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The Hal Roach Comedy Shorts of Thelma Todd, Zasu Pitts and Patsy Kelly by James L. Neibaur


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Gregory Peck: A Charmed Life


Lynn Haney - 2003
    And most of his leading ladies—among them, Ingrid Bergman, Jennifer Jones, Audrey Hepburn, Sophia Loren, and Ava Gardner—would not disagree. Irreverent, candid, refreshingly honest, Lynn Haney's carefully researched biography not only charts the remarkable career of the Oscar-winning star but also plumbs Peck's frequently troubling complexity in his off-screen roles as husband, father, lover, and son. About the tough times, Haney minces no words; but the misfortunes by no means eclipse the energy, intensity, and excitement that characterized Peck's five decades of moviemaking. This is a book filled with telling photographs, and a story cast with movie moguls from Louis B. Mayer to Darryl Zanuck, with directors from Hitchcock and Walsh to Huston and Wyler, with nearly every major luminary in Hollywood, and, starring for the first time in toto, Gregory Peck.

The Psychotronic Encyclopedia of Film


Michael J. Weldon - 1983
    He is now unfit for conventional employment. Because of the addictive nature of these films, we the publishers cannot guarantee that your sanity won't be endangered by reading this book.

Doodle Diary of a New Mom: An Illustrated Journey Through One Mommy’s First Year


Lucy Scott - 2015
    Despite her extensive pre-baby research, nothing prepared her for the momentous task of caring for this new little person. Featuring dozens of funny moments like baby's first lunch out to a forensic view of the living room, this charming doodle collection includes 120 two-color illustrations and is the perfect gift for Mother's Day, baby showers, or year-round fun. Also included are a few doodling prompts in the back of the book so moms can doodle their own first-year memories.

Dark Knights and Holy Fools: The Art and Films of Terry Gilliam: From Before Python to Beyond Fear and Loathing


Bob McCabe - 1999
    Since 1969, when he became the only American among the otherwise all-British Monty Python team. Terry Gilliam's work has won plaudits and acclaim for its originality and imagination. His films are renowned for the quality of performances from some of Hollywood's top acting talent, such as Robert de Niro, Brad Pitt, Robin Williams and Johnny Depp.For the first time, this book traces thirty years of the work and art of Terry Gilliam, from his pre-Python days through to the astounding adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, released in 1998.Using Gilliam's own drawings, storyboard and scripts, this book builds to a complete overview of the director's work, examining in detail his striking visual sense ad labyrinthing stories of Man against bureaucracy (Brazil, Twelve Monkeys), triumphant tales of imagination winning over mediocrity (Time Bandits, The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, The Fisher King) and, of course, something completely different (Monty Python and the Holy Grail).

The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune


Stuart Galbraith - 2002
    The Emperor and the Wolf is an in-depth look at these two great artists and their legacy that brims with behind-the-scenes details, many never before known, about their tumultuous lives and stormy relationships with the studios and with one another. More than just a biography, though, The Emperor and the Wolf is also an impromptu history of Japanese cinema -- its development, filmmakers, and performers -- and a provocative look at postwar American and Japanese culture and the different lenses through which two great societies viewed each other.

The Women Who Knew Too Much: Hitchcock and Feminist Theory


Tania Modleski - 1988
    In opposition to these positions, Modleski asserts that Hitchcock is deeply ambivalent towards his female characters. The Women Who Knew Too Much examines both the director's complex attitude toward femininity, and the implications of that attitutde for the audience. The book represents a significant contribution to the debates in film theory around the issue of gender and film spectatorship; in particular, it seeks to complicate the view that women's response to patriarchal cinema can only be masochistic, while men's response is necessarily sadistic.Applying the theories of psychoanalysis, mass culture, and a broad range of film (and) feminist criticism, Modleski offers compelling readings of seven Hitchcock films from various periods in his career.

Sleazoid Express: A Mind-Twisting Tour Through the Grindhouse Cinema of Times Square


Bill Landis - 2002
    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.

Charles Addams: A Cartoonist's Life


Linda H. Davis - 2006
    But for all the novelty of the sitcom based on Charles Addams’s groundbreaking New Yorker cartoons, Hollywood’s Addams family paled beside the cartoonist’s. “Not half as evil as my original characters,” sighed Addams.Though the haunted-household cartoons developed a following among New Yorker readers long before the 1960s sitcom, and the Addams and their seedy Victorian mansion soon became recognizable types, the artist with the well-known signature “Chas Addams” remained an enigma. Called “the Bela Lugosi of the cartoonists,” Addams was the cartoonist everyone–even Hitchcock–wanted to meet. He was bedeviled by rumors. People claimed that he slept in a coffin, collected severed fingers sent by fans, and suffered bouts of madness that sent him to the insane asylum.The true Addams was even more fabulous than the wildest stories and cartoons. Here was a sunny, funny urbane man, “a normal American boy,” as he called himself, with a dog who hated children and a taste for crossbows. While producing a unique body of work featuring lovingly drawn homicidal spouses, demonic children, genteel monsters, and an everyday world crosshatched with magic, Addams raced classic sports cars, juggled beautiful women (Joan Fontaine, Jackie Kennedy, and Greta Garbo, to name a few), and charmed everyone. But though his pursuits suggest lighthearted romantic comedy, Addams’s life had its sinister side. Far darker than anything Addams created with a brush was his relationship with a dangerous woman who forever changed his life.In this first biography of the great cartoonist, written with exclusive access to Addams’s intimates and his private papers, we finally meet the man behind the famed cartoons and circling rumors. Here is his surprising childhood in New Jersey, the cartoon that offended the Nazis, the friend whose early death Addams long mourned. Here are his wives, the stories behind his most famous–and some of his most private–cartoons, and the Addams whom even his closest friends didn’t know.With wit, humor, poignancy, and insight–enhanced by rare family photographs, classic and previously unpublished cartoons, and private drawings–Linda H. Davis paints an engaging and endearing portrait of a marvelous American original.One of America’s most gifted biographers, Linda Davis has given us an engrossing, unforgettable portrait of the legendary New Yorker cartoonist. In Davis’s empathetic narrative and in accompanying cartoons, photographs, and drawings, the great artist lives again in all his eccentric brilliance,ghoulish sense of humor, fecund love life, and warm and gentle humanity. Beautifully written and exhaustively researched, Chas Addams: A Cartoonist’s Life deserves to win every literary prize there is for best biography.--Stephen B. Oates, Paul Murray Kendall Professor of Biography and Professor History Emeritus, The University of Massachusetts at Amherst “If you don’t appreciate martinis with eyeballs in them, this is not the book for you. For the rest of us here is an irresistible riot of a read, an exhilarating expertly mixed cocktail of words and images. Charles Addams’s life was crowded with women–famous women, smart women, witty women, garden-variety drop-dead beautiful women–but in Linda Davis he has truly met his match.” --Stacy Schiff, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Vera “Seldom have we found as satisfying a fit of subject and author as this. Linda Davis has distilled years of research, travel and interviews into a rollicking and fascinating review of Addams’s astonishing life as artist, playboy and–from time to time–husband. We can all be grateful that Addams and Davis finally found one another.”--Harrison Kinney,author of James Thurber: His Life and Times

The Winston Effect: The Art and History of Stan Winston Studio


Jody Duncan - 2006
    Now, at last, he's opening up the Stan Winston Studio to collaborate on the first-ever book to reveal all the behind-the-scenes secrets of his groundbreaking and hugely influential artistry and effects work. Featuring an extensive array of sketches, production art, and photographs straight from the studio archives, this is the book his fans have been waiting for!

Cinema Sewer, Vol. 1


Robin Bougie - 2007
    A mind-melting compilation of gonzo writing, illustration and comics about the most insane, sexy, awkward, cheesy, hilarious, upsetting and jaw-dropping movies in the history of film, Cinema Sewer joyously celebrates the sleaziest aspects of the moviegoing experience, while delving deep into bizarre cinematic history. Bougie's distinctive writing style has made him famous among a loyal following of cult film fans. Includes: •Graphic illustrations by Bougie and associates • Bizarre film trivia • 100 pages of never-before-seen interviews, rants, comics • Rare genre film ads • DIY 'zine aesthetic

Ayoade on Ayoade: A Cinematic Odyssey


Richard Ayoade - 2014
    It wouldn't. In fact, it's actually pretty insulting that this so-called 'Community' hasn't done more to acknowledge (or even begin to repay) its undoubted debt to me.Richard Ayoade is many things - film director (of Submarine and the forthcoming The Double), comedy actor (The IT Crowd), comedian and TV presenter (Gadget Man). Ayoade on Ayoade captures the director in his own words: pompous, vain, angry and very, very funny.

99 Classic Movies for People in a Hurry


Thomas Wengelewski - 2009
    Get the low down on: Citizen Kane, Psycho, The Seventh Seal, Gone With the Wind, Dirty Dancing, Jaws, Bagdad Café, Rocky, Yojimbo, The Guns of Navarone, Jailhouse Rock, The Big Blue, Rebel Without a Cause, Taxi Driver, The Shawshank Redemption, The Misfits, among many others.

The Dark Side Of The Screen: Film Noir


Foster Hirsch - 1981
    From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.

Tim Burton: Interviews


Kristian Fraga - 2005
    When it became a surprise blockbuster, studios began to trust him with larger budgets and the whims of his expansive imagination. Mixing gothic horror, black comedy, and oddball whimsy, Burton's movies veer from childlike enchantment to morbid melancholy, often with the same frame.His beautifully designed and highly stylized films-including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow, and Ed Wood-are idiosyncratic, personal visions that have found commercial success. In Tim Burton: Interviews, the director discusses how animation and art design affect his work, how old horror films have deeply influenced his psyche, why so many of his protagonists are outcasts, and how he's managed to make personal films within the Hollywood system. He gives tribute to writers he's worked with, his favorite actors-including Johnny Depp and Vincent Price-and talks enthusiastically about pulp horror fiction and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.These interviews show his progression from an inarticulate young director to a contemplative and dry-witted artist over the course of twenty years. In later interviews, he opens up about being in therapy and how his childhood fantasies still affect his art. Tim Burton: Interviews reveals a man who has managed to thrive inside Hollywood while maintaining the distinctive quirks of an independent filmmaker.Kristian Fraga, New York City, wrote and directed the award-winning PBS documentary The Inside Reel: Digital Filmmaking. He is a founding partner of Sirk Productions, LLC, a Manhattan-based film and television production company.

Dorothy Dandridge


Donald Bogle - 1997
    . . . Bogle has fashioned a resonant history of a bygone era in Hollywood and passionately documented the contribution of one of its most dazzling and complex performers."—New York Times Book ReviewIn the segregated world of 1950s America, few celebrities were as talented, beautiful, glamorous, and ultimately influential as Dorothy Dandridge. Universally admired, she was Hollywood's first full-fledged Black movie star. Film historian Donald Bogle offers a panoramic portrait of Dorothy Dandridge’s extraordinary and ultimately tragic life and career, from her early years as a child performer in Cleveland, to her rise as a nightclub headliner and movie star, to her heartbreaking death at 42. Bogle reveals how this exceptionally talented and intensely ambitious entertainer broke down racial barriers by integrating some of America's hottest nightclubs and broke through Tinseltown’s glass ceiling. Along with her smash appearances at venues such as Harlem’s famed Cotton Club, Dorothy starred in numerous films, making history with her role in Otto Preminger’s Carmen Jones, playing opposite Harry Belafonte. Her performance earned her an Academy Award nomination for Best Actress—the first Oscar nod for a woman of color.But Dorothy’s wealth, fame, and success masked a reality fraught with contradiction and illusion. Struggling to find good roles professionally, uncomfortable with her image as a sex goddess, coping with the aftermath of two unhappy marriages and a string of unfulfilling affairs, and overwhelmed with guilt for her disabled daughter, Dorothy found herself emotionally and financially bankrupt—despair that ended in her untimely death.Woven from extensive research and unique interviews, as magnetic as the woman at its heart, Dorothy Dandridge captures this dazzling entertainer in all her complexity: her strength and vulnerability, her joy and her pain, her trials and her triumphs.