The magic of the silent screen, illuminated by the recollections of those who created it.A narrative and photographic history of the early days of the movies, combining fact, anecdote, and reminiscence in a critical survey of films, actors, directors, producers, writers, editors, technicians, and other participants and hangers-on.

    Screenplay for the movie Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid

    His delightful biography conveys the warmth and humor of the much-loved duo whose hilarious escapades convulsed a generation of movie-goers and have now won a new world-wide audience on the TV screen.

    Sarris's The American Cinema, the bible of auteur studies, is a history of American film in the form of a lively guide to the work of two hundred film directors, from Griffith, Chaplin, and von Sternberg to Mike Nichols, Stanley Kubrick, and Jerry Lewis. In addition, the book includes a chronology of the most important American films, an alphabetical list of over 6000 films with their directors and years of release, and the seminal essays "Toward a Theory of Film History" and "The Auteur Theory Revisited." Over twenty-five years after its initial publication, The American Cinema remains perhaps the most influential book ever written on the subject.

    An unrivaled raconteur, a neurotic without peer, he is the jongleur of our times. Like those medieval satirists, Levant is allowed to say anything he chooses about contemporary civilization because everyone thinks he's kidding. One can open this book at almost any page and find instant entertainment. When Levant's best-selling Memoirs of an Amnesiac was published, one critic said of it: 'line for line, the funniest book available.' This may also be said of this new work. For again, Mr. Levant presents us with a dazzling, irreverent potpourri f anecdotes, ad libs, witticisms, reminiscences, commentaries about show biz, TV, Hollywood, writers, politicians, musicians - not to mention the Levant family and the whole zany, brilliant, bizarre world of Oscar Levant. Among the notables about whom Levant writes in this new work - many of them are or were his friends - Dorothy Parker, Groucho and Harpo Marx, Leonard Bernstein, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Jack Paar, S. N. Behrman, Truman Capote, Clare Boothe Luce, Arnold Schoenberg, Aldoph Green, George and Ira Gershwin, Noel Coward, Irving Berlin, Judy Garland, Billy Rose, Artur Rubinstein, Benny Goodman, Kenneth Tynan, and Humphrey Bogart. Levant has a passion for the people he impales or praises - especially the great and near great. He is their vicarious confessor, a man who has experienced the gamut of emotion. Born to see the world awry and to immortalize his vision in semantic splendor, in instant, inimitable confections of wit, Levant laughs when it hurts."

    

    The book, Tarzan of the Apes, was an immediate sensation and paved its author's way to subsequent wealth and fame as the creator of this tree-swinging jungle man. On January 27, 1918, the film version of Tarzan of the Apes opened at the Broadway Theatre in New York with Elmo Lincoln starring as Tarzan, and another immediate success was scored. There have since been forty Tarzan films produced, and fourteen different actors have donned the loincloth to appear as Tarzan in the movies. A fifteenth Tarzan, Ron Ely, now appears in the Tarzan television serial. Tarzan of the Movies is the exciting account of these Tarzan films, which have amassed a gross of over five hundred million dollars during their more than fifty years of existence. The volume is a history in depth of the Tarzan epic, and reveals the backstage machinations in the production of each Tarzan pictures; the rivalry between various film-makers for film rights to the Apeman; and the sometimes hilarious, and sometimes tragic, events that took place during production; there are profiles of all the actors who have essayed the role of Apeman and comparisons of their approaches to the role. More than four hundred pictures, some of them extremely rare, appear throughout the text. Tarzan of the Movies may be read for pure pleasure or studied by film buffs as an invaluable record of an aspect of a half-century of film-making."