Product Description: Between 1933 and 1939, representations of the Nazis and the full meaning of Nazism came slowly to Hollywood, growing more ominous and distinct only as the decade wore on. Recapturing what ordinary Americans saw on the screen during the emerging Nazi threat, Thomas Doherty reclaims forgotten films, such as Hitler's Reign of Terror (1934), a pioneering anti-Nazi docudrama by Cornelius Vanderbilt Jr...read more

Product Description: In a film career that spanned five decades, John Wayne became a U.S. icon of heroic individualism and rugged masculinity. His widespread popularity, however, was not limited to the United States: he was beloved among moviegoers in Asia, Africa, Latin America, and Europe...read more

Product Description: Although he was a visual stylist who once referred to actors as cattle, Alfred Hitchcock also had a remarkable talent for innovative and creative casting choices. The director launched the careers of several actors and completely changed the trajectory of others, many of whom created some of the most iconic screen performances in history...read more

The legendary actor and bestselling author of Pieces of My Heart offers a nostalgic look at Hollywood?s golden age.With a career spanning more than five decades, few actors are more qualified to recount the glamorous Hollywood era of the late 1940s and early 1950s than Robert Wagner. Revisiting the houses, restaurants, and other haunts of Hollywood?s elite, he offers an intimate view of their lives on and off screen before the paparazzi culture. Engaging and entertaining, You Must Remember This is a window into the splendors of an erstwhile era.

Product Description: You’ve just bought your ticket to the 8:30 show. You are in your seat, and the coming attractions are over. Now, it’s time for the feature, and this book is it. The author is uniquely qualified to tell you this story because he has personally lived the entire plot, and known every one of the characters...read more

The emergence of the double-bill in the 1930s created a divide between A-pictures and B-pictures as theaters typically screened packages featuring one of each. With the former considered more prestigious because of their larger budgets and more popular actors, the lower-budgeted Bs served largely as a support mechanism to A-films of the major studios—most of which also owned the theater chains in which movies were shown. When a 1948 U.S. Supreme Court antitrust ruling severed ownership of theaters from the studios, the B-movie soon became a different entity in the wake of profound changes to the corporate organization and production methods of the major Hollywood studios.In The Battle for the Bs, Blair Davis analyzes how B-films were produced, distributed, and exhibited in the 1950s and demonstrates the possibilities that existed for low-budget filmmaking at a time when many in Hollywood had abandoned the Bs. Made by newly formed independent companies, 1950s B-movies took advantage of changing demographic patterns to fashion innovative marketing approaches. They established such genre cycles as science fiction and teen-oriented films (think Destination Moon and I Was a Teenage Werewolf) well before the major studios and also contributed to the emergence of the movement now known as underground cinema. Although frequently proving to be multimillion-dollar box-office draws by the end of the decade, the Bs existed in opposition to the cinematic mainstream in the 1950s and created a legacy that was passed on to independent filmmakers in the decades to come. 

Twilight of the Idols revisits some of the sensational scandals of early Hollywood to evaluate their importance for our contemporary understanding of human deviance. By analyzing changes in the star system and by exploring the careers of individual stars—Wallace Reid, Rudolph Valentino, and Mabel Normand among them—Mark Lynn Anderson shows how the era’s celebrity culture shaped public ideas about personality and human conduct and played a pivotal role in the emergent human sciences of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Anderson looks at motion picture stars who embodied various forms of deviance—narcotic addiction, criminality, sexual perversion, and racial indeterminacy. He considers how the studios profited from popularizing ideas about deviance, and how the debates generated by the early Hollywood scandals continue to affect our notions of personality, sexuality, and public morals.

Product Description: Leonard Maltin s reputation as one of the world s most popular authorities on the history of film is well known. Equally well known is his affection for the classic era of the movies. In his quarterly subscription-only newsletter Leonard Maltin s Movie Crazy, Maltin through personal remembrances as well as first-hand interviews with the actors, writers, directors, and performers of the Golden Age chronicles the history of a bygone magical era...read more