If the gore epics, women-in-prison films, and shockumentaries showcased within their mildewed walls didn't live up to their outrageous billing, the audience shouted, threw food, and even vandalized the theaters. For dedicated lovers of extreme cinema, buying a movie ticket on the Deuce meant putting your life on the line. Authors Bill Landis and Michelle Clifford came to know those grindhouses better than anyone else, and although the theaters were gone by the mid-1980s, the films remained. In Sleazoid Express, Landis and Clifford reproduce what no home video can -- the experience of watching an exploitation film in its original fight-for-your-life Deuce setting. Both a travelogue of the infamous grindhouses of yore and a comprehensive overview of the sleaze canon, Sleazoid Express offers detailed reviews of landmark exploitation classics and paints intimate portraits of directors whose notorious creations played the back end of triple bills for years on end. With wit, intelligence, and an unflinching eye, Landis and Clifford offer the definitive document of cinema's most intense and shocking moments as they came to life at a legendary place.

    Allison; Cape Fear; The Longest Day; Farewell, My Lovely; and The Winds of War. Mitchum's powerful presence and simmering violence combined with hard-boiled humor and existential detachment to create a new style in movie acting: the screen's first hipster antihero-before Brando, James Dean, Elvis, or Eastwood-the inventor of big-screen cool.Robert Mitchum: "Baby, I Don't Care" is the first complete biography of Mitchum, and a book as big, colorful, and controversial as the star himself. Exhaustively researched, it makes use of thousands of rare documents from around the world and nearly two hundred in-depth interviews with Mitchum's family, friends, and associates (many going on record for the first time ever) ranging over his seventy-nine years of hard living. Written with great style, and vividly detailed, this is an intimate, comprehensive portrait of an amazing life, comic, tragic, daring, and outrageous.

    

    The author shares his memories of his father and provides an overview of Groucho's career, his family life, and the turmoil of his final years.

    Spence Tracy and Kate Hepburn were the couple everyone knew of but no one really knew anything about. What kept these two opposites together makes for an interesting read.

    In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka. Here are Wilder's sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Ace in the Hole, among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious, but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script, everybody's lines, never a fault, never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna, working as a journalist in Berlin, rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit, tough-minded romanticism, and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilder's films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.

    In Moviemakers' Masterclass, Laurent Tirard talks to an illustrious collection of today's greatest directors to get to the core of their approach to cinema. The results shed a unique light upon the mysteries of the directorial process. Martin Scorsese, we learn, likes setting up each shot very precisely in advance. Lars von Trier, on the other hand, refuses to think about a set-up until the day of filming. And Bernardo Bertolucci tries to dream his shots the night before . . .Other directors featured include Woody Allen, Pedro Almodovar, Tim Burton, the Coen brothers, Jean-Pierre Jeunet and Wong Kar-Wai.

    In the animator's own words, accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished photographs, sketches, and storyboards from his personal archive, this book details Harryhausen's entire film career, from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers to Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. In words and images, this book explains the basics of special effects and stop-motion animation, along the way telling entertaining tales of working with the film stars of the day, such as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Lionel Jeffries. Film buffs will relish such revelations as how Raquel Welch was picked up by a flying dinosaur in One Million Years B.C., why the octopus in Mysterious Island was really only a sixtopus, and what Medusa's blood was made from in Clash of the Titans.

    Obsessively watched and critically ignored, sitcoms were a distraction, a gentle lullaby of a kinder, gentler America—until suddenly the artificial boundary between the world and television entertainment collapsed.            In this book we can watch the growth of the sitcom, following the path that leads from Lucy to The Phil Silvers Show; from The Dick Van Dyke Show to The Mary Tyler Moore Show; from M*A*S*H to Taxi; from Cheers to Roseanne; from Seinfeld to Curb Your Enthusiasm; and from The Larry Sanders Show to 30 Rock.            In twenty-four episodes, Sitcom surveys the history of the form, and functions as both a TV mixtape of fondly remembered shows that will guide us to notable series and larger trends, and a carefully curated guided tour through the history of one of our most treasured art forms.

    . . Some Like It Hot occupies a unique place in American culture. This beloved classic showcases five comic geniuses: Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon, I. A. L. Diamond, Billy Wilder, and Marilyn Monroe. It has been honored by the American Film Institute as the "Funniest Film of All Time". It has contributed quotes, styles, and stories to film lore. Yet the full story of its making has never been told—until now.

    In a Freakonomics meets Hollywood saga, veteran investigative reporter Edward Jay Epstein goes undercover to explore Hollywood’s “invisible money machine,” probing the dazzlingly complicated finances behind the hits and the flops, while he answers the surprisingly puzzling question: How do the studios make their money?Along the way we also learn much about star system and what makes the business tick: + What it costs to insure Nicole Kidman’s right knee ...+ How and why the studios harvest silver from old film prints ...+ Why stars do—or don’t do—their own stunts ...+ Why Arnold Schwarzenegger is considered a contract genius ...+ How Hollywood goes about doping outside investors and hedge fund managers ...+ Why Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is considered a “masterpiece” of financing ...

    The result is a highly entertaining book on Hollywood's extravagant relationship with the past, a celebration of the cinema as an illuminator of the story of mankind. By the author of the bestselling Flashman novels. 200 photos.

    . . . At the editing table, when I run the strip of film through, frame by frame, I still feel that dizzy sense of magic of my childhood.” Bergman, who has conveyed this heady sense of wonder and vision to moviegoers for decades, traces his lifelong love affair with film in his breathtakingly visual autobiography, The Magic Lantern.More grand mosaic than linear account, Bergman’s vignettes trace his life from a rural Swedish childhood through his work in theater to Hollywood’s golden age, and a tumultuous romantic history that includes five wives and more than a few mistresses. Throughout, Bergman recounts his life in a series of deeply personal flashbacks that document some of the most important moments in twentieth-century filmmaking as well as the private obsessions of the man behind them. Ambitious in scope yet sensitively wrought, The Magic Lantern is a window to the mind of one of our era’s great geniuses.“[Bergman] has found a way to show the soul’s landscape . . . . Many gripping revelations.”—New York Times Book Review“Joan Tate’s translation of this book has delicacy and true pitch . . . The Magic Lantern is as personal and penetrating as a Bergman film, wry, shadowy, austere.”—New Republic“[Bergman] keeps returning to his past, reassessing it, distilling its meaning, offering it to his audiences in dazzling new shapes.”—New York Times“What Bergman does relate, particularly his tangled relationships with his parents, is not only illuminating but quite moving. No ‘tell-all’ book this one, but revealing in ways that much longer and allegedly ‘franker’ books are not.”—Library Journal

    cartoons but were afraid to ask, this complete and indispensable reference will delight adults, children, and audiences all over the world.

    Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Arsenic and Old Lace, and It's a Wonderful Life, he was also an award-winning documentary filmmaker as well as a behind-the-scene force in the Director's Guild, the Motion Picture Academy, and the Producer's Guild. He worked with or knew socially everyone in the movie business from Mack Sennett, Chaplin, and Keaton in the silent era through the illustrious names of the golden age. He directed Clark Gable, Jimmy Stewart, Cary Grant, Gary Cooper, Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra, Jean Harlow, Claudette Colbert, Bette Davis, and others. Reading his autobiography is like having Capra sitting in your living room, regaling you with his anecdotes. In The Name Above the Title he reveals the deeply personal story of how, despite winning six Academy Awards, he struggled throughout his life against the glamors, vagaries, and frustrations of Hollywood for the creative freedom to make some of the most memorable films of all time.