Hollywood Sight Unseeing

Hollywood, Sight Unseeing begins with the following paragraph... I was in the batter's box. I was eight years old. The pitcher, ten, wound up, threw. Where was the baseball? I saw it leave his hand, then disappear until it was perhaps twenty feet from where it was headed... directly at my head. Being blessed with fast reflexes, I flattened out, dropped like a stone. I hit the ground with that ball missing my noggin by the wispiest whisker. At the time, it seemed nothing at all to me. I had escaped serious injury - just part of the game, I thought. But that "inconsequential" incident, with unrelenting insistence, uncompromising ferocity, would dictate the direction of the rest of my life Missing that baseball was diagnosed as macular degeneration, a retinal fault very rare in children. No known treatment, vision would continue to decline. By age 17, my vision was 20/200... legal blindness status. I saw at 20 feet what normally sighted people saw easily at 200 feet. Beginning with my first love, the entertainment industry, for 25 years, I earned my living, despite its near total visual nature, in the theater, radio, motion picture and television industries. For ten years of that time, I worked as a Dialogue Coach at Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Studios, working with top Directors, Producers and such stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman, Janet Leigh, Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Shirley MacLaine, Jayne Mansfield, and 16 pictures with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. When decreasing vision made Dialogue Coaching impractical, I switched to writing for motion pictures and television. Later, I transitioned to the construction industry as a General Building contractor. Now, with my vison of 20/600, I have returned to writing. After all, I'm only 83. Rudy Makoul

Moving to Los Angeles in 1901 to start her life anew, Nell Plat marries and begins a career as a costumer to the stars, but when a visitor from her past comes calling, everything she has worked so hard to achieve for her future is jeopardized.

Classical Hollywood Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face examines the representation of iconic female faces in the golden age of Hollywood – Greta Garbo, Gloria Swanson, Elizabeth Taylor – and the gay male fetishization of those faces. Classical Hollywood cinema is given to an aesthetic and ideological struggle between rival scopic economies: an erotics of “to-be-looked-at-ness” is countered by a hermeneutics of “to-be-seen-through-ness.” The latter emerges triumphant, but the legendary female faces of Hollywood resist, in their different ways, a coercive and normalizing knowledge, which is the source of the gay male investment in them. A disciplinary society privileges a hermeneutics of gaze; the iconomic female faces of classical Hollywood cinema demand an erotics. Classical Holly Cinema, Sexuality, and the Politics of the Face explores the tension between the two through detailed readings of Ninotchka, Sunset Boulevard, and Suddenly, Last Summer in the context of early and mid-century cinema and culture. It includes, for instance, an analysis of D. W. Griffith and blackface, the Stonewall riots and the coming-into-voice of the modern gay subject, several major films by Hitchcock, Citizen Kane, and the emergence of rival standards of beauty, both female and male, in figures such as Katharine Hepburn, Ingrid Bergman, Humphrey Bogart, Rock Hudson, and James Dean. This is an important study for students of queer theory, film theory and history, and gender and sexuality studies.

"Desi, Sharon, and Bettina are struggling to make names for themselves amid the glitz, glamour, and deception of the entertainment industry. They are swept away by its intrigue and intensity but cannot ignore the desperate calls from the ghosts of their pasts."--Jacket.

Book 4 – Movie Lovers Grace Brewster makes the biggest mistake of her life with sexy, bad boy movie producer, Gunther Quill. Humiliated by Quill and Jake Matthews, her sister’s Broadway co-star, Grace vows to even the score with both men. Will her plan work or blow up in her face, losing her the man she loves? Book 5 – Love’s Last Chance Seeking true love, respected choreographer, Dorrie, reconnects with each of three men. Will she find what she’s looking for or end up back with the one man who broke her heart? Book 6 – Lovers & Liars Gunther Quill, arrogant, brilliant producer, hates liars worse than anything. Erica Wheeler needs a job or face eviction. Will a little white lie used to get a plum job working for Gunther destroy her chance for happiness?

The next morning, Alex finds the body of a young Ch9inese boy floating near the edge of the waterfront. Who killed him and for what? Why would someone warn her ahead of time that she would find trouble near the water? What does it mean for an independen female private investigator when she is unexpectedly involved in an illegal immigrant's murder?