In this lavish tribute to Pickford (1892-1979), her enormous and wide-ranging body of work is illustrated with fabulous film stills, rare production shots, and personal photographs -- most never before published -- from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library.Today's audiences have little knowledge of Pickford's films, let alone of her enormous behind-the-scenes power as one of Hollywood's pioneering producers and cofounder of United Artists. This first illustrated filmography of Pickford's career accords her achievements the recognition they deserve. Noted film historian Kevin Brownlow draws on interviews with Pickford and her circle to provide entertaining film-by-film commentaries full of wonderful anecdotes about the silent era.

    Though he died at the young age of fifty-seven more than half a century ago, his influence among actors and filmmakers, and his enduring appeal for film lovers around the world, remains as strong as ever. What is it about Bogart, with his unconventional looks and noticeable speech impediment, that has captured our collective imagination for so long? In this definitive biography, Stefan Kanfer answers that question, along the way illuminating the private man Bogart was and shining the spotlight on some of the greatest performances ever captured on celluloid.Bogart fell into show business almost by accident and worked for nearly twenty years before becoming the star we know today. Born into a life of wealth and privilege in turn-of-the-century New York, Bogart was a troublemaker throughout his youth, getting kicked out of prep school and running away to join the navy at the age of nineteen. After a short, undistinguished stint at sea, Bogart spent his early twenties drifting aimlessly from one ill-fitting career to another, until, through a childhood friend, he got his first theater job. Working first as a stagehand and then, reluctantly, as a bit-part player, Bogart cut his teeth in one forgettable role after another. But it was here he began to develop a work ethic; deciding that there were “two kinds of men: professionals and bums,” Bogart, for the first time in his life, wanted to be the former.After the Crash of ’29, Bogart headed west to try his luck in Hollywood. That luck was scarce, and he slogged through more than thirty B-movie roles before his drinking buddy John Huston wrote him a part that would change everything; with High Sierra, Bogart finally broke through at the age of forty—being a pro had paid off. What followed was a string of movies we have come to know as the most beloved classics of American cinema: The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, The Big Sleep, The African Queen . . . the list goes on and on. Kanfer appraises each of the films with an unfailing critical eye, weaving in lively accounts of behind-the-scenes fun and friendships, including, of course, the great love story of Bogart and Bacall. What emerges in these pages is the portrait of a great Hollywood life, and the final word on why there can only ever be one Bogie.

    In 25 years, Kaufman, along with partner Michael Herz, has built Troma Studios up from a company struggling to find its voice in a field crowded with competitors to its current--and legendary--status as a lone survivor, a bastion of true cinematic independence, and the world's greatest collection of camp on film.As entertaining and funny as it is informative and insightful, Make Your Own Damn Movie! places Kaufman's radically low-budget, independent-studio style of filmaking directly in the reader's hands. Thus we learn how to: develop and write a knock-out screenplay; raise funding; find locations and cast actors; hire a crew; obtain equipment, permits, and music rights (all for little or no money); make incredible special effects for $0.79 each; charm, schmooze, and network while on the film-festival circuit; and, finally, make a bad actor act so bad it's actually good.From scriptwriting and directing to financing and marketing, this book is brimming with utterly off-the-wall, decidedly maverick, yet consistently proven advice on how to fully develop one's idea for an independent film.

    While some biographers had to rely on second-hand knowledge and newspaper and magazine articles that were often unreliable or deliberately inaccurate, Jordan (whose nickname is pronounced "Reenie") was on the scene for countless real-life Gardner episodes that rivaled any fiction. It is a must-read for classic movie enthusiasts and also for those who need a reminder of what true friendship is.

    Featuring a pitch-perfect screenplay, a classic soundtrack, and unforgettable performances by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and a deep supporting cast, Casablanca was hailed in the New York Times as “a picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” The film won Oscars for best picture, best director, and best screenplay, and would go on to enjoy more revival screenings than any other movie in history. It became so firmly ensconced in the cultural imagination that, as Umberto Eco once said, Casablanca is “not one movie; it is ‘movies.’ ”We’ll Always Have Casablanca is celebrated film historian Noah Isenberg’s rich account of this most beloved movie’s origins. Through extensive research and interviews with filmmakers, film critics, family members of the cast and crew, and diehard fans, Isenberg reveals the myths and realities behind Casablanca’s production, exploring the transformation of the unproduced stage play into the classic screenplay, the controversial casting decisions, the battles with Production Code censors, and the effect of the war’s progress on the movie’s reception. Isenberg particularly focuses on the central role refugees from Hitler’s Europe played in the production (nearly all of the actors and actresses cast in Casablanca were immigrants).Filled with fresh insights into Casablanca’s creation, production, and legacy, We’ll Always Have Casablanca is a magnificent account of what made the movie so popular and why it continues to dazzle audiences seventy-five years after its release.

    Depicting deep-rooted, even archetypal fears, while at the same time exploiting socially and culturally specific anxieties, cinematic horror is at once timeless and utterly of its time and place. This exciting visual history, which includes unique images from the David Del Valle archive, examines the genre in thematic, historical, and aesthetic terms, breaking it down into the following fundamental categories: Slashers & Serial Killers; Cannibals, Freaks & Hillbillys; Revenge of Nature & Environmental Horror; Sci-fi Horror; The Living Dead; Ghosts & Haunted Houses; Possession, Demons & Evil Tricksters; Voodoo, Cults & Satanists; Vampires & Werewolves; and The Monstrous-Feminine. Among the many films featured are classics such as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, The Exorcist, Dracula, and The Wicker Man.

    In the mid-1970s Charlotte Chandler spoke with Marlene Dietrich in Dietrich’s Paris apartment. The star’s career was all but over, but she agreed to meet because Chandler hadn’t known Dietrich earlier, “when I was young and very beautiful.” Dietrich may have been retired, but her appearance and her celebrity—her famous mystique—were as important to her as ever. Marlene Dietrich’s life is one of the most fabulous in Hollywood history. She began her career in her native Berlin as a model, then a stage and screen actress during the silent era, becoming a star with the international success The Blue Angel. Then, under the watchful eye of the director of that film, her mentor Josef von Sternberg, she came to America and became one of the brightest stars in Hollywood. She made a series of acclaimed pictures—Morocco, Shanghai Express, Blonde Venus, Destry Rides Again, among many others—that propelled her to international stardom. With the outbreak of World War II, the fiercely anti-Nazi Dietrich became an American citizen and entertained Allied troops on the front lines. After the war she embarked on a new career as a stage performer, and with her young music director, the gifted Burt Bacharach—whom Chandler interviewed for the book—Dietrich had an outstanding second career. Dietrich spoke candidly with Chandler about her unconventional private life: although she never divorced her husband, Rudi Sieber, she had numerous well-publicized affairs with his knowledge (and he had a longtime mistress with her approval). By the late 1970s, plagued by accidents, Dietrich had become a virtual recluse in her Paris apartment, communicating with the outside world almost entirely by telephone Marlene Dietrich lived an extraordinary life, and Marlene relies extensively on the star’s own words to reveal how intriguing and fascinating that life really was.

    "[S]urprisingly vivid accounts" (People) of such public icons as Lana Turner, Rock Hudson, Kim Novak, and Mae West explore the private scandals exploited by tabloids such as Confidential. Highlighting Hollywood's curious religious revival with The Robe, the film industry's exploitation of the potboiler Peyton Place, and the life of anarchic director Nick Ray of the enduring classic Rebel without a Cause, the authors "[give] a compelling sense" (Kirkus Reviews) of the unique obsessions of the era and the city's attempts to reinvent the magic and mystery of its past glories. Guided by the authors' historical savvy and intimate storytelling, we discover a city at a crossroads, attempting to reinvent the magic and mystery of its past glories. Tragic, irreverent, and always entertaining, The Bad and the Beautiful reveals the underground history of this turbulent decade in American film.

    Wet Hot American Summer. Valley of the Dolls. There are some movies that defy traditional critical assessment -- films that are panned by reviewers, but that go on to become beloved classics and cult phenoms anyway.Ever been crushed to learn your favorite movie -- or a new one you're dying to see -- has been given the big green splat from Rotten Tomatoes' infamous Tomatometer? The site's editors stand by their critics and scores, but they also feel your pain: Fresh films shouldn't get all the glory! In Rotten Movies We Love, the RT team celebrates 101 Rotten movies that can't be missed, including:Box office behemoths that bombed with critics: Space Jam, Maleficent, Bad BoysSci-fi treasures so bad they're awesome: Cherry 2000, Zardoz, Masters of the UniverseRare Rottens from Fresh directors: The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, Marie Antoinette, Legend, WillowDeeply beloved cult classics: The Last Dragon, Empire Records, The Craft, MacGruber Underrated gems ahead of their time: The Strangers, Event Horizon, Practical Magic, The Cable GuySequels worth a second look: Home Alone 2, Rocky IV, Jurassic Park III, Return to OzFeaturing 16 essays from some of the world's most well-known film critics -- Leonard Maltin, Terri White, Amy Nicholson, David Fear, K. Austin Collins, and more -- and punctuated with black-and-white film stills and punchy graphics, it's a fun romp through the quirkier corners of film history, sure to delight any cinephile or pop-culture fanatic.

    Pale

    Selznick was a unique figure in the golden Hollywood studio era. He produced some of the greatest and most memorable American films ever made--notably, Rebecca, A Star Is Born, Anna Karenina, A Farewell to Arms, and, above all, Gone With the Wind. Selznick's absolute power and artistic control are evidenced in his impassioned, eloquent, witty, and sometimes rageful memos to directors, writers, stars and studio executives, writings that have become almost as famous as his films. Newsweek wrote, I can't imagine how a book on the American movie business could be more illuminating, more riveting or more fun to read than this collection of David Selznick's memos.

    These are Hedy Lamarr's uninhibited memoirs in which she conceals little about her six marriages and is outspoken about her bisex life. After pub, she denied everything. O, Hedwig!

    This book lays to rest the persistent myth that businesspeople and producers stifle artistic talent and reveals instead the genius of a system of collaboration and conflict. Working from industry documents, Schatz traces the development of house styles, the rise and fall of careers, and the making-and unmaking-of movies, from Frankenstein to Spellbound to Grand Hotel. Richly illustrated and highly readable, The Genius of the System gives the definitive view of the workings of the Old Hollywood and the foundations of the New.

    Ava, Hedy, Judy, Liz epitomized Hollywood's golden era. With a trembling lip or sultry eye, with a tear or song or husky whisper, these women held moviegoers across America in their sway from the hard times of the 1930s through the booming postwar years to the early sixties. They were royalty and box office, and led pampered public lives—furs, jewels, designer gowns; limousines, flash bulbs, handsome escorts—that captured the national imagination. They also signed seven-year contracts with a morals clause, and the more they slipped, the more the secret abortions, efficient cover-ups, legal legerdemain, and dropped charges bound them to the wizard in their Oz, Louis B. Mayer. The slips are here along with the successes. Here, too, are the Blonde Bombshell Jean Harlow, Million-Dollar Mermaid Esther Williams, Sweater Girl Lana Turner, and bad girl Ava Gardner ("She can't act. She can't talk. She's terrific," declared Mayer after her screen test). From Jeanette MacDonald and Norma Shearer to Princess Grace and Dame Elizabeth Taylor, the sixteen portraits in this lively, photograph-filled volume, each accompanied by the star's filmography, tell the tales that have long lay hidden behind the gossip and the glories of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's glamorous golden girls.

    Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema--but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe.In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded--in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled.No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era--what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.