Nice Guys Don T Work In Hollywood

Nice Guys Don't Work in Hollywood is a fast-paced view of Harrington's journey through the kaleidoscope of the movie business, acting alternatively as personal memoir and cultural history from a veteran of thee entertainment business. In addition, Harrington was living as a gay man in Hollywood and the book gives a rare peek into the hidden world of what was then an elite subculture. Starting in 1940s avant-garde heyday, harrington made several deeply intuitive and evocative films. Against all odds, he then became a Hollywood insider.

In the 1940s, American movies changed. Flashbacks began to be used in outrageous, unpredictable ways. Soundtracks flaunted voice-over commentary, and characters might pivot from a scene to address the viewer. Incidents were replayed from different characters’ viewpoints, and sometimes those versions proved to be false. Films now plunged viewers into characters’ memories, dreams, and hallucinations. Some films didn’t have protagonists, while others centered on anti-heroes or psychopaths. Women might be on the verge of madness, and neurotic heroes lurched into violent confrontations. Combining many of these ingredients, a new genre emerged—the psychological thriller, populated by women in peril and innocent bystanders targeted for death. If this sounds like today’s cinema, that’s because it is. In Reinventing Hollywood, David Bordwell examines the full range and depth of trends that crystallized into traditions. He shows how the Christopher Nolans and Quentin Tarantinos of today owe an immense debt to the dynamic, occasionally delirious narrative experiments of the Forties. Through in-depth analyses of films both famous and virtually unknown, from Our Town and All About Eve to Swell Guy and The Guilt of Janet Ames, Bordwell assesses the era’s unique achievements and its legacy for future filmmakers. Reinventing Hollywood is a groundbreaking study of how Hollywood storytelling became a more complex art and essential reading for lovers of popular cinema.

A Thousand Cuts is a candid exploration of one of America's strangest and most quickly vanishing subcultures. It is about the death of physical film in the digital era and about a paranoid, secretive, eccentric, and sometimes obsessive group of film-mad collectors who made movies and their projection a private religion in the time before DVDs and Blu-rays. The book includes the stories of film historian/critic Leonard Maltin, TCM host Robert Osborne discussing Rock Hudson's secret 1970s film vault, RoboCop producer Jon Davison dropping acid and screening King Kong with Jefferson Airplane at the Fillmore East, and Academy Award-winning film historian Kevin Brownlow recounting his decades-long quest to restore the 1927 Napoleon. Other lesser-known but equally fascinating subjects include one-legged former Broadway dancer Tony Turano, who lives in a Norma Desmond-like world of decaying movie memories, and notorious film pirate Al Beardsley, one of the men responsible for putting O. J. Simpson behind bars. Authors Dennis Bartok and Jeff Joseph examine one of the least-known episodes in modern legal history: the FBI's and Justice Department's campaign to harass, intimidate, and arrest film dealers and collectors in the early 1970s. Many of those persecuted were gay men. Victims included Planet of the Apes star Roddy McDowall, who was arrested in 1974 for film collecting and forced to name names of fellow collectors, including Rock Hudson and Mel Tormé. A Thousand Cuts explores the obsessions of the colorful individuals who created their own screening rooms, spent vast sums, negotiated underground networks, and even risked legal jeopardy to pursue their passion for real, physical film.

The final book in the Queer Film Classics series is R.L. Cagle’s take on Scorpio Rising (1963), Kenneth Anger’s avant-garde short film that about gay Nazi bikers preparing for a race. The film marked Anger's spectacular return to the US underground cinema scene after an absence of nearly ten years. Scorpio Rising represents the culmination of nearly twenty years' worth of Anger’s work on unfinished, lost, or destroyed projects; it resonates with the thrill and energy Anger discovered as he mingled with young Americans on the beaches and under the boardwalk at Coney Island. He stuffs his film—one of the first to feature an all rock’n’roll soundtrack—with the symbols of their generation—motorcycles, transistor radios, comic books, matinee idols—until it literally explodes onscreen. Cagle reads Anger's film intertextually, bringing together a corpus of materials that includes Anger's pre-1963 works, feature films, pop music, and popular cultural icons. The aim of this book is not so much to establish Anger's role as an auteur, but rather to place the film in the larger social context of articulating gay identity in ways that reflected both "gay" sensibility (camp) and contemporary popular media theories. Launched in 2009, Queer Film Classics has been a critically acclaimed film book series, publishing books on 19 of the most important and influential films about and by LGBTQ people, made in eight different countries between 1950 and 2005, and written by leading LGBTQ film scholars and critics.

Originally published as an e-book that became a controversial media phenomenon, No More Mr. Nice Guy! landed its author, a certified marriage and family therapist, on The O'Reilly Factor and the Rush Limbaugh radio show. Dr. Robert Glover has dubbed the "Nice Guy Syndrome" trying too hard to please others while neglecting one's own needs, thus causing unhappiness and resentfulness. It's no wonder that unfulfilled Nice Guys lash out in frustration at their loved ones, claims Dr. Glover. He explains how they can stop seeking approval and start getting what they want in life, by presenting the information and tools to help them ensure their needs are met, to express their emotions, to have a satisfying sex life, to embrace their masculinity and form meaningful relationships with other men, and to live up to their creative potential.

“I believe in rules. Sure I do. If there weren't any rules, how could you break them?” The history of baseball is rife with colorful characters. But for sheer cantankerousness, fighting moxie, and will to win, very few have come close to Leo “the Lip” Durocher. Following a five-decade career as a player and manager for baseball’s most storied franchises, Durocher teamed up with veteran sportswriter Ed Linn to tell the story of his life in the game. The resulting book, Nice Guys Finish Last, is baseball at its best, brimming with personality and full of all the fights and feuds, triumphs and tricks that made Durocher such a success—and an outsized celebrity. Durocher began his career inauspiciously, riding the bench for the powerhouse 1928 Yankees and hitting so poorly that Babe Ruth nicknamed him “the All-American Out.” But soon Durocher hit his stride: traded to St. Louis, he found his headlong play and never-say-die attitude a perfect fit with the rambunctious “Gashouse Gang” Cardinals. In 1939, he was named player-manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers—and almost instantly transformed the underachieving Bums into perennial contenders. He went on to manage the New York Giants, sharing the glory of one of the most famous moments in baseball history, Bobby Thomson’s “shot heard ’round the world,” which won the Giants the 1951 pennant. Durocher would later learn how it felt to be on the other side of such an unforgettable moment, as his 1969 Cubs, after holding first place for 105 days, blew a seemingly insurmountable 8-1/2-game lead to the Miracle Mets. All the while, Durocher made as much noise off the field as on it. His perpetual feuds with players, owners, and league officials—not to mention his public associations with gamblers, riffraff, and Hollywood stars like George Raft and Larraine Day—kept his name in the headlines and spread his fame far beyond the confines of the diamond. A no-holds-barred account of a singular figure, Nice Guys Finish Last brings the personalities and play-by-play of baseball’s greatest era to vivid life, earning a place on every baseball fan’s bookshelf.

Character actor Richard Jaeckel worked five decades in Hollywood alongside the industry's biggest names. Noted for tough-guy portrayals, he appeared in such classic westerns and war films as Sands of Iwo Jima (1949), The Gunfighter (1950), 3:10 to Yuma (1957), and The Dirty Dozen (1967). Bringing strength and integrity to his roles, he was nominated for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Sometimes a Great Notion (1970). A World War II veteran and Merchant Marine, he was respected in the surfing and fitness communities for his ageless athleticism. His performance as Turk in Come Back, Little Sheba (1952) was groundbreaking for iron-pumping actors wanting to be taken seriously for their dramatic abilities. This revealing portrait of the life of a working character actor covers Jaeckel's noteworthy career through each of his film and television appearances, from Guadalcanal Diary (1943) to Baywatch (1994). Recollections and behind the scenes stories from those he knew and worked with offer an in-depth look at the dedication and professionalism it takes to make it in Hollywood.

From the horrific to the heroic, cinematic werewolves are metaphors for our savage nature, symbolizing the secret, bestial side of humanity that hides beneath our civilized veneer. Examining acknowledged classics like The Wolf Man (1941) and The Howling (1981), as well as overlooked gems like Dog Soldiers (2011), this comprehensive filmography covers the highs and lows of the genre. Information is provided on production, cast and filmmakers, along with critical discussion of the tropes and underlying themes that make the werewolf a terrifying but fascinating figure.