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Susan Tyler Hitchcock is a writer and sailing enthusiast.
Lion of Hollywood is the definitive biography of Louis B. Mayer, the chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer—MGM—the biggest and most successful film studio of Hollywood’s Golden Age. An immigrant from tsarist Russia, Mayer began in the film business as an exhibitor but soon migrated to where the action and the power were—Hollywood. Through sheer force of energy and foresight, he turned his own modest studio into MGM, where he became the most powerful man in Hollywood, bending the film business to his will. He made great films, including the fabulous MGM musicals, and he made great stars: Garbo, Gable, Garland, and dozens of others. Through the enormously successful Andy Hardy series, Mayer pur...
This book is divided in two parts. The first, by far the larger, is a recording of events in the history of the Sherwood family, whose origins lie in the marriage of Frank P. Sherwood and Frances Howell on February 14, 1948. As might be anticipated, the first story is about a very happy honeymoon in San Francisco. The last story in Part One relates an experience of the family that grew out of the 1948 marriage, now numbering 11 people. They helped Frank and Frances celebrate their 50th anniversary with a weeks outing in Devon, England. In between these two quite delightful events, there were less welcome occasions when things did not go so well. The pets in the family, the experience with smoking, and the family finances also are subjects found in these chronicles. Part Two reverts to an earlier period before Frank was married, and it is essentially concerned with famous people he encountered as a young man. There are brief reports on President Franklin D. Roosevelt, the baseball star Ted Williams, and famed screen actress Ingrid Bergman, all of whom Frank met before his marriage in1948.
Eddie Mannix and Howard Strickling are virtually unknown outside of Hollywood and little-remembered even there, but as General Manager and Head of Publicity for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Studios, they lorded over all the stars in Hollywood's golden age from the 1920s through the 1940s--including legends like Garbo, Dietrich, Gable and Garland. When MGM stars found themselves in trouble, it was Eddie and Howard who took care of them--solved their problems, hid their crimes, and kept their secrets. They were "the Fixers." At a time when image meant everything and the stars were worth millions to the studios that owned them, Mannix and Strickling were the most important men at MGM. Through a complex ...
Cari Beauchamp masterfully combines biography with social and cultural history to examine the lives of Frances Marion and her many female colleagues who shaped filmmaking from 1912 through the 1940s. Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter—male or female—or almost three decades, wrote almost 200 produced films and won Academy Awards for writing "The Big House" and "The Champ."
For more than a century, people have been drawn to sites of tragedy involving the rich, beautiful and notorious of Hollywood. Tourists at the center of the movie universe flock to Rudolph Valentino's grave, the house where Marilyn Monroe died, the "O.J. murders" condo, the hotel where John Belushi overdosed, a myriad of haunted mansions. In its extensively researched and enlarged second edition, this book tells the stories of these locations and makes finding them simple. Seventeen driving tours include more than 650 sites. Each tour covers a specific area, from Hollywood and the Sunset Strip to Brentwood and Malibu, covering the entire Los Angeles basin. Concise, easy-to-follow directions are given to each location with 145 photos and the fascinating story behind each stop.
The first Latin American actor to become a superstar, Ramon Novarro was for years one of Hollywood's top actors. Born Ramon Samaniego to a prominent Mexican family, he arrived in America in 1916, a refugee from civil wars. By the mid-1920s, he had become one of MGM's biggest box office attractions, starring in now-classic films, including The Student Prince, Mata Hari, and the original version of Ben-Hur. He shared the screen with the era's top leading ladies, such as Greta Garbo, Myrna Loy, Joan Crawford, and Norma Shearer, and he became Rudolph Valentino's main rival in the “Latin Lover” category. Yet, despite his considerable professional accomplishments, Novarro's enduring hold on fa...
Set against the backdrop of the black struggle in society, Slow Fade to Black is the definitive history of African-American accomplishment in film--both before and behind the camera--from the earliest movies through World War II. As he records the changing attitudes toward African-Americans both in Hollywood and the nation at large, Cripps explores the growth of discrimination as filmmakers became more and more intrigued with myths of the Old South: the "lost cause" aspect of the Civil War, the stately mansions and gracious ladies of the antebellum South, the "happy" slaves singing in the fields. Cripps shows how these characterizations culminated in the blatantly racist attitudes of Griffit...
In 1946, Harry Choates, a Cajun fiddle virtuoso, changed the course of American musical history when his recording of the so-called Cajun national anthem "Jole Blon" reached number four on the national Billboard charts. Cajun music became part of the American consciousness for the first time thanks to the unprecedented success of this issue, as the French tune crossed cultural, ethnic, racial, and socio-economic boundaries. Country music stars Moon Mullican, Roy Acuff, Bob Wills, and Hank Snow rushed into the studio to record their own interpretations of the waltz-followed years later by Waylon Jennings and Bruce Springsteen. The cross-cultural musical legacy of this plaintive waltz also pav...