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Bauhaus and Gestalt aesthetics influenced Saul Bass’s art, and this was most visible in his film posters, which often reduced a film’s narrative content to a single iconic image. These logos achieved instant recognition by simplifying their semantic content to basic geometric forms, eliminating all details to become two-dimensional silhouettes that could be printed in any monochromatic color. Apart from the uniqueness of their design, Bass’s posters for Otto Preminger’s The Man with the Golden Arm, Saint Joan, Bonjour Tristesse, and Anatomy of a Murder consciously paid homage to modernist, abstract art. Bass’s advertising campaign and credit sequence for The Man with the Golden Arm officially kick-started the designer’s Hollywood career, even though it was neither his first film logo campaign nor his first title work. The same pars pro toto (parts standing in for the whole) aesthetic inherent in creating logocentric advertising campaigns and posters was also at work in conceptualizing title sequences that placed everyday objects at the center of their design. Bass experimented with a variety of conceptual solutions to individual design problems, moving from a kind of documentary realism to symbolic representations to pure abstraction.

While working on the Spartacus script, Otto Preminger asked Trumbo to write the script for Exodus. Preminger publicly announced that Trumbo would receive screen credit. (The announcement that Trumbo would also receive screen credit for Spartacus came seven months later.) Thus, at the end of 1960, Trumbo’s name was on the screen twice, for two hugely successful films. This feat provoked a slow weakening of the blacklist, but blacklistees returned to work in a trickle, not a wave.

In February 1971, while her studio-seized debut feature A New Leaf was being readied its premiere, Elaine May took a job-for-hire – adapting Lois Gould's newly published, fictionalized semi-memoir Such Good Friends for director Otto Preminger. Her work on the film was pseudonymously ascribed to Esther Dale, in keeping with May's general policy of not taking credit for projects for which she lacked authorial control, and has tended to be regarded as little more than a footnote in her career. Yet Such Good Friends is characterized by themes and styles which typify May's oeuvre: betrayal of a partner; the conflict between the roles we play and our ‘true’ selves; abrupt, seemingly spontaneous, tonal shifts; a particularly intellectual, highly verbal brand of New York Jewish humour counterpointed by vulgar farce; the spectre of impending death. Further, the film shows us that, even when working as intermediary between Gould and Preminger, May's outlook remains thoroughly existentialist. This philosophy, popularized by Jean-Paul Sartre, is not merely reflected in the content of her work but also shapes her entire approach to creative endeavours. Indeed, it's fascinating to see how May's inherent spontaneity, manifested as an inescapable subjectivity, merges with Preminger's highly- controlled, deliberately composed objectivity.

After being fired from the set of the film noir classic Laura (1944) through the machinations of producer Otto Preminger, Mamoulian enjoyed only a spotty career in Hollywood. He would complete only two more films, an adaptation of Eugene O’Neill's Ah, Wilderness! called Summer Holiday (1948) and the Fred Astaire-Cyd Charisse musical Silk Stockings (1957). He also took a stand against mandatory loyalty oaths for all Hollywood directors. Mamoulian was fired during the troubled production of Cleopatra (1960); his enduring contribution was casting Elizabeth Taylor in the lead. He spent the remaining years of his life travelling to film festivals and speaking to film students.

Chapter 2 demonstrates, by reviewing existing theoretical accounts and by using as a case study Anatomy of a Murder (Preminger, 1959), that to conceptualise an artwork as comprising a range of axes or spectrums of distance is a powerful way of exploring its handling of point of view (and its achievements in this regard). It uses the work of Robert Pippin and Harold Adams Innis to offer a reading of The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance as a film concerned with the cultural and historical effects of different media of communication, including the distances these different media span and create. In its conclusion it offers a synthesis of the arguments of various members of the ‘Frankfurt School’ and the ‘Toronto School’ in order to suggest certain aesthetically- and historically-specific properties of the narrative fiction film as a medium of expression and communication – particularly, its relationship to publicness and privacy.

With difficulty, Cleo Trumbo finally resolved the financial mess her husband had left behind. The family also struggled to ensure that Trumbo received screen credit for Roman Holiday and that Kirk Douglas did not get exclusive credit for “breaking the blacklist.” The Trumbos were gratified when a free-speech fountain at the University of Colorado was dedicated to Trumbo and when the citizens of Grand Junction embraced him and Eclipse. The “Dalton Gang” sponsored a sculpture of him—writing in his bathtub—that sits on Main Street in Grand Junction. A special Writers Guild committee restored many of his black-market credits.

This chapter explores the politics of color in Oscar Hammerstein's Carmen Jones by focusing on the various layers of representation in its stage and film versions. Carmen Jones uses lyrics that adopt common clichés of Negro speech and equates Georges Bizet's sexually liberated gypsy in Carmen with a lower-class African American woman. After providing a background on the circumstances, precedents, and models that inspired Hammerstein's conception of Carmen Jones, the chapter considers Hammerstein's transformation of the plot and his text-translation practice, along with the opera's exoticism, stereotypes, and problematic representations of blackness and black Other. It then discusses the critical reception of Carmen Jones in light of the socioeconomic status and race of its 1943 audience. It also analyzes Otto Preminger's 1954 film version of Carmen Jones and how he was able to capture the spectacle of its Technicolor bodies on the big screen with the aid of CinemaScope.

This chapter describes Hitchcock’s working relationships during his most productive years as a director. Under terms negotiated by his agent, Lew Wasserman, ownership of the films he directed for Paramount reverted to Hitchcock eight years after their initial release, eventually pushing his earnings well beyond those of his peers. As Hitchcock’s star ascended, the influence of Joe Breen and the Production Code declined. Joe Breen’s health failed, and he was replaced in 1954 by his assistant, Geoffrey Shurlock, who was more accommodating than his predecessor with directors he admired, like Hitchcock. The Code itself received a major makeover in 1956 with the rescinding of flat bans on illegal drugs, abortion, white slavery, and kidnapping. Restrictions on such long-forbidden words as damn and hell were also lifted, and some directors, like Otto Preminger, openly challenged the Code and released films, notably The Moon Is Blue, without a Code Seal. Subsequent chapters include detailed discussions on the impacts of censorship on each of the eleven films Hitchcock made during his glory years.