A "lively" memoir by the Hollywood legend about the making of Spartacus , with a foreword by George Clooney ( Los Angeles Times ). One of the world's most iconic movie stars, Kirk Douglas has distinguished himself as a producer, philanthropist, and author of ten works of fiction and memoir. Now, more than fifty years after the release of his enduring epic Spartacus , Douglas reveals the riveting drama behind the making of the legendary gladiator film. Douglas began producing the movie in the midst of the politically charged era when Hollywood's moguls refused to hire anyone accused of Communist sympathies. In a risky move, Douglas chose Dalton Trumbo, a blacklisted screenwriter, to write Spartacus . Trumbo was one of the "Unfriendly Ten," men who had gone to prison rather than testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee about their political affiliations. Douglas's source material was already a hot property, as the novel Spartacus was written by Howard Fast while he was in jail for defying HUAC. With the financial future of his young family at stake, Douglas plunged into a tumultuous production both on- and off-screen. As both producer and star of the film, he faced explosive moments with young director Stanley Kubrick, struggles with a leading lady, and negotiations with giant personalities, including Sir Laurence Olivier, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, and Lew Wasserman. Writing from his heart and from his own meticulously researched archives, Kirk Douglas, at ninety-five, looks back at his audacious decisions. He made the most expensive film of its era--but more importantly, his moral courage in giving public credit to Trumbo effectively ended the notorious Hollywood blacklist. A master storyteller, Douglas paints a vivid and often humorous portrait in I Am Spartacus! The book is enhanced by newly discovered period photography of the stars and filmmakers both on and off the set.

In the 1980s, long before Lee Goldberg became a #1 New York Times bestselling author and successful TV writer/producer, he paid his UCLA tuition and rent by working as a freelance journalist covering the entertainment industry. His first, big interviews was with one of his idols, screenwriter Richard Maibaum, who wrote most of the James Bond movies. That lengthy, controversial, and award-winning interview, first published in the UCLA Daily Bruin and later reprinted in Starlog Magazine, was the beginning of Lee's extensive 007 coverage. Over the next few years, his Bond-related interviews for Starlog and other publications included actors Barry Nelson (the first man to play James Bond in TV's Casino Royale ), George Lazenby (the one-time Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service ), Roger Moore and Timothy Dalton, screenwriters Tom Mankiewicz, Michael Wilson and Lorenzo Semple Jr., and directors John Glen and Peter Hunt. Those interviews and more, quoted for decades in reference books about the Bond films, are now collected for the first time, in their original form, in this entertaining, and unique volume. This book, the first in a series of Goldberg's collected Hollywood journalism, isn't an exhaustive, detailed examination of the Bond films. Instead it's an intriguing snapshot of filmmaking in the 1980s, a revealing look at the creation of the Bond films...and perhaps also offers a glimpse into Goldberg's formative years as a writer, and how the lessons learned from his interviews may have shaped his own career as an acclaimed novelist and screenwriter.