"Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares scandalous and laugh-out-loud tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies. David Mamet went to Hollywood on top-a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself. In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set. He depicts the ever-fickle studios and producers who piece by piece eat the artist alive. And he ponders the art of filmmaking and the genius of those who made our finest movies. With the bravado and flair of Mamet's best theatrical work, this memoir describes a world gone by, some of our most beloved film stars with their hair down, and how it all got washed away by digital media and the woke brigade. The book is illustrated throughout with three-dozen of Mamet's pungent cartoons and caricatures"--

(Applause Books). Here is the original story of a true original, the celebrated and internationally renowned director, playwright and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, whose creative genius continues to energize American stage and screen today. Say his name, and images of West Side Story , Gypsy, Anastasia, The Turning Point , and The Way We Were appear. Laurents' highly praised memoir is a dazzling portrait of his life as he recounts the great moments, the trials and the joys of his incredible career. He takes us into his world, peopled with the creative artists, directors, actors and personalities who came of age in the theatre and in Hollywood after WWII. Later, back in New York, he writes about jump-starting Barbra Streisand's career by casting her in I Can Get It for You Wholesale . He writes about the creation of Gypsy with Jule Styne and Stephen Sondheim. And he writes about coming together in a complex, fraught collaboration with his three old pals, Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein and Sondheim for West Side Story . Throughout, Laurents is funny, fierce, and frank a life recounted as richly as it was lived. "This is a historic work. A 'must' for show biz mavens." LIZ SMITH, Newsday & Syndicated

In an immensely alive and pointed memoir by a writer who was himself blacklisted during what Lillian Hellman so aptly called "scoundrel time, " Bernstein recounts his passage from idealist to scapegoat. Chronicling his writing careers in Hollywood and then television, Bernstein tells of the blacklisting for communism which brought ostracism, FBI surveillance, and a search for "fronts" to take credit for his work. of photos.

An Academy Award-nominated screenwriter and a mystery novelist, Roger L. Simon is the only American writer to pull off the amazing trick of being profiled positively in both Mother Jones and National Review in one lifetime. The stunning story of his political odyssey is told in this memoir, where Simon recounts his migration from financier of the Black Panther Breakfast Program to pioneer blogosphere mogul beloved by the right as a 9/11 Democrat. But Simon is beholden to neither right nor left in this tale of Hollywood chic run amuck, as he talks out of school about his adventures with, among many others, Richard Pryor, Warren Beatty, Timothy Leary, Richard Dreyfuss, Woody Allen, and Julian Semyonov, the Soviet Union's version of Robert Ludlum and also a KGB colonel who tempted Simon to join the KGB himself. Among the topics covered along the way: Is there a new blacklist in Hollywood, this one targeting conservatives? Simon's red-carpet tours of the People's Republic of China, Cuba, and the Soviet Union with Hollywood screenwriters and famous mystery novelists. Why Al Gore's documentary on global warming didn't deserve the Oscar on artistic grounds alone; and why the Academy's voting system is so corrupt. And, as they say, there is much, much more besides.

"A darkly comic memoir about being a working creative person in a world that is growing ever more dysfunctional, by acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and television writer Bruce Eric Kaplan In January of 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life as a television writer in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad. That journal is now They Went Another Way. The book's through line traces his trying to get a television project set up in the increasingly Byzantine world of Hollywood. But as he details the project's ups and downs, Kaplan finds himself not only ruminating on show business, but also on today's political and social issues, on old movies and TV shows and music, on his family, on his friends, on his past, on his failing heating system, and on all the dead birds that kept showing up in his backyard. This hilarious and surprisingly moving book is about life-about art, about love, about alienation, about connection, about ugliness and beauty, about disappointment and wonder and hope. In short, it is about everything. And if it's not, it almost is"--

"A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. Salka Viertel's autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman's pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, "a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood. is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka's house on Maybery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.""--

Norma Barzman is a blacklisted writer living in Southern France. Henry Myers is her beloved cousin, a former member of the Algonquin circle who has found his writing talent diminished with age, and is living an isolated life in New York City. When Norma invites Henry to Italy to realize their mutual dream of traveling together to Cremona to write about the mysterious origins of violin making, neither one could have anticipated the explosive consequences of their journey. But their adventure opens a Pandora's box of long-suppressed emotions, family secrets, and forces each to reassess their feelings towards each other, and themselves.

Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize (Biography) A Hollywood love story, a Hollywood memoir, a dual biography of two of Hollywood's most famous figures, whose golden lives were lived at the center of Hollywood's golden age, written by their daughter, an acclaimed writer and producer. Fay Wray was most famous as the woman--the blonde in a diaphanous gown--who captured the heart of the mighty King Kong, the twenty-five-foot, sixty-ton gorilla, as he placed her, nestled in his eight-foot hand, on the ledge of the 102-story Empire State Building, putting Wray at the height of New York's skyline and cinematic immortality. Wray starred in more than 120 pictures opposite Hollywood's biggest stars--Spencer Tracy, Gary Cooper ( The Legion of the Condemned, The First Kiss, The Texan, One Sunday Afternoon ), Clark Gable, William Powell, and Charles Boyer; from cowboy stars Hoot Gibson and Art Accord to Ronald Colman ( The Unholy Garden ), Claude Rains, Ralph Richardson, and Melvyn Douglas. She was directed by the masters of the age, from Fred Niblo, Erich von Stroheim ( The Wedding March ), and Mauritz Stiller ( The Street of Sin ) to Leo McCarey, William Wyler, Gregory La Cava, "Wild Bill" William Wellman, Merian C. Cooper ( The Four Feathers, King Kong ), Josef von Sternberg ( Thunderbolt ), Dorothy Arzner ( Behind the Make-Up ), Frank Capra ( Dirigible ), Michael Curtiz ( Doctor X ), Raoul Walsh ( The Bowery ), and Vincente Minnelli. The book's--and Wray's--counterpart: Robert Riskin, considered one of the greatest screenwriters of all time. Academy Award-winning writer (nominated for five), producer, ten-year-long collaborator with Frank Capra on such pictures as American Madness, It Happened One Night, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Lost Horizon, and Meet John Doe, hailed by many, among them F. Scott Fitzgerald, as "among the best screenwriters in the business." Riskin wrote women characters who were smart, ornery, sexy, always resilient, as he perfected what took full shape in It Happened One Night, the Riskin character, male or female--breezy, self-made, streetwise, optimistic, with a sense of humor that is subtle and sure. Fay Wray and Robert Riskin lived large lives, finding each other after establishing their artistic selves and after each had had many romantic attachments--Wray, an eleven-year-long difficult marriage and a fraught affair with Clifford Odets, and Riskin, a series of romances with, among others, Carole Lombard, Glenda Farrell, and Loretta Young. Here are Wray's and Riskin's lives, their work, their fairy-tale marriage that ended so tragically. Here are their dual, quintessential American lives, ultimately and blissfully intertwined.

In the spring of 1937, Brooklyn’s Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and already the author of three remarkable novels (now collected as The Brooklyn Novels), came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence―and a lifelong love affair with the movie business. Fuchs worked with the best: Warner and M-G-M and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for Collier’s and The New Yorker and non-fiction “Letters from Hollywood” for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuch’s writings about studio life, from a novice screenwriter’s anxious first impressions to a fifty-year veteran’s mellow memoirs. Fuchs may have loved Hollywood, but he saw life as it is, gold and tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter.