Digby's Hollywood Story


Book Description

A studio cop, an aspiring actress who uses what she’s got to get what she wants, a cross-dressing action star, a mysterious death – all are elements in this novella set in 1940s Hollywood... but the real subject of Digby’s Hollywood Story is story-telling itself, an examination of our need to make sense of the world by casting the chaos of life into the form of narrative.




Marvel Universe


Book Description

The Marvel Universe details the lives and deaths of Wagner’s cast of characters: an orphaned billionairess, a black man wrongly convicted of murder, a schizophrenic child obsessed with the comic book character Wolverine, a cancelled TV star, and the love child of Elon Musk. Their intertwining stories take place during the pandemic, a year of tectonic social unrest, ushering in a new reality that surpasses anything any Hollywood franchise could hope to imagine.




Literature and Gender


Book Description

Literature and Gender combines an introduction to and an anthology of literary texts which powerfully demonstrate the relevance of gender issues to the study of literature. The volume covers all three major literary genres - poetry, fiction and drama - and closely examines a wide range of themes, including: feminity versus creativity in women's lives and writing the construction of female characters autobiography and fiction the gendering of language the interaction of race, class and gender within writing, reading and interpretation. Literature and Gender is also a superb resource of primary texts, and includes writing by: Sappho Emily Dickinson Sylvia Plath Tennyson Elizabeth Bishop Louisa May Alcott Virginia Woolf Jamaica Kincaid Charlotte Perkins Gilman Susan Glaspell Also reproduced are essential essays by, amoung others, Maya Angelou, Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, Toni Morrison, Elaine Showalter, and Alice Walker. No other book on this subject provides an anthology, introduction and critical reader in one volume. Literature and Gender is the ideal guide for any student new to this field.




The Kings & Queens of Hollywood Comedy


Book Description

The Hollywood Comedy is a genre of film in which the main emphasis is on humor. The book follows the careers of Comedy teams, such as Martin & Lewis, the Marx Brothers, Abbott & Costello, Laurel & Hardy and many more comedy groups. Also we follow the comedy Kings & Queens like Lucille Ball, Marthe Raye, David Spade, Richard Pryor, Bill Murray, Soupy Sales, Grouch Marx, Mo & Curly Howard, Terry-Thomas, Buddy Hackett, Billy Crystal, Patsy Kelly, Larry Fine, Don Knotts, Ernie Kovaks, Ted Knight, Dave Thomas, Rich Little, Robin Williams, Red Skeleton, Jim Varney, Ma & Pa Kettle, Andy Hardy Phil Silvers, Milton Berle, Ed Wynn and Alan Young and so many more comedians. A look at the style of comedy and so much more...




Somebody's Darling: A Novel


Book Description

The personal and professional struggles of McMurtry’s lively protagonist Jill Peel, a director in 1970s Hollywood, takes on new resonance in the twenty-first century. Forty years ago, Larry McMurtry journeyed from the sprawling ranches of his early work to the provocative Sunset Strip, creating a Hollywood fable that is both immediate and relevant in today’s dynamic cultural climate. One would never guess that Jill Peel is still on the verge of stardom. Jill won an Oscar shortly after her fresh-faced arrival in 1950s Hollywood, then for the next twenty years batted away every Tinseltown producer who tried to hire her and get her into bed. Now middle-aged, she’s determined to create more movie magic by directing a cast of raunchy eccentrics, including Joe Percy, an aging womanizing screenwriter, and ex-football player Owen Oarson, eager to sleep his way to leading-man stardom. Teeming with biting humor and intriguing characters that mirror the scandals of modern-day Hollywood, Somebody’s Darling is a timeless story about a fiercely capable woman who dares to challenge the realities of a deceptively seductive Babel.




The Use of Arthurian Legend in Hollywood Film


Book Description

This is the first book to examine the various uses of the Arthurian legend in Hollywood film, covering films from the 1920s to the present. The authors use five representational categories: intertextual collage (or cult film); melodrama, which focuses on the love triangle; conservative propaganda, pervasive during the Cold War; the Hollywood epic; and the postmodern quest, which commonly employs the grail portion of the legend. Arguing that filmmakers rely on the audience's rudimentary familiarity with the legend, the authors show that only certain features of the legend are activated at any particular time. This fascinating study shows us how the legend has been adapted and how through the popular medium of Hollywood films, the Arthurian legend has survived and flourished.




The Englishman's Boy


Book Description

The Englishman’s Boy brilliantly links together Hollywood in the 1920s with one of the bloodiest, most brutal events of the nineteenth-century Canadian West – the Cypress Hills Massacre. Vanderhaeghe’s rendering of the stark, dramatic beauty of the western landscape and of Hollywood in its most extravagant era – with its visionaries, celebrities, and dreamers – provides vivid background for scenes of action, adventure, and intrigue. Richly textured, evocative of time and place, this is an unforgettable novel about power, greed, and the pull of dreams that has at its centre the haunting story of a young drifter – “the Englishman’s boy” – whose fate, ultimately, is a tragic one.




I Blow My Own Horn


Book Description




Complete Catalogue of Plays


Book Description




The Encyclopedia of Hollywood Film Actors


Book Description

For decades, Screen World has been the film professional's, as well as the film buff's, favorite and indispensable annual screen resource, full of all the necessary statistics and facts. Now Screen World editor Barry Monush has compiled another comprehensive work for every film lover's library. In the first of two volumes, this book chronicles the careers of every significant film actor, from the earliest silent screen stars – Chaplin, Pickford, Fairbanks – to the mid-1960s, when the old studio and star systems came crashing down. Each listing includes: a brief biography, photos from the famed Screen World archives, with many rare shots; vital statistics; a comprehensive filmography; and an informed, entertaining assessment of each actor's contributions – good or bad! In addition to every major player, Monush includes the legions of unjustly neglected troupers of yesteryear. The result is a rarity: an invaluable reference tool that's as much fun to read as a scandal sheet. It pulsates with all the scandal, glamour, oddity and glory that was the lifeblood of its subjects. Contains over 1 000 photos!