Drawing on the extraordinary collection of The Library of Congress, one of the greatest repositories for silent film and memorabilia, Peter Kobel has created the definitive visual history of silent film. From its birth in the 1890s, with the earliest narrative shorts, through the brilliant full-length features of the 1920s, Silent Movies captures the greatest directors and actors and their immortal films.Silent Movies also looks at the technology of early film, the...

Like her art, Marilyn Monroe was rooted in paradox: She was a powerful star and a childlike waif; a joyful, irreverent party girl with a deeply spiritual side; a superb friend and a narcissist; a dumb blonde and an intellectual. No previous biographer has recognized-much less attempted to analyze-most of these aspects of her personality. Lois Banner has. With new details about Marilyn's childhood foster homes, her sexual abuse, her multiple marriages, her affairs, and her untimely death at...

Jack Warner epitomized the great Hollywood studio chief. He was admired as much as he was feared, engaged in battles with some of Hollywood's greatest legends from Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney to Olivia de Havilland and Bette Davis. Under his tutelage Warner Bros. gave us some of the most memorable and iconic movies, including The Jazz Singer, Casablanca, Treasure of the Sierra Madre, Damn Yankees and My Fair Lady. Warner was an astute businessman and a prodigious gambler; his footfa...

**“A smart and eminently readable examination of the life and career of one of the twentieth century’s most influential movie critics.”—Los Angeles Times“Engrossing and thoroughly researched.”—Entertainment Weekly• A New York Times Book Review Notable Book of 2011 •The first major biography of the most influential, powerful, and controversial film critic of the twentieth century**Pauline Kael was, in the words of Entertainment ...

"A fascinating biography that re-creates Hollywood's Golden Age of Glamour" as it recounts the life of the star and inventor ( Publishers Weekly).Hedy Lamarr's exotic beauty was heralded across Europe in the early 1930s. Yet she became infamous for her nude scenes in the scandalous movie Ecstasy. Trapped in a marriage to one of Austria's munitions barons, a friend of Mussolini's who hid his Jewish heritage to become an "honorary Aryan" at the onset...

Dalton Trumbo was the highest paid screenwriter in Hollywood when he was investigated as a Communist during America's Red Scare of the 1940s. He was ultimately sent to jail and placed on an industry blacklist that would make him unhirable.His exile lasted 13 years during which time he was forced to write screenplays under assumed names. While on the Hollywood blacklist Trumbo's writing won two Academy Awards, Oscars the public would never know about.This book tells the incr...

This chronicle of vaudeville is "an essential (and very funny) history of American popular entertainment" (Greg Kotis, creator of Urinetown ).When Groucho Marx and Charlie Chaplin were born, variety entertainment had been going on for decades in America, and like Harry Houdini, Milton Berle, Mae West, and countless others, these performers got their start on the vaudeville stage. From 1881 to 1932, vaudeville was at the h...

It was made like a television movie, and completed in less than three months. It killed off its star in forty minutes. There was no happy ending. And it offered the most violent scene to date in American film, punctuated by shrieking strings that seared the national consciousness. Nothing like Psycho had existed before; the movie industry -- even America itself -- would never be the same.In The Moment of Psycho, film critic David Thomson situates Psycho in Alfred ...

“A must have for any film nut.”—DetailsPeter Bogdanovich, award-winning director, screenwriter, actor and critic, interviews 16 legendary directors over a 15-year period. Their richly illuminating conversations combine to make this a riveting chronicle of Hollywood and picture making. Join him in conversations with:Robert Aldrich • George Cukor • Allan Dwan • Howard Hanks • Alfred Hitchcock • Chuck Jones • Fritz Lang • Joseph H. Lewis • Sidney Lume...

The story of one of the most important and least-understood jobs in moviemaking-film editing-is here told by one of the wizards, Ralph Rosenblum, whose credentials include six Woody Allen films, as well as The Pawnbroker, The Producers, and Goodbye, Columbus. Rosenblum and journalist Robert Karen have written both a history of the profession and a personal account, a highly entertaining, instructive, and revelatory book that will make any reader a more aware movie-viewer....

“Brings the pace and confusion and inspiration of filmmaking to life . . . Schatz has made a lasting contribution to film history.”—Directors Guild of America NewsletterAt a time when the studio is making a stunning comeback, film historian Thomas Schatz provides an indispensable account of Hollywood's tradional blend of business and art. This book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and ...

In Michael Tisserand's biography Krazy: George Herriman, A Life in Black and White, the creator of history's greatest comic strip finally gets his due.A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKWINNER OF THE EISNER AWARDFINALIST FOR THE NBCC AWARD IN BIOGRAPHY AND THE PEN/JACQUELINE BOGRAD WELD AWARD FOR BIOGRAPHYKrazy is an eye-opening biography that lays bare the truth about Georg...