Hollywood Lives

They're rich, powerful, and ambitious--and whatever the new generation of Hollywood wives want, they get. They will stop at nothing for their chance in the spotlight. There are no limits to their passions--or their excesses--and there are new rules to the power game. Megastar Lissa Roman is about to discover that the game itself can exact a deadly price.

Golden Age Movie Actors as Writers 'Hollywood Lives' is about the movies in the Golden Age (1930-1950). It reviews some 175 star autobiographies distilling out of them the actor's accounts of the Communist Witch Hunt, racial prejudice, studio pressures, the glamour of movie stardom, the bosses, fellow actors and much else. This is the first ever book about movie actors as writers and contains many surprises. Graham Bannock, a British author now in his seventies, has been watching movies and reading about them since he was in his teens. He has authored or co-authored some 30 books, mostly on economics and business.

How Hollywood biopics both showcase and modify various notions of what it means to be an American. Biopics—films that chronicle the lives of famous and notorious figures from our national history—have long been one of Hollywood’s most popular and important genres, offering viewers various understandings of American national identity. Invented Lives, Imagined Communities provides the first full-length examination of US biopics, focusing on key releases in American cinema while treating recent developments in three fields: cinema studies, particularly the history of Hollywood; national identity studies dealing with the American experience; and scholarship devoted to modernity and postmodernity. Films discussed include Houdini, Patton, The Great White Hope, Bound for Glory, Ed Wood, Basquiat, Pollock, Sylvia, Kinsey, Fur, Milk, J. Edgar, and Lincoln, and the book pays special attention to the crucial generic plot along which biopics traverse and showcase American lives, even as they modify the various notions of the national character. “A provocative, critically astute study, this collection examines the biopic as a reflexive, refractive modernist film genre. Admirably researched essays provide close, compelling readings of chosen films, while exploring the multilayered matrices of historical fact, biographical and autobiographical literature, popular media representations, and cultural histories—shaping not only the lives and narratives of the performers, artists, and political/historical figures represented but also the practices of the filmmakers as they worked within or on the margins of the Hollywood industry.” — Cynthia Lucia, Rider University “The volume’s greatest strengths include its range, its variety of ideas on the significance of the biopic, and its research—definitive in several cases—into the relation between historical figures and their cinematic counterparts.” — James Morrison, author of Passport to Hollywood: Hollywood Films, European Directors

For fans of The Princess Diaries and Famous in Love, an engrossing look behind the velvet ropes of stardom from a former Teen People Senior Editor who has seen it all. What if your picture was taped inside teenage boys' lockers across America, your closets were bursting with never-worn designer clothing, and the tabloids constantly asked whether you were losing your "good girl" status? It's a glamorous life, but 16-year-old Kaitlin Burke, co-star of one of the hottest shows on TV, is exhausted from the pressures of her fame. So she decides to spend two months undercover as an ordinary high school student. But could it be that real life high school is just as harsh as cutthroat Hollywood?? Don't miss the first book in the Secrets of My Hollywood Life series from Jen Calonita, author of the Fairy Tale Reform School series.

'I don't know what people expect when they meet me. They seem to be afraid that I'm going to piss in the potted palm and slap them on the ass.' Marlon Brando 'I should have been dead ten times over. I believe in miracles. It's an absolute miracle that I'm still around.' Dennis Hopper 'The best time to get married is noon. That way, if things don't work out, you haven't blown the whole day.' Warren Beatty 'You only lie to two people in your life: your girlfriend and the police.' Jack Nicholson They're the baddest bad asses Hollywood has ever seen: Marlon Brando, Dennis Hopper, Warren Beatty and Jack Nicholson. These are men for whom rules did not apply, men for whom normal standards of behaviour were simply too wearisome to worry about. These are men who brawled, boozed, snorted and shagged their way into legend-hood - but along the way they changed acting and the way movies were made forever. Hollywood Hellraisers is a whistle-stop tour of jaw-dropping sexual activity, misbehaviour of an Olympic standard, all-out excess and genuine madness. It's a wonder Hollywood survived.

A World War II veteran and Hollywood gas station attendant describes how his good looks and open bisexuality culminated in liaisons with numerous celebrities, providing a chronicle of Hollywood's sexual underground in the 1940s and 1950s.

Originally published as: Blacklisting myself. 2008. With new introd. and epilogue.

“The days of poets moping around castle steps wearing black capes is over. The poets of today are amplified.” — LEONARD COHEN Picking up where Samuel Johnson left off more than two centuries ago, Ray Robertson’s Lives of the Poets (with Guitars) offers up an amplified gathering of thirteen portraits of rock & roll, blues, folk, and alt-country’s most inimitable artists. Irreverent and riotous, Robertson explores the “greater or lesser heat” with which each musician shaped their genre, while offering absorbing insight into their often tumultuous lives. Includes essays on Gene Clark, Ronnie Lane, The Ramones, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Townes Van Zandt, Little Richard, Alan Wilson, Willie P. Bennett, Gram Parsons, Hound Dog Taylor, Paul Siebel, Willis Alan Ramsey, and John Hartford.