Did you know that less than two weeks after Jack Kerouac reported to the Newport, RI U.S. Naval Training Station (the same month that the German 6th Army was surrendering at Stalingrad), he was discharged, diagnosed with a Constitutional Psychopathic State, Schizoid Personality”? That just a few months later, William Burroughs moved from Chicago to New York, where he took a small apartment at 69 Bedford Street and began a heroin addiction that was to last until 1956? That meanwhile, Grego...

In a controversial and tumultuous filmmaking career that spanned nearly fifty years, Robert Altman mocked, subverted, or otherwise refashioned Hollywood narrative and genre conventions. Altman's idiosyncratic vision and propensity for formal experimentation resulted in an uneven body of work: some rank failures and intriguing near-misses, as well as a number of great films that are among the most influential works of New American Cinema. While Altman always professed to have nothing author...

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...

Pick your next movie to watch with this collection of four decades of 4-star reviews from the Pulitzer Prize–winning film critic.Spanning the length of Roger Ebert's career as the leading American movie critic, this book contains all of his four-star reviews written during that time from About Last Night . . . to You Can Count on Me. A great guide for movie watching.

Richard Schickel's text, combining critical analysis and a re-interpretation of all the available biographical information, masterfully maps the intersections where a great star's personal history and his screen personality met in a style as elegant, graceful and witty as the actor himself.

"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...

From the Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and playwright: an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from a filmmaker who’s always played by his own rules.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what on earth do those producers do anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and refreshingly forthright answers to these and ...

A lively portrait of mid-twentieth-century American book publishing—"A wonderful book, filled with anecdotal treasures" ( The New York Times).According to Al Silverman, former publisher of Viking Press and president of the Book-of-the-Month Club, the golden age of book publishing began after World War II and lasted into the early 1980s.In this entertaining and affectionate industry biography, Silverman captures the passionate spirit of legendary hou...

A master film critic is at her witty, exhilarating, and opinionated best in this career-spanning collection featuring pieces on Bonnie and Clyde, The Godfather, and other modern movie classics“Film criticism is exciting just because there is no formula to apply,” Pauline Kael once observed, “just because you must use everything you are and everything you know.” Between 1968 and 1991, as regular film reviewer for The New Yorker, Kael used ...

The legacy of silver screen tycoon Samuel Goldwyn comes to vivid life in this acclaimed biography from the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award-winning author of Wilson, Lindbergh, and Max Perkins: Editor of Genius.He was the premier dream-maker of his era—a fierce independent force in a time when studios ruled. He was a producer of silver-screen sagas who may have been, in the words of Harper's Bazaar, “the last Hollywood tyco...

In the first biography of Ginsberg since his death in 1997 and the only one to cover the entire span of his life, Ginsberg's archivist Bill Morgan draws on his deep knowledge of Ginsberg's largely unpublished private journals to give readers an unparalleled and finely detailed portrait of one of America's most famous poets. Morgan sheds new light on some of the pivotal aspects of Ginsberg's life, including the poet's associations with other members of the Beat Generation, his complex relat...

WITH 8 PAGES OF BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHSHow—and why—do we obsess over movie stars? How does fame both reflect and mask the person behind it? How have the image of stardom and our stars’ images altered over a century of cultural and technological change? Do we create celebrities, or do they create us?Ty Burr, film critic for The Boston Globe, answers these questions in this lively and fascinating anecdotal history of stardom, with all its blessin...