Tinseltown

Author: William J. Mann
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062242229
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 488

Book Description
New York Times Bestseller • Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime, and one of the nation’s largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate. A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.

Murder in Tinseltown

Author: Earl Hamner
Publisher: Hawk Publishing Group
ISBN: 9781930709157
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 194

Book Description
Emory Goode, a ruthless Hollywood producer, investigates the death of an actress.

Hollywood Horrors

Author: Andrea Van Landingham
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493060082
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 313

Book Description
The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city. With generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. A dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. A network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams...it’s Hollywood.

Tinseltown Tarot

Author:
Publisher: Rizzoli Publications
ISBN: 1922417793
Category : Body, Mind & Spirit
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Visit the glamorous past to peek into the future. Forget the crystal ball – try the silver screen! This shimmering deck will beckon you back to a time of dazzling stars, glimmering boudoirs, and overflowing champagne. And hey: if your cards ain’t looking so swell – just turn on one of your favorite flicks and audition for a better fate tomorrow.

One Lucky Bastard

Author: Roger Moore
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1493015583
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 293

Book Description
In a career that spans over seven decades, Roger Moore has been at the very heart of Hollywood. Of course, he’s an actor and has starred in films that have made him famous the world over; but he’s also a tremendous prankster, joker and raconteur. Despite the fact that he is well known as one of the nicest guys in the business, on and off the screen he has always been up for some fun. In this fabulous collection of true stories from his stellar career, Moore lifts the lid on the movie business, from Hollywood to Pinewood. One Lucky Bastard features outrageous tales from his own life and career as well as those told to him by a host of stars and filmmakers including, Tony Curtis, Sean Connery, Michael Caine, David Niven, Frank Sinatra, Gregory Peck, John Mills, Peter Sellers, Michael Winner, Cubby Broccoli, and many more. Wonderfully entertaining and laugh-out-loud funny, these extraordinary tales from the world of the movies is vintage Moore at his very best.

Witch-Hunt in Hollywood

Author: Michael Freedland
Publisher: Quarto Publishing Group USA
ISBN: 1781314039
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 406

Book Description
How political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade: “One of the most readable and damning accounts of that period.” —The Guardian This is the story of how the politicians took Tinseltown to task in the late 1940s and 1950s. As the Cold War with the Soviet Union began in earnest, the search for “Reds under the bed,” later led by Senator Joseph McCarthy, was felt most keenly in Hollywood, where the investigations were carried out under the full glare of the spotlights. Painstakingly researched and drawing on numerous exclusive interviews, this book charts the generation of actors who found their livelihood ruined by being blacklisted and the writers forced to hire “fronts” to continue to work; it reveals how Arthur Miller was offered the chance to have his hearing dropped in return for a photo opportunity with Marilyn Monroe; and how Kirk Douglas’s naming of Dalton Trumbo as the writer of Spartacus signaled the end of this extraordinary era. Witch Hunt in Hollywood is the definitive account of how political paranoia shaped cinema for a decade.

Tinseltown Gangsters

Author: Jeffrey Sussman
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1538173573
Category : True Crime
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
Like sharks to blood in the water, the mob arrived in Hollywood greedy and ready to tear away huge chunks of cash. Opportunistic mobsters saw labor unions as the means for muscling into the movie industry and extorting millions of dollars from studio bosses. Control the unions to which projectionists, art directors, cinematographers, electricians, scene designers, stagehands, extras belong, and you control the whole industry. Painting colorful portraits of numerous mobsters, producers, actors, and directors, Tinseltown Gangsters tells the gripping, fast-paced, true story of corruption and greed in Hollywood throughout much of the twentieth century.

Tinseltown!

Author: Brett Edwards
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781734822618
Category :
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
His entire life, the eccentric Eddie Rabe has been chasing that elusive golden statue with no pants, and his hope dwindles after he loses his cool and beats a tyrannical film director to a pulp, Now he's on the run with one last trick up his sleeve: deliver his latest screenplay to a rival executive by day's end. But there's only one problem: he hasn't written a word yet, and he's having trouble concentrating because his roommate-struggling actor Michael Miller-was dropped by his sleazy agent and cut from a commerical. But a phone call offers both guys a shot at redemption. What follows is a wild misadventure involving a secret society of samurai assassins, and a pair of method actors posing as cops in this interwoven tale of violence and dark humor.

Bellefleur

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0062269178
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 610

Book Description
A wealthy and notorious clan, the Bellefleurs live in a region not unlike the Adirondacks, in an enormous mansion on the shores of mythic Lake Noir. They own vast lands and profitable businesses, they employ their neighbors, and they influence the government. A prolific and eccentric group, they include several millionaires, a mass murderer, a spiritual seeker who climbs into the mountains looking for God, a wealthy noctambulist who dies of a chicken scratch. Bellefleur traces the lives of several generations of this unusual family. At its center is Gideon Bellefleur and his imperious, somewhat psychic, very beautiful wife, Leah, their three children (one with frightening psychic abilities), and the servants and relatives, living and dead, who inhabit the mansion and its environs. Their story offers a profound look at the world's changeableness, time and eternity, space and soul, pride and physicality versus love. Bellefleur is an allegory of caritas versus cupiditas, love and selflessness versus pride and selfishness. It is a novel of change, baffling complexity, mystery. Written with a voluptuousness and startling immediacy that transcends Joyce Carol Oates's early works, Bellefleur is widely regarded as a masterwork—a feat of literary genius that forces us "to ask again how anyone can possibly write such books, such absolutely convincing scenes, rousing in us, again and again, the familiar Oates effect, the point of all her art: joyful terror gradually ebbing toward wonder" (John Gardner).

The Mercedes-Benz Book

Author: Victor Boesen
Publisher: Doubleday Books
ISBN:
Category : Transportation
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
"Traces the history and development of the Mercedes, offers profiles of Benz and Daimler, it's two creators, and looks at the German automobile's racing triumphs." -- Amazon.com viewed August 4, 2020.