The Wizard of Oz: The Official 75th Anniversary Companion


William Stillman - 2013
    Officially licensed with Warner Bros., this collectible edition features accessible text, a host of never-before-seen ephemera, and nine removable features.Written by the foremost authorities on the subject—Jay Scarfone and William Stillman—and designed in close collaboration with Warner Bros., The Wizard of Oz: The Official 75th Anniversary Companion delivers an entertaining and interactive experience, transporting readers over the rainbow and into the wonderful Land of Oz. The authors detail filmmaking secrets—the inspiration behind the film's realistic tornado; why Dorothy's shoes were ruby-colored; and how the filmmakers got a fleet of monkeys to fly—and reveal never-before-seen artwork from their personal collection, including, but not limited to, rare stills, Technicolor test frames, and costume and set illustrations.Additionally, the book will contain nine removable features as well as several innovative graphic components. More than your average anniversary edition, this book promises to be the most definitive look at The Wizard of Oz yet. It is comprehensive in its scope yet accessibly written and beautifully designed—perfect for The Wizard of Oz fans, film buffs of all ages, and collectors.

Vanity Fair's Hollywood


Vanity Fair - 2000
    The brightest stars in Hollywood's firmament have been assembled in one volume: Garbo and Swanson, Gable and Grant, Tracy and Hepburn, Fairbanks and Pickford, Taylor and Burton - along with today's cinematic giants: Cruise and Kidman, Nicholson and Streep, De Niro and DiCaprio, Hanks and Roberts, and scores more. Vanity Fair's photographers - among them Cecil Beaton, Annie Leibovitz, Helmut Newton, Herb Ritts, Edward Steichen and Bruce Weber - have helped to define modern portraiture. Likewise, Vanity Fair's stable of Hollywood writers in this volume includes luminaries of the past (P.G. Wodehouse, Dorothy Parker and D.H. Lawrence) and of the present (Christopher Hitchens, Dominick Dunne, Amy Fine). Here, then, is a century's worth of stars and moguls, parties and scandals, power and glamour, through the unrivalled lens and the inimitable prose of Vanity Fair.

The Big Sleep


David Thomson - 1997
    This text shows how The Big Sleep signalled a change in the nature of Hollywood cinema, as the director Howard Hawks shot extra scenes, "fun" scenes, to replace the ones in which the murders are explained, and in so doing left the plot unresolved.

Hollywood Babylon


Kenneth Anger - 1959
    Originally published in Paris, this is a collection of Hollywood's darkest and best kept secrets from the pen of Kenneth Anger, a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of America's leading underground film-makers.

MGM: Hollywood's Greatest Backlot


Steven Bingen - 2010
    During its Golden Age, the studio employed the likes of Garbo, Astaire, and Gable, and produced innumerable iconic pieces of cinema such as The Wizard of Oz, Singin’ in the Rain, and Ben-Hur.It is estimated that a fifth of all films made in the United States prior to the 1970s were shot at MGM studios, meaning that the gigantic property was responsible for hundreds of iconic sets and stages, often utilizing and transforming minimal spaces and previously used props, to create some of the most recognizable and identifiable landscapes of modern movie culture.All of this happened behind closed doors, the backlot shut off from the public in a veil of secrecy and movie magic. M-G-M: Hollywood’s Greatest Backlot highlights this fascinating film treasure by recounting the history, popularity, and success of the MGM company through a tour of its physical property.Featuring the candid, exclusive voices and photographs from the people who worked there, and including hundreds of rare and unpublished photographs (including many from the archives of Warner Bros.), readers are launched aboard a fun and entertaining virtual tour of Hollywood’s most famous and mysterious motion picture studio.

Edith Head: The Fifty-Year Career of Hollywood's Greatest Costume Designer


Jay Jorgensen - 2010
    Funny Face. Sunset Blvd. Rear Window. Sabrina. A Place in the Sun. The Ten Commandments. Scores of iconic films of the last century had one thing in common: costume designer Edith Head (1897–1981). She racked up an unprecedented 35 Oscar nods and 400 film credits over the course of a fifty-year career.Never before has the account of Hollywood’s most influential designer been so thoroughly revealed—because never before have the Edith Head Archives of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences been tapped. This unprecedented access allows this book to be a one-of-a-kind survey, bringing together a spectacular collection of rare and never-before-seen sketches, costume test shots, behind-the- scenes photos, and ephemera.

Influence


Mary-Kate Olsen - 2008
    In the pages of Influence, Ashley and Mary-Kate take readers on a journey through their celebrated young lives, pausing to reflect on what has helped shape them into who they are today. Influence will be filled with never-before-seen photographs from Ashley and Mary-Kate's private collections, pages of original material by Ashley and Mary-Kate, and interviews with some of the most influential tastemakers in the world. Internationally famous photographer Rankin shot the cover image and many interior shots. The book is designed by renowned book-designer Rodrigo Corral and edited by fashion and arts writer Derek Blasberg. Influence has 4 major sections: Fashion, Environment, Art and Giving Back, as well as an introduction and conclusion. This category-breaking book will show that with an open mind and a little bit of curiosity, everyone can have INFLUENCE.

Her Name Is Barbra


Randall Riese - 1993
    Randall Riese has exhaustively covered every aspect of her life--from her rise to stardom and her stunning career on Broadway and in film, to her relationship with her mother and with her son, her political involvement, and her numerous lovers. Includes 16 pages of fabulous photographs.

The Big Show: High Times and Dirty Dealings Backstage at the Academy Awards®


Steve Pond - 2005
    The Big Show is the only book ever to offer an unguarded, behind-the-scenes glimpse of this singular event, along with remarkable insight into how the Oscars reflect the high-stakes politics of Hollywood, our obsession with celebrities (not to mention celebrities’ obsession with themselves), and the cinematic state of the union.

Woody: Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Him


David Evanier - 2015
    Evanier tackles the themes that Allen has spent a lifetime sorting through in art: morality, sexuality, Judaism, the eternal struggle of head and heart. Woody will be the definitive word on a major American talent as he begins his ninth decade, and his sixth decade of making movies.

Audrey: The 60s


David Wills - 2012
    Audrey: The 60s is a landmark photographic chronicle of her film and fashion career during those tumultuous years. Regarded as one of the most beautiful and best-dressed women in the world, Audrey Hepburn had timeless appeal—and this breathtaking photographic collection compiled by David Wills, author of Marilyn Monroe: Metamorphosis, captures this legendary star at the height of her career—from Breakfast at Tiffany’s to the Vogue fashion shoots with world-class photographers that captured her unique, trendsetting style.

L.A. Noir: The Struggle for the Soul of America's Most Seductive City


John Buntin - 2009
    Los Angeles has legends. Midcentury Los Angeles. A city sold to the world as "the white spot of America," a land of sunshine and orange groves, wholesome Midwestern values and Hollywood stars, protected by the world’s most famous police force, the Dragnet-era LAPD. Behind this public image lies a hidden world of "pleasure girls" and crooked cops, ruthless newspaper tycoons, corrupt politicians, and East Coast gangsters on the make. Into this underworld came two men–one L.A.’s most notorious gangster, the other its most famous police chief–each prepared to battle the other for the soul of the city. Former street thug turned featherweight boxer Mickey Cohen left the ring for the rackets, first as mobster Benjamin "Bugsy" Siegel’s enforcer, then as his protégé. A fastidious dresser and unrepentant killer, the diminutive Cohen was Hollywood’s favorite gangster–and L.A.’s preeminent underworld boss. Frank Sinatra, Robert Mitchum, and Sammy Davis Jr. palled around with him; TV journalist Mike Wallace wanted his stories; evangelist Billy Graham sought his soul. William H. Parker was the proud son of a pioneering law-enforcement family from the fabled frontier town of Deadwood. As a rookie patrolman in the Roaring Twenties, he discovered that L.A. was ruled by a shadowy "Combination"–a triumvirate of tycoons, politicians, and underworld figures where alliances were shifting, loyalties uncertain, and politics were practiced with shotguns and dynamite. Parker’s life mission became to topple it–and to create a police force that would never answer to elected officials again. These two men, one morally unflinching, the other unflinchingly immoral, would soon come head-to-head in a struggle to control the city–a struggle that echoes unforgettably through the fiction of Raymond Chandler and movies such as The Big Sleep, Chinatown, and L.A. Confidential. For more than three decades, from Prohibition through the Watts Riots, the battle between the underworld and the police played out amid the nightclubs of the Sunset Strip and the mansions of Beverly Hills, from the gritty streets of Boyle Heights to the manicured lawns of Brentwood, intersecting in the process with the agendas and ambitions of J. Edgar Hoover, Robert F. Kennedy, and Malcolm X. The outcome of this decades-long entanglement shaped modern American policing–for better and for worse–and helped create the Los Angeles we know today. A fascinating examination of Los Angeles’s underbelly, the Mob, and America’s most admired–and reviled–police department, L.A. Noir is an enlightening, entertaining, and richly detailed narrative about the city originally known as El Pueblo de Nuestra Se–ora la Reina de los Angeles, "The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angels."Frank Darabont has adapted this book for a TV series, Mob City.

Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille


Scott Eyman - 2010
    DeMille lived a life as epic as any of his cinematic masterpieces. As a child DeMille learned the Bible from his father, a theology student and playwright who introduced Cecil and his older brother, William, to the theater. Tutored by impresario David Belasco, DeMille discovered how audiences responded to showmanship: sets, lights, costumes, etc. He took this knowledge with him to Los Angeles in 1913, where he became one of the movie pioneers, in partnership with Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). Working out of a barn on streets fragrant with orange blossom and pepper trees, the Lasky company turned out a string of successful silents, most of them directed by DeMille, who became one of the biggest names of the silent era. With films such as The Squaw Man, Brewster’s Millions, Joan the Woman, and Don’t Change Your Husband, he was the creative backbone of what would become Paramount Studios. In 1923 he filmed his first version of The Ten Commandments and later a second biblical epic, King of Kings, both enormous box-office successes. Although his reputation rests largely on the biblical epics he made, DeMille’s personal life was no morality tale. He remained married to his wife, Constance, for more than fifty years, but for most of the marriage he had three mistresses simultaneously, all of whom worked for him. He showed great loyalty to a small group of actors who knew his style, but he also discovered some major stars, among them Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, and later, Charlton Heston. DeMille was one of the few silent-era directors who made a completely successful transition to sound. In 1952 he won the Academy Award for Best Picture with The Greatest Show on Earth. When he remade The Ten Commandments in 1956, it was an even bigger hit than the silent version. He could act, too: in Billy Wilder’s classic film Sunset Boulevard, DeMille memorably played himself. In the 1930s and 1940s DeMille became a household name thanks to the Lux Radio Theater, which he hosted. But after falling out with a union, he gave up the program, and his politics shifted to the right as he championed loyalty oaths and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts. As Scott Eyman brilliantly demonstrates in this superbly researched biography, which draws on a massive cache of DeMille family papers not available to previous biographers, DeMille was much more than his clichéd image. A gifted director who worked in many genres; a devoted family man and loyal friend with a highly unconventional personal life; a pioneering filmmaker: DeMille comes alive in these pages, a legend whose spectacular career defined an era.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama from the Golden Age of American Cinema


Anne Helen Petersen - 2014
    And the stars of yesteryear? They weren’t always the saints that we make them out to be. BuzzFeed’s Anne Helen Petersen, author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, is here to set the record straight. Pulling little-known gems from the archives of film history, Petersen reveals eyebrow-raising information, including:*The smear campaign against the original It Girl, Clara Bow, started by her best friend *The heartbreaking story of Montgomery Clift’s rapid rise to fame, the car accident that destroyed his face, and the “long suicide” that followed *Fatty Arbuckle’s descent from Hollywood royalty, fueled by allegations of a boozy orgy turned violent assault *Why Mae West was arrested and jailed for “indecency charges” *And much more Part biography, part cultural history, these stories cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups. But it’s not all just tawdry gossip in the pages of this book. The stories are all contextualized within the boundaries of film, cultural, political, and gender history, making for a read that will inform as it entertains. Based on Petersen’s beloved column on the Hairpin, but featuring 100% new content, Scandals of Classic Hollywood is sensationalism made smart.

Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait


Kendra Bean - 2013
    For more than thirty years, her name alone sold out theaters and cinemas the world over, and she inspired many of the greatest visionaries of her time: Laurence Olivier loved her; Winston Churchill praised her; Christian Dior dressed her.Through both an in-depth narrative and a stunning array of photos, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait presents the personal story of one of the most celebrated women of the twentieth century, an engrossing tale of success, struggles, and triumphs. It chronicles Leigh’s journey from her birth in India to prominence in British film, winning the most-coveted role in Hollywood history, her celebrated love affair with Laurence Olivier, through to her untimely death at age fifty-three in 1967.Author Kendra Bean is the first Vivien Leigh biographer to delve into the Laurence Olivier Archives, where an invaluable collection of personal letters and documents ranging from interview transcripts to film contracts to medical records shed new insight on Leigh’s story. Illustrated by hundreds of rare and never-before-published images, including those by Leigh’s "official" photographer, Angus McBean, Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait is the first illustrated biography to closely examine the fascinating, troubled, and often misunderstood life of Vivien Leigh: the woman, the actress, the legend.