Hollywood Nobody


Book Description

Fifteen-year-old Scotty, tired of traveling from place to place with her single mother, a successful movie food designer, begins writing a blog in which she records her thoughts and keeps track of her efforts to find answers about her absent father, her future, and the strange man dogging their path.




Romancing Hollywood Nobody


Book Description

16-year-old Scotty and her grandmother try to find her mother, who may or may not be dead. Add romance, heartache, and critical choices, and Scotty's life is about to change.




Nobody's Girl Friday


Book Description

This book on the history of Hollywood's high-flying career women during the studio era covers the impact of the executives, producers, editors, writers, agents, designers, directors, and actresses who shaped Hollywood film production and style, led their unions, climbed to the top during the war, and fought the blacklist.




Finding Hollywood Nobody


Book Description

Through new friendships, Scotty learns that this prayer thing might work after all. But will prayer be enough when the situation is life and death?




Inventing Elsa Maxwell


Book Description

Inventing Elsa Maxwell, the first biography of this extraordinary woman, tells the witty story of a life lived out loud. With Inventing Elsa Maxwell, Sam Staggs has crafted a landmark biography. Elsa Maxwell (1881-1963) invented herself–not once, but repeatedly. Built like a bulldog, she ascended from the San Francisco middle class to the heights of society in New York, London, Paris, Venice, and Monte Carlo. Shunning boredom and predictability, Elsa established herself as party-giver extraordinaire in Europe with come-as-you-are parties, treasure hunts (e.g., retrieve a slipper from the foot of a singer at the Casino de Paris), and murder parties that drew the ire of the British parliament. She set New York a-twitter with her soirees at the Waldorf, her costume parties, and her headline-grabbing guest lists of the rich and royal, movie stars, society high and low, and those on the make all mixed together in let-'er-rip gaiety. All the while, Elsa dashed off newspaper columns, made films in Hollywood, wrote bestselling books, and turned up on TV talk shows. She hobnobbed with friends like Noel Coward and Cole Porter. Late in life, she fell in love with Maria Callas, who spurned her and broke Elsa's heart. Her feud with the Duchess of Windsor made headlines for three years in the 1950s. One of the twentieth century's most colorful characters is brought back to life in this biography by the author of All About All About Eve.




Scrappy Little Nobody


Book Description

The New York Times bestselling collection of humorous autobiographical essays by the Academy Award nominated actress and star of Up in the Air and Pitch Perfect. Even before she made a name for herself on the silver screen starring in films like Pitch Perfect, Up in the Air, Twilight, and Into the Woods, Anna Kendrick was unusually small, weird, and “10 percent defiant.” At the ripe age of thirteen, she had already resolved to “keep the crazy inside my head where it belonged. Forever. But here’s the thing about crazy: It. Wants. Out.” In Scrappy Little Nobody, she invites readers inside her brain, sharing extraordinary and charmingly ordinary stories with candor and winningly wry observations. With her razor-sharp wit, Anna recounts the absurdities she’s experienced on her way to and from the heart of pop culture as only she can—from her unusual path to the performing arts (Vanilla Ice and baggy neon pants may have played a role) to her double life as a middle-school student who also starred on Broadway to her initial “dating experiments” (including only liking boys who didn’t like her back) to reviewing a binder full of butt doubles to her struggle to live like an adult woman instead of a perpetual “man-child.” Enter Anna’s world and follow her rise from “scrappy little nobody” to somebody who dazzles on the stage, the screen, and now the page—with an electric, singular voice, at once familiar and surprising, sharp and sweet, funny and serious (well, not that serious).




A Nobody in a Somebody World


Book Description

Caught with her funny companion, Erma Bombeck, on that morbidly hot August day in the depths of the Grand Canyon, without a smidge of shade or water, the picture was grim for these two dear friends...as grim as the Reaper. The next thing they knew, their knees buckled and they hit the sand as if an old miner had "knocked 'em over with his pick ax." This was followed by their stomachs tossing up whatever fluid they had left in their dried-out bodies. Seasickness in the sand. Not good. Gasping for air, they rolled under a craggy crag from which a scorpion skittered and quietly groaned for a moment in unison. That's when Erma mumbled her obit. And it was then and there that Lorraine said in a promise to God that if he/she let her live, that "I swear I'm going to write a book." And Erma agreed that if she died first, Lorraine could write a book. And lo and behold the book's title would be "A Nobody in a Somebody World." The inspiration came the day Lorraine was in her grubbiest of clothes pruning roses in the front of her Beverly Hills home. A ball-capped dad driving his Lampoon Vacation family in their weathered station wagon pulled up and hollered at her, "Hey! Are you somebody?" Lorraine says that the great thing about being anonymous is that an unknown can walk among us while quietly gathering mundane material and then retell everything after the main subjects die or are too old to recognize their names. You will learn what it's like for a non-celeb to end up in the film business where your husband produces two of the worst movies ever with Oscar-winning stars. You will follow her in her garden as she relives a photo shoot gone terribly wrong for a feature in the Ladies Home Journal magazine. The experience is trumped by the nationally publicized event of hundreds of frenzied Iranian rioters destroying those roses in her front yard with tornado-like intensity. Read along as her reputation is trashed by her appearance on a #1 game show. This is a book that shows truth is way funnier than fiction and that an unknown person can turn her crazy, sometimes bawdy, amazing stories into a wonderful collection all bound together in "A Nobody in a Somebody World." Enjoy.




Adventures in the Screen Trade


Book Description

Enter Hollywood's inner sanctums in this gosippy and honest book, named one the top 100 film books of all time by The Hollywood Reporter, by the Academy Award-winning screenwriter and bestselling author of The Primcess Bride. No one knows the writer's Hollywood more intimately than William Goldman. Two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the bestselling author of The Princess Bride, Marathon Man, Tinsel, Boys and Girls Together, and other novels, Goldman now takes you behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films . . . .into the plush offices of Hollywood producers . . ..into the working lives of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman, and Hoffman...and into his own professional experiences and creative thought processes in the crafting of screenplays. You get a firsthand look at why and how films get made and what elements make a good screenplay. Says columnist Liz Smith, "You'll be fascinated.."




Nobody Dies in Hollywood


Book Description

Introduces a contemporary take on a traditional genre with private investigator Michael Drayton, an every man for today, whose grit and diversity explodes from the page much like the reverberation from his trusty Sig Sauer. Drayton is reluctantly drawn into a grisly double homicide, one in which the loss of a world-renowned, Oscar-winning star overshadows that of the "nobody" who died alongside him.




Italian Film


Book Description

Examines the extraordinary cinematic tradition of Italy, from the silent era to the present.