Hollywood Confidential

Hollywood Confidential is the first truly in-depth look at the sexy, humorous, violent, and tragic history of the mob in Hollywood from the 1920s, when Joe Kennedy decided to buy a motion picture company, to the 1980s when the last vestiges of mob influence were revealed through investigations of former Screen Actors Guild President Ronald Reagan and his union backers. The revelations continue into the 1980s when the major studios were no longer important, the independents were on the rise, and it was no longer possible to buy, bribe, or blackmail in a meaningful way. There were deals and bad guys, but the mob as it existed was finished in Hollywood.

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including their sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Stars filed multimillion dollar libel suits against the magazine, and the state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted its publisher for obscenity, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial in 1957. The lawsuits forced Confidential to end its scandalmongering, and it stopped printing its sleazy gossip in 1958. However, the magazine's legacy lives on in our culture's obsession with gossip and celebrity scandal. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.

Describes the life of the Hollywood personality who led a double life as a spy for Israel involved in secret negotiations for that country's nuclear arsenal while he was working as a Hollywood producer for high-profile movies.

Legend. Bum. Genius. Con Man. Devoted husband and father. Myth. Storyteller. Inspiration. Drunk. Visionary. Tom Waits is all of these things. Waits is the lifeline between the great Beat poets and today's rock & roll heroes. He's old enough to be your dad and cool enough to be your hero. One of the few truly original musicians recording today, he's also the rare singer who can actually act, and he has put together a respectable body of work in movies. Wild Years: The Music and Myth of Tom Waits retraces the long road that Waits has traveled and explores the music that made him a legend. Jay S. Jacobs looks at the towering myth that Waits has created for himself. Jay S. Jacobs follows the fate of one of America's pre-eminent artists, a very private man whose career embodies a quirky array of fulfillment and loss, beauty and strangeness. This revised and updated edition includes a new chapter, with insight on Waits' career in the 21st century thus far, as well as the most complete discography available in print. Tom's Wild Years ' a poignant, revealing celebration of the man and all his myths.

In May 2003, I became involved in a doomed book project with reporter Anita Busch about the federal investigations of Los Angeles private detective Anthony Pellicano, the "Sleuth to the Stars," who had targeted Busch, among others. Directly or indirectly, usually working through a group of prominent Los Angeles attorneys, Pellicano had represented a wide variety of Hollywood celebrities, including actresses Rosanne Barr, Farrah Fawcett, and Elizabeth Taylor; actors Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, and James Woods; corporate executives Brad Grey, Kirk Kerkorian, Michael Nathanson, Michael Ovitz, and Don Simpson, as well as Michael Jackson, George Harrison of The Beatles, and television personality Jerry Springer, among many others. My two years of "volunteer" work with Busch serves as a testament to the old adage, "No good deed goes unpunished." In fact, the fallout from this experience, especially Busch's thirteen-year smear campaign against me, continues to this day-even after Pellicano's convictions in 2008 for conspiracy and racketeering. . . . I have described this situation to friends and colleagues as "The Book Project from Hell." Hollywood Confidential is a true story about friendship and betrayal, as well as loyalty and greed-along with an offbeat new dimension to what is known about one of Hollywood's most-publicized scandals: the federal prosecution of Anthony Pellicano and his illegal wiretapping activities.

L.A. Confidential is epic "noir", a crime novel of astonishing detail and scope written by the bestselling author of The Black Dahlia. A horrific mass murder invades the lives of victims and victimizers on both sides of the law. And three lawmen are caught in a deadly spiral, a nightmare that tests loyalty and courage, and offers no mercy, grants no survivors. (124,000 words)

"The history of Hollywood's postwar transition is framed by two spectacular dead bodies: Elizabeth Short, AKA the Black Dahlia, found dumped and posed in a vacant lot in January 1947 and Marilyn Monroe, the studio era's last real movie star, discovered dead at her home in August 1962. Short and Monroe are just two of the many left for dead after the collapse of the studio system, Hollywood's awkward adolescence during which the company town's many competing subcultures--celebrities, moguls, mobsters, gossip mongers, industry wannabes, and desperate transients--came into frequent contact and conflict. Hard-Boiled Hollywood focuses on the lives lost at the crossroads between a dreamed-of Los Angeles and the real thing after the Second World War, whose reality was anything but glamorous"--Provided by publisher.

Tinseltown has always been the mecca for image and ego, the Babylon of outlandish wealth and outrageous acts. Now, "Hollywood Confidential" dishes out the dirt on all of our favorites, from Demi, Sharon, and Arnold to Quentin, Keanu, and Winona, including a detailed graph of "just-who-had-which-plastic-surgery". Photos.