The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education
Peter Coyote - 2015
For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission---acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.
The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson: The Pretty Boys and Dirty Deals of Henry Willson
Robert Hofler - 2005
Selznick. The starmaker-to-be was on the lookout for promising newcomers when he received an unsolicited photograph from a movie star hopeful named Roy Fitzgerald. The photograph of the handsome young man with bad teeth not only had a career defining impact for Willson but, more importantly, it redefined Hollywood's concept of the male heartthrob. Roy Fitzgerald became Rock Hudson and, for the next twenty-five years, Henry Willson became the man behind movie "beefcake." The Man Who Invented Rock Hudson delves into Willson's life in explicit, unsparing detail. Variety reporter Robert Hofler deftly chronicles Willson's maneuvers to sidestep the FBI's investigation into Hudson's sex life; the agent's use of off-duty L.A.P.D. cops and Mob ties to scare off Hudson's blackmailers; Hudson's "arranged" marriage to Willson's secretary, Phyllis Gates; as well as Hudson's affair with a Universal Pictures vice-president to help secure starring roles. Additionally, the book discusses Willson's other star clients, including Robert Wagner, Troy Donahue, Tab Hunter, John Derek, James Darren, Chad Everett, Mike Connors, and many others.
Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford
Scott Eyman - 1999
Through a career that spanned decades and 140 films -- among them such American masterpieces as The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance -- John Ford left a cinematic legacy that few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet Ford himself was famously reticent about his personal life, often fabricating details and events. In this definitive look at the life and career of one of America's greatest directors, Scott Eyman offers a remarkable portrait of the man behind the legend that reveals how a saloon keeper's son from Maine helped to shape Hollywood's idea of America.
By Myself and Then Some
Lauren Bacall - 2005
Their romance on and off screen made them Hollywood's most celebrated couple and together they produced some of the most electric scenes in movie history. But when Bogart died of cancer in 1957, Bacall had to find a way of living beyond the fairytale and ironic way she had evolved. In a time of post war communism, Hollywood blacklisting and revolutionary politics she moved with the legends: Hemingway, the Oliviers, Katharine Hepburn, Bobby Kennedy, an engagement to Frank Sinatra and a second turbulent marriage to Jason Robards. Now at 80, BY MYSELF AND THEN SOME brings her story up to date including her recent films and Broadway runs, fond memories of her children and many close lifelong friendships, not least the greatest love of her life, Humphrey Bogart.
My Life with Groucho: A Son's Eye View
Arthur Marx - 1954
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.
Nicholson: A Biography
Marc Eliot - 2013
With twelve Oscar nominations to his credit and legendary roles in films like Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces, Terms of Endearment, The Shining, and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Nicholson creates original, memorable characters like no other actor of his generation. And his personal life has been no less of an adventure—Nicholson has always been at the center of the Hollywood elite and has courted some of the most famous and beautiful women in the world. Relying on years of extensive research and interviews with insiders who know Nicholson best, acclaimed biographer Marc Eliot sheds new light on Nicholson's life on and off the screen. From Nicholson’s working class childhood in New Jersey, where family secrets threatened to tear his family apart, to raucous nights on the town with Warren Beatty and tumultuous relationships with starlets like Michelle Phillips, Anjelica Huston, and Lara Flynn Boyle, to movie sets working with such legendary directors and costars as Dennis Hopper, Stanley Kubrick, Meryl Streep, and Roman Polanski, Eliot paints a sweeping picture of the breadth of Nicholson’s fifty-year career in film, as well as an intimate portrait of his personal life. Equally at home on the bookshelves of serious film historians and fans of compulsively readable Hollywood biographies, Nicholson is both a comprehensive tribute to a film legend and an entertaining look at a truly remarkable life.
Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!
Robert Ben Garant - 2011
Well…maybe not the best of them, but certainly the most successful. (If you’re aiming to win an Oscar, this is not the book for you!) But if you can type a little, and can read and speak English—then you too can start turning your words into stacks of money! This is the only screenwriting book you will ever need (because all other ones pretty much suck). In these pages, Garant and Lennon provide the kind of priceless tips you won’t find anywhere else, including: -The art of pitching -Getting your foot in the door -Taking notes from movie stars -How to get fired and rehired -How to get credit and royalties! And most important: what to buy with the huge piles of money you’re going to make! Writing Movies for Fun and Profit will take you through the highs and lows of life as a professional screenwriter. From the highs of hugging Gisele Bündchen and getting kung fu punched by Jackie Chan to the soul-crushing lows of Herbie: Fully Loaded. Read this book and you’ll have everything you need to make your first billion the old-fashioned way—by “selling out” in show business! A portion of the authors’ proceeds from this book are being contributed to the USO of Metropolitan Washington, a private, nonprofit organization dedicated to serving active duty military members and their families in the greater Washington, DC, region.
Brando: The Biography
Peter Manso - 1994
Here at last is the unvarnished truth about Brando's har sh childhood, his stunning rise to stage and screen stardom, his stormy relationships with women, his public agony as the father of a convicted killer, and more. 75 photos.
In the Company of Legends
Joan Kramer - 2015
These were recognized as high-quality, definitive film portraits, which revitalized the genre and made it a mainstay of television programming.This is their insiders’ view of the famous and the powerful: Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart, Johnny Carson, Frank Sinatra, Lew Wasserman, Ronald Reagan, Paul Newman, Joanne Woodward, Jane Fonda, Richard Dreyfuss, Audrey Hepburn, and Bette Davis, among others. Kramer and Heeley’s behind the scenes stories of the productions and the personalities involved are amusing, sometimes moving, often revealing, and have never been told before.
Nevertheless
Alec Baldwin - 2017
From his work in popular movies, including Beetlejuice, Working Girl, Glengarry Glen Ross, The Cooler, and Martin Scorsese’s The Departed to his role as Jack Donaghy on Tina Fey’s irreverent series 30 Rock—for which he won two Emmys, three Golden Globes, and seven Screen Actors Guild Awards—and as Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump on Saturday Night Live, he’s both a household name and a deeply respected actor.In Nevertheless, Baldwin transcends his public persona, making public facets of his life he has long kept private. In this honest, affecting memoir, he introduces us to the Long Island child who felt burdened by his family’s financial strains and his parents’ unhappy marriage; the Washington, DC, college student gearing up for a career in politics; the self-named "Love Taxi" who helped friends solve their romantic problems while neglecting his own; the young soap actor learning from giants of the theatre; the addict drawn to drugs and alcohol who struggles with sobriety; the husband and father who acknowledges his failings and battles to overcome them; and the consummate professional for whom the work is everything. Throughout Nevertheless, one constant emerges: the fearlessness that defines and drives Baldwin’s life.Told with his signature candor, astute observational savvy, and devastating wit, Nevertheless reveals an Alec Baldwin we have never fully seen before.
Robert Downey Jr.: The Fall and Rise of the Comeback Kid
Ben Falk - 2010
Because I'm so insane I guess." —Robert Downey Jr. Robert Downey Jr.'s life isn't a movie—but it could be. This biography is an insightful, devastating, scathing, and ultimately uplifting journey into the realms of Hollywood’s darkest excesses and successes. Downey now commands $25 million a movie—not bad for someone who 10 years ago was in prison, addicted to heroin and cocaine, and one bad choice away from death. Sherlock Holmes was one of last year's biggest blockbusters, with its sequel expected at the end of 2011, while summer 2010 blockbuster Iron Man 2 continued the fun and the high praise for Downey of its predecessor. His is without a doubt Hollywood’s greatest ever comeback.
Mary and Lou and Rhoda and Ted: And All the Brilliant Minds Who Made The Mary Tyler Moore Show a Classic
Jennifer Keishin Armstrong - 2013
Mary Tyler Moore made her name as Dick Van Dyke’s wife on the eponymous show, a cute, unassuming housewife that audiences loved. But when her writer/producers James Brooks and Allan Burnes dreamed up an edgy show about a divorced woman with a career, network executives replied: Americans won’t watch television about New York City, divorcees, men with mustaches, or Jews. But Moore and her team were committed, and when the show finally aired, in spite of tepid reviews, fans loved it.Jennifer Armstrong introduces readers to the show’s creators; its principled producer, Grant Tinker; and the writers and actors who attracted millions of viewers. As the first situation comedy to employ numerous women as writers and producers, The Mary Tyler Moore Show became a guiding light for women in the 1970s. The show also became the centerpiece of one of greatest evenings of comedy in television history, and Jennifer Armstrong describes how the television industry evolved during these golden years.
Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror
Jason Zinoman - 2011
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.
Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business
David Mamet - 2007
Godzilla, David Mamet, the award-winning playwright and screenwriter, gives us an exhilaratingly subversive inside look at Hollywood from the perspective of a filmmaker who has always played the game his own way.Who really reads the scripts at the film studios? How is a screenplay like a personals ad? Whose opinion matters when revising a screenplay? Why are there so many producers listed in movie credits? And what the hell do those producers do, anyway? Refreshingly unafraid to offend, Mamet provides hilarious, surprising, and bracingly forthright answers to these and other questions about virtually every aspect of filmmaking, from concept to script to screen. He covers topics ranging from “How Scripts Got So Bad” to the oxymoron of “Manners in Hollywood.” He takes us step-by-step through some of his favorite movie stunts and directorial tricks, and demonstrates that it is craft and crew, not stars and producers, that make great films. He tells us who his favorite actors and what his favorite movies are, who he thinks is the most perfect actor to grace the screen, and who he thinks should never have appeared there.Demigods and sacred cows of the movie business–beware! But for the rest of us, Mamet speaking truth to Hollywood makes for searingly enjoyable reading.
Kate: The Life of Katharine Hepburn
Charles Higham - 1975
And she herself tells the deeply moving story of her twenty-five-year love affair with Tracy. Here is a vivid portrait of the most elegant, independent, and tempestuous star to grace the screen. Over a half million copies sold.