combined with the subtle transitions made me forget I was...

Talk about a treasure chest of films.

Over the weekend, a massive collection of early U.S. films, clocking in at a robust 75 films, was discovered in a vault in New Zealand. According to Variety, the collection of films will be preserved by the New Zealand Film Archive and National Film Preservation Foundation, along with the help of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, George Eastman House, UCLA Film and Television Archive, as well as the Library of Congress, and the Museum of Modern Art to boot.

Among the films, there are films showing such things as how hats are made by Stetson, how someone can set an underwater explosive, and a neo-commercial for a Ford tractor trailer. However, the most interesting piece is not something like that at all.

Uncovered in this collection is an early film from the filmography of John Ford. Upstream, a film previously thought to have been lost,...

Budd Schulberg, from the April 1997 issue of Vanity Fair. Photograph by Nigel Parry. Budd Schulberg, who died yesterday at the age of 95, established himself early on as Hollywood’s quintessential outsider with his skewering satires, his political stances, and his chronicles of the downtrodden. Born to B.P. Schulberg, who ran Paramount Pictures in the 1930s (and helped define the era when studio chiefs had initials in lieu of first names), Budd was both a product of old Hollywood, and one of its most relentless critics. The characters of Sammy Glick, the backstabbing careerist from Schulberg’s 1941 novel What Makes Sammy Run, and of Lonesome Rhodes, the vagrant-turned-tv-sensation from his screenplay for 1957’s A Face in the Crowd, are all too relevant today. Intended as caricatures when he wrote them, they wouldn’t seem out of place in the era of Ari Gold and reality television. Above all, Schulberg was an inveterate writer,...

On The Waterfront screenwriter Budd Schulberg has died. He was 95.

Schulberg was taken from his Long Island, New York home on Wednesday to a local hospital, where he died after doctors failed to revive him.

The scribe was born in New York City in 1914, the son of Paramount Pictures boss B.P. Schulberg, and made a name for himself as a novelist in the 1940s.

He later went on to write screenplays for films including 1957's A Face In The Crowd, before penning his best-known work On The Waterfront, about mafia violence in New Jersey.

The 1954 drama received 12 Academy Award nominations, winning eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Marlon Brando and Best Story and Screenplay for Schulberg.

Schulberg is survived by his wife Betsy and four children.

Hollywood screenwriter Budd Schulberg, best known for his Oscar-winning screenplay for On The Waterfront, has died at his home on Long Island. He was 96.Born in 1914 in New York into a movie family - his father was Paramount production head B.P. Schulberg and his mother was sister of movie powerbroker Sam Jaffe - Schulberg wrote his first screenplay aged only 19. His entree into Hollywood came in 1937 with an uncredited contribution to David O. Selznick's A Star Is Born. He received his first credit on Little Orphan Annie a year later.During the war Schulberg served in the Oss, the fledgling espionage agency. Fittingly, his war years had a distinctly cinematic flavour: he was assigned to John Ford's documentary unit, helping record Us combat operations from D-Day to the liberation of the concentration camps and Nuremberg trials, and was involved in the arrest of German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl in Austria.

Won 1954 Oscar for "On the Waterfront"; also wrote anti-Hollywood novel, "What Makes Sammy Run."

By Wrap Staff

Writer Budd Schulberg, who won an Academy Award for "On the Waterfront," died on Wednesday at 95.

The son of B.P. Schulberg, head of Paramount Pictures, and Adeline Jafee-Schulberg, sister to agent/film producer Sam Jaffe, Schulberg was hardly a Hollywood insider. Aside from his 1954 Oscar, he’s best known for his iconic anti-Hollywood novel, “What Makes Sammy Run.”

The book made him almost as unpopular in the industry town as his appearance in 19...

Budd Schulberg, who won an Academy Award for the screenplay for "On the Waterfront" and penned the definitive portrait of a Hollywood hustler in his novel "What Makes Sammy Run?" died Wednesday. He was 95.

His wife Betsy told the Associated Press that he died of natural causes at his home in Westhampton Beach, N.Y. He was taken to a nearby medical center, where efforts to revive him were unsuccessful.

Alternately scorned and lionized by Hollywood during the course of his career, Schulberg, the son of a powerful studio executive, was a writer of varied forms, including magazine articles, novels and screenplays. He adapted his short story "Your Arkansas Traveler," about the rise and fall of a popular entertainer, for the screen as "A Face in the Crowd," which Elia Kazan directed in 1957.

Called before the House Un-American Activities Committee investigating allegations of Communism in the motion picture industry, Schulberg...