America's favorite girl next door may have projected a wholesome image that led Oscar Levant to quip "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," but in Considering Doris Day Tom Santopietro reveals Day's underappreciated and effortless acting and singing range that ran the gamut from musicals to comedy to drama and made Day nothing short of a worldwide icon.             Covering the early Warner Brothers years through Day's triumphs working with artists as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Bob Fosse, Santopietro's smart and funny book deconstructs the myth of Day as America's perennial virgin, and reveals why her work continues to resonate today, both onscreen as pioneering independent career woman role model, and off, as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. Praised by James Cagney as "my idea of a great actor" and by James Garner as "the Fred Astaire of comedy," Doris Day became not just America's favorite girl, but the number one film star in the world. Yet after two weekly television series, including a triumphant five year run on CBS, she turned her back on show business forever.             Examining why Day's worldwide success in movies overshadowed the brilliant series of concept recordings she made for Columbia Records in the  '50s and '60s, Tom Santopietro uncovers the unexpected facets of Day's surprisingly sexy acting and singing style that led no less an observer than John Updike to state "She just glowed for me." Placing Day's work within the social context of America in the second half of the twentieth century, Considering Doris Day is the first book that grants Doris Day her rightful place as a singular American artist.

    Man of Steel: Inside the Legendary World of Superman explores the remarkable creative process behind the movie and showcases the exceptional concept art that shaped its unique visual style. From the stark alien vistas of Krypton to the down-to-earth warmth of Smallville, this book uncovers the intensive world-building process that makes Superman’s universe both thrilling and believable. Also featuring in-depth interviews with the cast and crew, and candid on-set photography, Man of Steel: Inside the Legendary World of Superman is the ultimate insider’s look at one of the most electrifying movies in recent memory.MAN OF STEEL, SUPERMAN and all related characters and elements are trademarks of and © DC Comics. (s13)

    From classic Hollywood masterpieces like M (1931) to the recent “torture porn” craze with flicks like the Saw franchise, this collection gives a master’s overview of the genre.

    Brilliant. Brutal. Fiercely talented. Angry. Drug addicted. In reality, he’s all of them. He’s a survivor of the Detroit ghetto, the fifty-year-old father of twin boys, and a veteran of dozens of movies. He’s also now sober, after his addiction took his life just about as far down as any human being could go.Through screen-stealing performances in the 1990s movies True Romance, Heat, and Natural Born Killers, Sizemore was so in demand that even when it was widely known that he had a drug problem, directors like Steven Spielberg were offering him roles and begging him to stay sober for them. Robert De Niro personally recruited him for the role of MichaelCheritto in Heat after asking him to dinner and expressing his admiration. Jack Nicholson, Robert Downey, Jr., and Johnny Depp each went out of their way to befriend him. But this same man went from romancing Elizabeth Hurley and Juliette Lewis to being accused of domestic violence by the world’s most famous madam, and moved from a Beverly Hills mansion to a solitary-confinement cell at Chino State Prison and later a desolate, abandoned cabin in a town best known for being where Charles Manson hid Rosemary LaBianca’s wallet.For years, Sizemore’s days were filled with overdoses, suicide attempts, and homelessness. The simple fact is that people don’t come back from where Tom Sizemore landed—yet miraculously, he did. By Some Miracle I Made It Out of There is a harrowing journey into the heart of addiction, told in riveting and often shocking detail—a terrifying cautionary tale for anyone who’s peered over the abyss of drug abuse. By turns gritty and heartbreaking, it is also one man’s look at a particular moment in entertainment history—a window into the drug-fueled spotlight that sent Robert Downey, Jr., to jail and killed River Phoenix, Heath Ledger, and Chris Farley and many others far before their time.

    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.

    Discover hidden stories behind movies you love (and, er, don't love so much), and find out just why the most dangerous place to be is in a Tom Hanks film.Fascinating, surprisingly and hugely entertaining, this leftfield movie guide is gold for film buffs, and might just bring out the geek - hidden or otherwise - within you...Includes:Alternative movie endings that were binned Movie sequels you didn't know existedMassive box office hits that were huge gamblesThe collateral damage of Tom Hanks moviesHidden subtexts in family moviesDisastrous things that went wrong on modern movie sets...and much, much more!

    A salvage operation on a very public, very expensive train wreck, It Doesn’t Suck argues that Showgirls is much smarter and deeper than it is given credit for. In an accessible and entertaining voice, the book encourages a shift in critical perspective on Paul Verhoeven’s Showgirls, analyzing the film, its reception, and rehabilitation. This in-depth study of a much-reviled movie is a must read for lovers and haters of the 1995 Razzie winner for Worst Picture.

    In three different lives in three vastly different time periods, one man, Thomas, Tommy, Tom, is desperate to beat death and to prolong the life of the woman he loves.

    Among the many subjects it discusses: working with non-traditional forms; maintaining a consistent and ongoing storyline; developing a personal cinematic style; finding a script's audience; keeping an audience's attention; developing subtexts; utilising psychology and philosophy; creating realism; polishing scenes; creating memorable dialogue.

    Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves as creative artists. The great midcentury director John Ford was known to answer studio executives’ complaints that he was behind schedule by tearing a handful of random pages from his script and tossing them over his shoulder. And Ken Russell was so contemptuous of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Altered States that Chayefsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits.Of course, popular impressions aside, screenwriters have been central to moviemaking since the first motion picture audiences got past the sheer novelty of seeing pictures that moved at all. Soon they wanted to know: What happens next? In this truly fresh perspective on the movies, veteran Oscar-winning screenwriter Marc Norman gives us the first comprehensive history of the men and women who have answered that question, from Anita Loos, the highest-paid screenwriter of her day, to Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman, and other paradigm-busting talents reimagining movies for the new century.The whole rich story is here: Herman Mankiewicz and the telegram he sent from Hollywood to his friend Ben Hecht in New York: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The unlikely sojourns of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner as Hollywood screenwriters. The imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s and the ingenious attempts of screenwriters to outwit the censors. How the script for Casablanca, “a disaster from start to finish,” based on what James Agee judged to be “one of the world’s worst plays,” took shape in a chaotic frenzy of writing and rewriting—and how one of the most famous denouements in motion picture history wasn’t scripted until a week after the last scheduled day of shooting—because they had to end the movie somehow.Norman explores the dark days of the Hollywood blacklist that devastated and divided Hollywood’s screenwriting community. He charts the rise of the writer-director in the early 1970s with names like Coppola, Lucas, and Allen and the disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate that led the studios to retake control. He offers priceless portraits of the young William Hurt, Steven Spielberg, and Steven Soderbergh. And he describes the scare of 2005 when new technologies seemed to dry up the audience for movies, and the industry—along with its screenwriters—faced the necessity of reinventing itself as it had done before in the face of sound recording, color, widescreen, television, and other technological revolutions.Impeccably researched, erudite, and filled with unforgettable stories of the too often overlooked, maligned, and abused men and women who devised the ideas that others brought to life in action and words on-screen, this is a unique and engrossing history of the quintessential art form of our time.

    A look at over 400 of the best historical movies (and some of the worst) purporting to be ‘factual’ or ‘based on actual events’; and how Hollywood has distorted, altered, manipulated, exaggerated, even falsified history under the all-encompassing premise…based on a true story…

    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."

    Illustrated.

    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.

    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.