Hollywood Babylon
The Legendary Underground Classic of Hollywood's Darkest and Best Kept Secrets
Written by Kenneth Anger

Format: Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Dell
On Sale: November 15, 1981
Price: $8.99
ISBN: 978-0-440-15325-2 (0-440-15325-5)

Originally published in Paris, and consequently went on to become an underground legend, Hollywood Babylon explores the underbelly of glamorous Hollywood. Read more >

Watchmen: The Art of the Film

Written by Peter Aperlo

Format: Hardcover, 256 pages
Publisher: Titan Books
On Sale: February 10, 2009
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 978-1-84856-068-0 (1-84856-068-0)

Discover how director Zack Snyder (300) and his crew faithfully recreated the intricately detailed world and characters of the legendary graphic novel in the eagerly awaited film.

From the New York City of an alternate 1985 to the surface of Mars, the film adaptation of Watchmen is a triumph of design, filled... Read more >

Leni
The Life and Work of Leni Riefenstahl
Written by Steven Bach

Format: Trade Paperback, 432 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 12, 2008
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-38775-2 (0-307-38775-5)

Leni Riefenstahl, the woman known as “Hitler’s filmmaker,” made some of the greatest and most innovative documentaries ever made. They are also insidious glorifications of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich. Now, Steven Bach reveals the truths and lies behind Riefenstahl’s lifelong self-vindication as an apolitical artist who claimed to know... Read more >

The Devil Finds Work

Written by James Baldwin

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 13, 2011
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27595-0 (0-307-27595-7)

Baldwin’s personal reflections on movies gathered here in a book-length essay are also a probing appraisal of American racial politics. Offering an incisive look at racism in American movies and a vision of America’s self-delusions and deceptions, Baldwin challenges the underlying assumptions in such films as In the Heat of the... Read more >

One Day When I Was Lost

Written by James Baldwin

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 14, 2007
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27594-3 (0-307-27594-9)

Based on Alex Haley’s bestselling classic The Autobiography of Malcolm X comes a rare, lucidly composed screenplay from one of America’s great masters of letters.

Son of a Baptist minister; New York City hustler; honor student; convicted criminal; powerful minister in the Nation of Islam; father and husband: Malcolm X transformed himself... Read more >

The Inventor and the Tycoon
A Gilded Age Murder and the Birth of Moving Pictures
Written by Edward Ball

Format: Hardcover, 464 pages
Publisher: Doubleday
On Sale: January 22, 2013
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-52575-6 (0-385-52575-3)

From the National Book Award-winning author of Slaves in the Family, a riveting true life/true crime narrative of the partnership between the murderer who invented the movies and the robber baron who built the railroads.

One hundred and thirty years ago Eadweard Muybridge invented stop-motion photography, anticipating and making possible motion pictures... Read more >

John Wayne
A Novel
Written by Dan Barden

Format: Trade Paperback, 196 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: September 15, 1998
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-48710-8 (0-385-48710-X)

In this immensely captivating and imaginative novel, perfectly set at the intersection of fact and fiction, Dan Barden superimposes the story of John Wayne on the story of the Bardens, a family very much like his own. Frank Barden, Wayne’s contractor, is an Irish Catholic from New York who has come... Read more >

The Erotic Engine
How Pornography has Powered Mass Communication, from Gutenberg to Google
Written by Patchen Barss

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor Canada
On Sale: June 21, 2011
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-66737-1 (0-385-66737-X)

Pornography: The force for change that has been written out of the history of world culture.

From cave painting to photography to the internet, pornography has always been at the cutting edge in adopting and exploiting new developments in mass communication. And in so doing, it has helped to promote and propel... Read more >

I Do and I Don't
A History of Marriage in the Movies
Written by Jeanine Basinger

Format: Hardcover, 432 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: January 29, 2013
Price: $30.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-26916-4 (0-307-26916-7)

From one of our leading film historians and interpreters: a brilliantly researched, irresistibly witty, delightfully illustrated examination of “the marriage movie”; what it is (or isn’t) and what it has to tell us about the movies—and ourselves.

As long as there have been feature movies there have been marriage movies, and yet... Read more >

The Star Machine

Written by Jeanine Basinger

Format: Trade Paperback, 608 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 6, 2009
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38875-9 (0-307-38875-1)

From one of our leading film authorities, a rich, penetrating, amusing plum pudding of a book about the golden age of movies, full of Hollywood lore, anecdotes, and analysis.

Jeanine Basinger gives us an immensely entertaining look into the “star machine,” examining how, at the height of the studio system, from... Read more >

Joseph P. Kennedy Presents
His Hollywood Years
Written by Cari Beauchamp

Format: Trade Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 9, 2010
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47522-0 (0-307-47522-0)

Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation as a savvy businessman, diplomat, and sly political patriarch is well-documented. But his years as a Hollywood mogul have never been fully explored until now.

In Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, Cari Beauchamp brilliantly explores this unknown chapter in Kennedy’s biography. Between 1926 and 1930, Kennedy positioned himself... Read more >

Acting for Young Actors
For Money Or Just for Fun
Written by Mary Lou Belli and Dinah Lenney

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Back Stage Books
On Sale: August 1, 2006
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-8230-4947-9 (0-8230-4947-7)

Aimed at teens and tweens, Acting for Young Actors lets kids hone their skills and develop their craft. It begins with the five W's: WHO am I? WHAT do I want? WHY do I want it? WHERE am I? WHEN does this event take place? Sounds basic - but many young... Read more >

Peter Bogdanovich's Movie of the Week

Written by Peter Bogdanovich

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: November 2, 1999
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-43205-6 (0-345-43205-3)

The Academy Award-winning filmmaker recommends 52 classic films (all available on video), to be viewed on a weekly basis for one full year. From timeless musicals to powerful dramas and thrillers, to legendary masterpieces and neglected treasures to sparkling comedies and landmark foreign films, each choice is accompanied by an illuminating... Read more >

Who the Hell's in It
Conversations with Hollywood's Legendary Actors
Written by Peter Bogdanovich

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Ballantine Books
On Sale: October 25, 2005
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-345-48002-6 (0-345-48002-3)

Peter Bogdanovich, known primarily as a director, film historian and critic, has been working with professional actors all his life. He started out as an actor (he debuted on the stage in his sixth-grade production of Finian’s Rainbow); he watched actors work (he went to the theater every week from the... Read more >

Fan-Tan

Written by Marlon Brando and Donald Cammell
Edited by David Thomson

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9626-8 (1-4000-9626-X)

A wholly unexpected, hugely entertaining work from one of the greatest actors of our time: the story of an eccentric early-twentieth-century pirate, on the high seas from the Philippines to Shanghai—a larger-than-life character that Brando could have easily inhabited himself.

Anatole “Annie” Doultry is in his early fifties, with an imposing... Read more >

My Last Sigh
The Autobiography of Luis Bunuel
Written by Luis Bunuel

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 26, 2013
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-80370-2 (0-345-80370-1)

A provocative memoir from Luis Buñuel, the Academy Award winning creator of some of modern cinema's most important films, from Un Chien Andalou to The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Luis Buñuel’s films have the power to shock, inspire, and reinvent our world. Now, in a memoir that carries all the surrealism... Read more >

The Best Old Movies for Families
A Guide to Watching Together
Written by Ty Burr

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: February 13, 2007
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9686-2 (1-4000-9686-3)

If a child can watch Barney, can’t that same child also enjoy watching Charlie Chaplin or the Marx Brothers? And as they get older, wouldn’t they grow to like screwball comedies (His Girl Friday), women’s weepies (Imitation of Life), and westerns (The Searchers)? The answer is that they’ll follow because they’ll... Read more >

Gods Like Us
On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame
Written by Ty Burr

Format: Hardcover, 448 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: September 18, 2012
Price: $28.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-37766-1 (0-307-37766-0)

WITH 8 PAGES OF BLACK-AND-WHITE PHOTOGRAPHS

How—and why—do we obsess over movie stars? How does fame both reflect and mask the person behind it? How have the image of stardom and our stars’ images altered over a century of cultural and technological change? Do we create celebrities, or do they create us?

Ty... Read more >

Conversations with John Schlesinger

Written by Ian Buruma

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: January 10, 2006
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-75763-1 (0-375-75763-5)

“I like the surprise of the curtain going up, revealing what’s behind it.”
–John Schlesinger

The British director John Schlesinger was one of the cinema’s most dynamic and influential artists. Now, in Conversations with John Schlesinger, acclaimed writer Ian Buruma, Schlesinger’s nephew, reveals the director’s private world in a series of in-depth interviews... Read more >

Robert Redford
The Biography
Written by Michael Feeney Callan

Format: Trade Paperback, 608 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 15, 2012
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47596-1 (0-307-47596-4)

Robert Redford is among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, renowned for his iconic roles as the Sundance Kid, Bob Woodward and Jay Gatsby, and celebrated for his fierce commitment to environmental causes, independent filmmaking, and his Sundance Film Festival. Yet only now, in this revelatory biography written... Read more >

Robert Redford
The Biography
Written by Michael Feeney Callan

Format: Hardcover, 496 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: May 3, 2011
Price: $28.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-45055-9 (0-679-45055-6)

The long-anticipated biography of Robert Redford.

Among the most widely admired Hollywood stars of his generation, Redford has appeared onstage and on-screen, in front of and behind the camera, earning Academy, Golden Globe, and a multitude of other awards and nominations for acting, directing, and producing, and for his contributions to the... Read more >

The Reel Civil War
Mythmaking in American Film
Written by Bruce Chadwick

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 3, 2002
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70832-9 (0-375-70832-4)

During the late nineteenth century, magazines, newspapers, novelists, and even historians presented a revised version of the Civil War that, intending to reconcile the former foes, downplayed the issues of slavery and racial injustice, and often promoted and reinforced the worst racial stereotypes. The Reel Civil War tells the history of... Read more >

America Noir
Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era
Written by David Cochran

Format: Trade Paperback, 280 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: June 22, 2010
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-218-8 (1-58834-218-2)

In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone featured victims of vast, faceless, bureaucratic... Read more >

The Difficulty of Being

Written by Jean Cocteau
Translated by Elizabeth Sprigge
Introduction by Geoffrey O'Brien

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: May 28, 2013
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-290-1 (1-61219-290-4)

By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature of the twentieth century, and had worked with the foremost artists of his time, including Proust, Gide, Picasso and Stravinsky.

This memoir tells the inside account of those... Read more >

Writing Short Films
Structure and Content for Screenwriters
Written by Linda J. Cowgill

Format: Trade Paperback, 275 pages
Publisher: Lone Eagle
On Sale: September 1, 2005
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-1-58065-063-2 (1-58065-063-5)

Contrasting and comparing the differences and similarities between feature films and short films, Writing Short Films offers readers the essential requirements necessary to make their writing crisp, sharp and compelling. Emphasizing characters, structure, dialogue and story, Writing Short Films dispels the "magic formula" concept that screenplays can be constructed by anyone... Read more >