Author : Beverly Linet
Publisher : Berkley Publishing Group
Page : 331 pages
File Size : 18,38 MB
Release : 1981-12-01
Category : Motion picture actors and actresses
ISBN : 9780425050309
Author : Kim R. Holston
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 257 pages
File Size : 24,21 MB
Release : 2015-07-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0786480882
This biography of Susan Hayward, one of Hollywood's leading ladies of the 1940s and 1950s, covers her childhood, school years, early modeling career, and development as an actress. It also documents her personal life, including her marriages and attempted suicide, and her illness and death at the age of 56. It provides an analysis of each of her feature films with comments from contemporary reviewers, and places Hayward and her films in the context of Hollywood and motion picture history. The filmography gives cast and production credits for both motion pictures and television movies.
Author : Gerald Horne
Publisher : Univ of California Press
Page : 385 pages
File Size : 29,82 MB
Release : 2006-09-19
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 052093993X
Before he attained notoriety as Dean of the Hollywood Ten—the blacklisted screenwriters and directors persecuted because of their varying ties to the Communist Party—John Howard Lawson had become one of the most brilliant, successful, and intellectual screenwriters on the Hollywood scene in the 1930s and 1940s, with several hits to his credit including Blockade, Sahara, and Action in the North Atlantic. After his infamous, almost violent, 1947 hearing before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Lawson spent time in prison and his lucrative career was effectively over. Studded with anecdotes and based on previously untapped archives, this first biography of Lawson brings alive his era and features many of his prominent friends and associates, including John Dos Passos, Theodore Dreiser, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Charles Chaplin, Gene Kelly, Edmund Wilson, Ernest Hemingway, Humphrey Bogart, Dalton Trumbo, Ring Lardner, Jr., and many others. Lawson's life becomes a prism through which we gain a clearer perspective on the evolution and machinations of McCarthyism and anti-Semitism in the United States, on the influence of the left on Hollywood, and on a fascinating man whose radicalism served as a foil for launching the political careers of two Presidents: Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan. In vivid, marvelously detailed prose, Final Victim of the Blacklist restores this major figure to his rightful place in history as it recounts one of the most captivating episodes in twentieth century cinema and politics.
Author : Gordon Morris Bakken
Publisher : UNM Press
Page : 691 pages
File Size : 35,16 MB
Release : 2010-11-16
Category : Political Science
ISBN : 0826348580
Until the early twentieth century, printed invitations to executions issued by lawmen were a vital part of the ritual of death concluding a criminal proceeding in the United States. In this study, Gordon Morris Bakken invites readers to an understanding of the death penalty in America with a collection of essays that trace the history and politics of this highly charged moral, legal, and cultural issue. Bakken has solicited essays from historians, political scientists, and lawyers to ensure a broad treatment of the evolution of American cultural attitudes about crime and capital punishment. Part one of this extensive analysis focuses on politics, legal history, multicultural issues, and the international aspects of the death penalty. Part two offers a regional analysis with essays that put death penalty issues into a geographic and cultural context. Part three focuses on specific states with emphasis on the need to understand capital punishment in terms of state law development, particularly because states determine on whom the death penalty will be imposed. Part four examines the various means of death, from hanging to lethal injection, in state law case studies. And finally, part five focuses on the portrayal of capital punishment in popular culture.
Author : Kathleen A. Cairns
Publisher : U of Nebraska Press
Page : 238 pages
File Size : 32,41 MB
Release : 2020-04-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1496211308
Barbara Graham might have been a diabolical dame in a hard-boiled detective story--beautiful, sexy, and deadly. Charged alongside two male friends in the murder of an elderly widow during a botched robbery attempt, "Bloody Babs" became the third woman executed in California--after a 1953 trial that played out before standing-room-only crowds captured the imaginations of journalists, filmmakers, and death penalty opponents. Why, Kathleen A. Cairns asks, of all the capital cases in the twentieth century, did Graham's have such political resonance and staying power? Leaving aside the question of guilt or innocence--debated to this day--Cairns examines how Graham's case became a touchstone in the ongoing debate over capital punishment. While prosecutors positioned the accused woman as a femme fatale, the media came to offer a counternarrative for Graham's life highlighting her abusive and lonely beginnings. Cairns shows how Graham's case became crucial to the abolitionists of the time, who used instances of questionable guilt to raise awareness of the arbitrary and capricious nature of death penalty prosecutions. Critical in keeping capital punishment in the forefront of public consciousness until abolitionists homed in on a winning strategy, Graham's case illustrates the power of individual stories to shape wider perceptions and ultimately public policies.
Author : C. David Heymann
Publisher : Simon and Schuster
Page : 448 pages
File Size : 38,87 MB
Release : 2014-07-01
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 1439191794
From the New York Times bestselling author of Bobby and Jackie comes the riveting, true story of the passionate, volatile relationship between baseball great Joe DiMaggio and Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe. When Joe DiMaggio and Marilyn Monroe eloped in January of 1954, they became an international sensation. Joe and Marilyn reveals the true inside story of these two iconic figures whose marital troubles were Hollywood legend. Though their marriage only lasted nine months, they remained close until Monroe’s mysterious death in 1962 at the age of thirty-six. He had a half-dozen red roses delivered three times a week to her crypt for twenty years. According to Heymann, DiMaggio remained devoted to her until his own death in 1999. An intimate, sensitive, shocking, and richly detailed look at two of America’s biggest stars, Heymann delivers the expertise and passion for his subjects that his many fans so love. Based on extensive archival research and personal interviews with family and friends, Joe and Marilyn offers great insight into this famously tragic romance. Sixteen pages of striking photos accompany this unforgettable love.
Author : Steven Rea
Publisher : Chronicle Books
Page : 124 pages
File Size : 28,56 MB
Release : 2019-09-10
Category : Photography
ISBN : 1452183732
Audrey Hepburn, Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, Rita Hayworth, Marilyn Monroe—the brightest stars of the silver screen couldn't resist curling up with a good book. This unique collection of rare photographs celebrates the joy of reading in classic film style. The Hollywood Book Club captures screen luminaries on set, in films, in playful promotional photos, or in their own homes and libraries with books from literary classics to thrillers, from biographies to children's books, reading with their kids, and more. Featuring nearly 60 enchanting images, lively captions about the stars and what they're reading by Hollywood photo archivist Steven Rea, here's a real page-turner for booklovers and cinephiles.
Author : Axel Nissen
Publisher : Scarecrow Press
Page : 384 pages
File Size : 40,55 MB
Release : 2013-07-11
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 0810891379
Before she achieved immortality on the long-running situation comedy Bewitched, Agnes Moorehead had established a distinguished career as a character actress. After her screen debut in Citizen Kane (1941), Moorehead became one of the most familiar female faces on the silver screen. For moviegoers of the 1940s and ‘50s, she was the quintessential character actress, earning four Academy Award nominations during a career that saw her gain the respect of her peers in all four major entertainment media: radio, film, theater, and television. In The Films of Agnes Moorehead, Axel Nissen looks at the actress’s sixty-three feature films between 1941 and 1973. Each film is profiled here, with particular emphasis placed on the films that merit closer attention: Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Mrs. Parkington, Dark Passage, All That Heaven Allows, The Left Hand of God, The Swan, Tempest, The Bat, and Hush… Hush, Sweet Charlotte. Arranged in chronological order, the discussion of these films highlights Moorehead’s contribution to each feature. In addition to analyzing her performances, the author discusses the development of Moorehead’s career as a whole, along with her relationship with various studios, directors, producers, and fellow actors. Based on extensive interviews with the actress’s surviving friends and co-workers, as well as detailed archival research into primary sources, this book brings to light new information not just about Moorehead’s work in film, but on her life and career in general. Though this book will certainly appeal to movie buffs, The Films of Agnes Moorehead will also be of interest to students and scholars of classic Hollywood films, including those interested in women and film, gender studies, and film history.
Author : Don Rhodes
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
Page : 225 pages
File Size : 34,11 MB
Release : 2015-10-01
Category : History
ISBN : 1493015990
Georgia Myths and Legends explores unusual phenomena, strange events, and mysteries in Georgia’s history. Each episode included in the book is a story unto itself, and the tone and style of the book is lively and easy to read for a general audience interested in Georgia history. From the puzzle of lost confederate gold to a woman who mysteriously spent her life waving at more than 50,000 passing ships, this selection of stories from Georgia's past explores some of the Peach State's most compelling mysteries and debunks some of its most famous myths.
Author : Val Holley
Publisher : McFarland
Page : 212 pages
File Size : 26,69 MB
Release : 2010-06-28
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 9780786480869
In 1954, Mike Connolly, the gay gossip columnist for the Hollywood Reporter from 1951 to 1966, was described by Newsweek as "probably the most influential columnist inside the movie colony," the one writer "who gets the pick of trade items, the industry rumors, the policy and casting switches." He was indeed one of the most talented and influential members of the Hollywood press of his time, and his column, for those who could read between the lines, was a daily chronicle of gay goings-on. Fifty years later, his cumulative output is a virtually untapped lode of gay Hollywood history. Mike Connolly's life and work are the focus of this book. It considers his formative years, his pre-World War II life at the University of Illinois and in Chicago, and the ways in which the homosexual community in Hollywood lived lives both secretive and open in the forties, fifties and sixties. It also examines the literary merit, power and newsworthiness of Connolly's "Rambling Reporter" column in the Hollywood Reporter and its significance as a chronicle of gay Hollywood life; the previously unexplored role of Connolly's column in the Hollywood blacklist and how his anti-Communist crusade was rooted in his earlier campaign to close down the brothels in his college town; and how his life informed his column and his column shaped his life.
