‘Before there was Star Wars … before there was Close Encounters … there was The Man Who Fell To Earth.’Earthbound is the first book-length exploration of a true classic of twentieth-century science-fiction cinema, shot under the heavy, ethereal skies of New Mexico by the legendary British director Nicolas Roeg and starring David Bowie in a role he seemed born for as an extraterrestrial named Thomas Newton who comes to Earth in sea...

A sparkling satire of Hollywood stars and wannabes, packed with “dead-on observations of L.A. culture, show business, and human nature” (Booklist).Susan Compo’s narrative voice — satirical and allusive — has earned her comparisons to Dorothy Parker, and her characters display a similarly irresistible blend of smart-ass wit, despair, and whistling-in-the-dark bravado. Following two highly regarded story collections, Compo’s debut novel takes a sharp-eyed lo...

The Goth subculture that flourished in the 1980s and '90s is experiencing a long overdue resurgence of interest, so the time is definitely ripe to rediscover Susan Compo’s short stories, hailed at the time as “like Raymond Carver through Goth-coloured glasses” (Sunday Times).Compo was immersed in the music and fashion scenes in London and Los Angeles during those years - as participant and keen observer - and she writes about them with wit and compassion b...

A deep dive into the subcultures of Los Angeles and London in the 1980s as glam turned to punk and goth.Susan Compo captures the lives of aspiring musicians, scenesters, and obsessive fans—lives in which reality is a constant threat to cherished illusions, and death, while never far away, is sometimes not the end of the story.Cathi Unsworth calls Life After Death “a dazzling time capsule that, once re-opened, brings back in vivid and lurid detail a...

Though he never reached the lead actor status he labored so relentlessly to achieve, Warren Oates (1928–1982) is one of the most memorable and skilled character actors of the 1970s. With his rugged looks and measured demeanor, Oates crafted complex characters who were at once brazen and thoughtful, wild and subdued. Friends remember the hard-living, hard-drinking actor as kind and caring, but also sometimes as mean as a blue-eyed devil. Married four times, partial to road trips in his RV a...

A Curious Man is the marvelously compelling biography of Robert “Believe It or Not” Ripley, the enigmatic cartoonist turned globetrotting millionaire who won international fame by celebrating the world's strangest oddities, and whose outrageous showmanship taught us to believe in the unbelievable.As portrayed by acclaimed biographer Neal Thompson, Ripley’s life is the stuff of a classic American fairy tale. Buck-toothed and cursed by shyness, Ripley turned his sense of bei...

Discover the tantalizing details of Hollywood's famous and infamous fatalitiesThe death of a celebrity is often as fascinating as--and sometimes more fascinating than--a star's actual life. From the grisly end of Sharon Tate at the hands of the Manson family and the mysterious demise of Bob Crane to the peaceful passings of Lucille Ball and George Burns, The Hollywood Book of Death is a captivating and appealingly packaged volume of more than 125 televisio...

AMERICA’S #1 BESTSELLING TELEVISION BOOK WITH MORE THAN HALF A MILLION COPIES IN PRINT–NOW REVISED AND UPDATED!PROGRAMS FROM ALL SEVEN COMMERCIAL BROADCAST NETWORKS, MORE THAN ONE HUNDRED CABLE NETWORKS, PLUS ALL MAJOR SYNDICATED SHOWS!This is the must-have book for TV viewers in the new millennium–the entire history of primetime programs in one convenient volume. It’s a guide you’ll turn to again and again for information on every series ever telecast. There are ent...

Some sample anecdotes: 1) Simon and Schuster once published a children's book titled Dr. Dan the Bandage Man. As a publicity gimmick, they decided to include a half-dozen band-aids in each book, so publisher Richard Simon sent this telegram to a friend at Johnson and Johnson: "PLEASE SHIP TWO MILLION BAND-AIDS IMMEDIATELY." The following day Mr. Simon received this telegram in reply: "BAND-AIDS ON THEIR WAY. WHAT THE HELL HAPPENED TO YOU?" 2) As a young woman, ballerina Margot Fonteyn wish...

True stories of writers and pirates, painters and potheads, guitar pickers and drug merchants in Key West in the 1970s.For Hemingway and Fitzgerald, there was Paris in the twenties. For others, later, there was Greenwich Village, Big Sur, and Woodstock. But for an even later generation—one defined by the likes of Jimmy Buffett, Tom McGuane, and Hunter S. Thompson—there was another moveable feast: Key West, Florida.The small town on the two-by-four-mile isla...

Movies made for television were in their infancy when ABC came up with a novel idea: a weekly series of films made exclusively for the small screen. The ABC Movie of the Week became a great success and a cultural touchstone for a generation of Americans.In this loving tribute to the classic series of TV films, more than two hundred films in the series are reviewed, including well-remembered titles such as Duel, Tribes, The Six Million Dollar Man, Go Ask Alice, Brian's ...

Some sample anecdotes; 1) When his two sons were attending UCLA, comedian Joe E. Brown was invited to join his sons' fraternity—provided that he become an undergraduate. Mr. Brown paid the tuition and even attended a physics class, where he challenged the professor's statements and even asserted that Albert Einstein had called him for advice. (This was a somewhat true statement, but of course Mr. Einstein hadn't called Mr. Brown for advice about physics.) After the class was over, the prof...