Movie soundtracks, old and new, have featured ragtime tunes in their track listing. ... Versions of ragtime works are included in the films "The Gremlins" and "Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope" (Paterson). ... Early jazz musicians like Jelly Roll Morton and Fats Weller came from ragtime backgrounds and borrowed ragtime traditions, blending them with new techniques (Faulkner). ...
Both fed them on lynching, murder, sex crimes, explosions, wrecks, love nests, fires, miracles, revolutions, wars." ... When the movies began, it was clear that the new form of entertainment would be very different from theater. ... A "star" is someone who is recognized and admired by "everybody," and people of a certain type have this as a psychological need. ... They would become the new gods. ... To move from the metaphorical to the literal, West's novel identifies some of the constituents of this unstable soil and I hope that in this essay I have identified some more. ...
