"In Hooked on Hollywood, Maltin opens up his personal archive to take readers on a fascinating journey through film history. He first interviewed greats of Hollywood as a precocious teenager in 1960s New York City. Early Maltin interviews had literally been stored in his garage for more than 40 years until GoodKnight Books brought them to light for the first time in this volume to entertain readers and inform future film scholars. In addition, key feature articles from Maltin's newsletter Movie Crazy are published here for the first time, providing new perspectives on the Warner Bros. classics Casablanca and Gold Diggers of 1933 as well as many other masterpieces--and bombs--from Hollywood history. Finally, Maltin looks back at what he considers Hollywood's "overlooked" studio, RKO Radio Pictures, which gave us such classics as King Kong and the many dance musicals of Astaire and Rogers. In Leonard's unique and witty style, he looks at dozens of obscure RKO features from the 1930s, including saucy pre-Codes, musicals, comedies, and mysteries. Leonard Maltin's love of movies and vast knowledge about their history shines through from the first page to the last in this unique volume, which includes 150 rare photos and a comprehensive index."--

The films of Fritz Lang depict an entrapping, claustrophobic world in which people are controlled by larger forces. His overriding theme is the struggle against fate and against the traits of human nature that doom us. His life and work spanned six decades of film history-from the silent era through the golden age of German Expressionism of the 1920s and the classic studio system in Hollywood to the rise of the international co-production. In Hollywood he worked for every major studio except Disney. He made blockbusters, modest B movies, and everything in between. Among his films are classics of German cinema-including Metropolis and M . In America he made some of the most notable crime movies ( Fury ), noir films ( The Big Heat ), and Westerns ( The Return of Frank James ) of the studio era. Despite the different time periods, nations, and genres in which he worked, his films remain stylistically consistent. Lang (1890-1976), a notoriously difficult interviewee, granted relatively few interviews apart from short publicity exchanges in the promotion of his films. Fully aware of his public persona, he was a canny self-promoter who carefully constructed half-truths and myths about himself. This fascinating collection covers his conversations about his life and his works over a period of forty years. They reveal how cinema for Lang was an intensely personal art. "For me," he said, "cinema is a vice. I love it intimately. I've often written that it is the art form of our century."

Joseph L. Mankiewicz: Interviews features talks with the master director of such classics as All About Eve, The Barefoot Contessa, and Cleopatra. Mankiewicz (1909-1993) was a creative force in Hollywood from the end of the silent film era through the early years of the Hollywood renaissance of the 1970s. Displaying the wit, insight, and daring that were the hallmarks of his movies, Mankiewicz explores his films and his approach to writing and directing. These interviews span the period from his greatest Hollywood triumphs-he won four Oscars in two years-to just shortly before his death in 1993. From the time he arrived in 1929 through his last film Sleuth in 1972, he had a front-row seat to Hollywood history. This volume offers a hard-to-find, wide-ranging discussion between Mankiewicz and Gary Carey. A Michel Ciment interview appears here in English for the first time. The book will become a welcome resource for admirers of Mankiewicz and his work as well as those interested in the history of classic Hollywood. A writer based in Brooklyn, Brian Dauth has published in Senses of Cinema and MR Zine.

"Ivan Illich alights on such topics as education, history, language, politics, and the church. The conversations range over the whole of Illich's published work and public career as a priest, vice-rector of a university, founder of the Centre for Intercultural Documentation in Cuernavaca, Mexico, and author of such classics as Tools for Conviviality , Medical Nemesis , and Deschooling Society ."