Two of the top casting directors in the business, who most recently cast the new James Bond, The Da Vinci Code, and the summer blockbuster Poseidon, offer an insider’s tour of their crucial craft—spotting stars in the making—in this lively memoir, full of the kind of backroom detail loved by movie fans and aspiring actors alike. Janet and Jane share the fascinating, funny stories of discovering and casting then-unknown stars like Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Leonardo DiCaprio, John Cusack, Matt Damon, Winona Ryder, Jennifer Connelly, Brendan Fraser, Virginia Madsen, Joaquin Phoenix, Meg Ryan, Benicio Del Toro, and the Harry Potter kids. Taking us from the first casting call through head shots, auditions, meetings, and desperate searches to fill a part, they give us behind-the-scenes access to the machinery of star-making. Films Include:The Da Vinci CodeFriday Night LightsSomething's Gotta GiveA Beautiful MindHarry Potter & the Sorcerer's StoneHow the Grinch Stole ChristmasThe Perfect StormAir Force OneJurassic ParkGhosts of MississippiThe American PresidentMrs. DoubtfireIn the Line of FireLast Action HeroA Few Good MenHome AloneHookBackdraftMiseryGhostWhen Harry Met SallyLicence to KillMystic PizzaBeetlejuiceThe Princess BrideStand by MeFerris Bueller's Day OffThe Sure ThingDuneBody DoubleRed DawnThe Outsiders

    Like a shooting star doomed to darkness after a glorious run, Rajesh Khanna spent the better half of his career in the shadow of his own stardom. Yet, forty years after his last monstrous hit, Khanna continues to be the yardstick by which every single Bollywood star is measured. At a time when film stars were truly larger than life, Khanna was even more: the one for whom the term 'superstar' was coined. Born Jatin Khanna to middle-class parents, the actor was adopted by rich relatives who brought him up like a prince. By the time he won the Filmfare-United Producers Combine Talent Hunt, he was already famous for being the struggler who drove an imported sports car.With seventeen blockbuster hits in succession and mass adulation rarely seen before or since, the world was at Khanna's feet. Everything he touched turned to gold. The hysteria he generated - women writing him letters in blood, marrying his photograph and donning white when he married Dimple Kapadia, people bringing sick children for his 'healing' touch after Haathi Mere Saathi - was unparalleled. Then, in a matter of months, it all changed. Khanna's career hit a downward spiral as spectacular as his meteoric rise just three years after Aradhana (1969) and never really recovered. Dark Star looks at the phenomenon of an actor who redefined the 'film star'. Gautam Chintamani's engaging narrative tries to make sense of what it was that made Rajesh Khanna and what accounted for his extraordinary fall. A singular account of a wondrous life.

    While the role may have given him eternal life on the silver screen, it doomed him to a career plagued by typecasting. After a decade of trying vainly to broaden his range and secure parts to challenge his acting abilities, Lugosi finally resigned himself to a career as the world's most recognizable vampire. His last years were spent as a forgotten and rather tragic figure.

     Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but at the same time as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film-aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre's major players, The New York Times's critic Jason Zinoman's Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror's golden age. By the late 1960s, horror was stuck in the past, confined mostly to drive-in theaters and exploitation houses, and shunned by critics. Shock Value tells the unlikely story of how the much-disparaged horror film became an ambitious art form while also conquering the multiplex. Directors such as Wes Craven, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter, and Brian De Palma- counterculture types operating largely outside the confines of Hollywood-revolutionized the genre, exploding taboos and bringing a gritty aesthetic, confrontational style, and political edge to horror. Zinoman recounts how these directors produced such classics as Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, creating a template for horror that has been imitated relentlessly but whose originality has rarely been matched. This new kind of film dispensed with the old vampires and werewolves and instead assaulted audiences with portraits of serial killers, the dark side of suburbia, and a brand of nihilistic violence that had never been seen before. Shock Value tells the improbable stories behind the making of these movies, which were often directed by obsessive and insecure young men working on shoestring budgets, were funded by sketchy investors, and starred porn stars. But once The Exorcist became the highest grossing film in America, Hollywood took notice. The classic horror films of the 1970s have now spawned a billion-dollar industry, but they have also penetrated deep into the American consciousness. Quite literally, Zinoman reveals, these movies have taught us what to be afraid of. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of the most important artists in horror, Shock Value is an enthralling and personality-driven account of an overlooked but hugely influential golden age in American film.

    From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino' s short and tragic life–the first fully documented biography of the star–Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover' s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino's androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women's darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino's experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen's first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

    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.

    Hundreds of photographs and illustrations of the most popular movie ever made.

    But despite many books about their films and individual lives, there has never been a fully researched, definitive narrative biography of the duo, from birth to death.Louvish traces the early lives of Stanley Jefferson and Norvell Hardy and the surrounding minstrel and variety theatre, which influenced all of their later work. Louvish examines the rarely seen solo films of both our heroes, prior to their serendipitous pairing in 1927, in the long-lost short "Duck Soup." The inspired casting teamed them until their last days. Both often married, they found balancing their personal and professional lives a nearly impossible feat.Between 1927 and 1938, they were able to successfully bridge the gap between silent and sound films, which tripped up most of their prominent colleagues. Their Hal Roach and MGM films were brilliant, but their move in 1941, to Twentieth Century Fox proved disastrous, with the nine films made there ranking as some of the most embarrassing moments of cinematic history.In spite of this, Laurel and Hardy survived as exemplars of lasting genius, and their influence is seen to this day. The clowns were elusive behind their masks, but now Simon Louvish can finally reveal their full and complex humanity, and their passionate devotion to their art. In Stan and Ollie: The Roots of Comedy: The Double Life of Laurel and Hardy, Louvish has seamlessly woven tireless and thorough research into an authoritative biography of these two important and influential Hollywood pioneers.

    Teas in 1959. The modest little film pushed all preexisting limits of on-screen nudity, and with its success, the floodgates of what was permitted to be shown on film were thrust open, never to be closed again. Russ Meyer ignited a true revolution in filmmaking, breaking all sex, nudity, and violence taboos. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Meyer created a body of work that has influenced a legion of filmmakers, fashionistas, comic book artists, rock bands, and even the occasional feminist. Bringing his anecdote- and action-packed biographical style to another renegade of popular culture, New York Times bestselling author of Shakey Jimmy McDonough offers a wild, warts-and-all portrait of Russ Meyer, the director, writer, producer, and commando moviemaking force behind the sexploitation classics Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and many others. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws blows the lid off the story of Russ Meyer, from the beginning to his recent tragic demise, creating in the process a vivid portrait of a past America.

    Born into a clan of lumberjacks, ranchers, and frontier lawyers, David Samuel Peckinpah served in the Marines and then made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features before being hired as a writer for Gunsmoke in 1955. Quickly becoming the hottest writer in television, Peckinpah went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. The life he led -- glamorous, wild, and beset by personal demons -- is as vivid as his films. A hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, inspiration to such luminaries as DePalma, Scorsese, and Tarantino, Sam Peckinpah was an audacious American original. If They Move...Kill 'Em! is his wild and woolly story.

    From this was born The Wizard of Oz, a film that, 60 years later, continues to captivate us. It seems we can never get enough of the dishy inside details, the amazing feats of production that made it such a spectacle, and the personalities both in front of the camera and behind the scenes. Now, timed to coincide with the theatrical rerelease -- which will include never-before-seen footage -- this is the book Oz aficionados will turn to for more information on America's favorite movie. A bestselling classic since it was first published in 1977, The Making of The Wizard of Oz is as ageless as the film itself jam-packed with fascinating facts and telling asides.

    Although Lee Marvin is best known for his icy tough guy roles—such as his chilling titular villain in The ManWho Shot Liberty Valance or the paternal yet brutally realistic platoon leader in The Big Red One—very little is known of his personal life; his family background; his experiences in WWII; his relationship with his father, family, friends, wives; and his ongoing battles with alcoholism, rage, and depression, occasioned by his postwar PTSD. Now, after years of researching and compiling interviews with family members, friends, and colleagues; rare photographs; and illustrative material, Hollywood writer Dwayne Epstein provides a full understanding and appreciation of this acting titan’s place in the Hollywood pantheon in spite of his very real and human struggles.

    For many years Argento's ground-breaking shockers like Deep Red, Suspiria, Inferno and Opera meant box-office gold. Now the maverick auteur, lauded as the Italian Hitchcock and the Horror Fellini, has written his autobiography, revealing all about his fascinating life, his dark obsessions, his talented family, his perverse dreams, and his star-crossed work.With candour and honesty, Fear lifts the lid on Argento's glittering career, from his childhood mixing with glamorous Italian movie stars to his start in the fledgling field of cinema criticism, Argento shares compelling anecdotes about his life growing up in La Dolce Vita Rome. Born into a family that breathed cinema, as a child Dario Argento was a voracious devourer of books and films. Bored by school so much that he fled to Paris, the young Dario felt at ease only in the darkness of a cinema - where he found fertile soil in which his solitary nature and overflowing imagination could flourish.But it was his experience as a journalist that led to his life-changing encounter with Sergio Leone, for whom he and Bernardo Bertolucci wrote the script for Once Upon a Time in the West. Meanwhile, the mind of the future director developed a desire as ambitious as it was magnificent: to make a film in a new style, distinct from all others. Channelling the films of Hitchcock, Lang and Antonioni triggered a wealth of ideas that changed the history of cinema.His first film came out in 1970 - The Bird with the Crystal Plumage. In no time at all the name of Dario Argento was known across the globe. And soon enough a series of classic films including Deep Red and Suspiria saw the light of the projector beam. Dario Argento is a maverick auteur who captured his personal demons on celluloid.At last, his fascinating life story can be told: his passions, his loves, his fears. In his autobiography, alongside the tale of an inspirational film director making his mark on the world, one glimpses the anxieties of a driven but shy man, in love with cinema and life itself. Adapted from the Italian translation and illustrated with rare photographs, the award-winning and critically acclaimed Master of Terror tells all. So put on your black leather gloves and start turning the pages of Fear for the answer to every question you've ever wanted to ask about the weird and wonderful world of Dario Argento.

    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.

    Faced with the prospects of a career-defining role and mentorship by a cinematic great, the 24-year-old Hollywood actor arrived in London armed with a large-format Roliflex camera-inspired by Kubrick's early career as a "Look "photographer-and a notebook to record his own on-set reportage; preparation for his starring role as a Marine Corps journalist. But expectations eroded as a strange, creeping sickness pervaded the set, a horrific accident sidelined a principal, and an unexpected rivalry arose with a co-star. And as the months dragged on, take-by-take, Modine realized he was falling victim to a manipulative mind-game of the Grand Master himself. By the time his tour of duty ended a year and a half later, Modine had shot hundreds of photos and written countless entries. Only now-after two decades and the death of Kubrick-can Modine look back on his images and words. The result-a coming-of-age drama set against the backdrop of a seminal Vietnam saga. A book like no other, Stanley Kubrick would have been the first in line to buy "Full Metal Jacket Diary."