"A biography of Walt Disney with a focus on his work making dreams come true for himself and for generations of children"--

Robert Evans's The Kid Stays in the Picture is universally recognized as the greatest, most outrageous, most unforgettable show business memoir ever written. The basis of a groundbreaking, award-winning documentary film, it remains the gold standard of Hollywood storytelling. The only actor ever to run a Hollywood studio, Evans emerged from near-obscurity in the mid-1960s to rescue Paramount, one of the great studios of the Golden Age, from near-bankruptcy. A self-confessed "half-assed actor," Evans proved a genius producer and studio chief, drawing on his irresistible combination of instinct, smarts, showmanship, and bravado to take Paramount from the basement to the penthouse with such films as The Odd Couple, Rosemary's Baby, Love Story, The Godfather, and Chinatown. He lived a swashbuckling life, partying with lifetime friends like Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, and Dustin Hoffman, consulting with power players like Henry Kissinger, and squiring a host of dazzling women including his wives Ali McGraw, Catherine Oxenberg, and Phyllis George. After a decade of triumph, he lost everything in a spectacular flameout of cocaine and bad business decisions, yet survived it all--and lived to tell the tale. An extraordinary raconteur, Evans spares no one, least of all himself. Filled with starring roles for everyone from Ava Gardner to Marlon Brando to Sharon Stone, The Kid Stays in the Picture is sharp, witty, and self-aggrandizing and self-lacerating in equal measure-- Provided by publisher.

"A shocking account of how Harvey Weinstein rose to become one of the most iconic figures in the world of movies, how he used that position to feed his monstrous sexual appetites, and how it all came crashing down, from the author who has covered the Hollywood power game for the New Yorker for three decades. Twenty years ago, Ken Auletta wrote one of the iconic New Yorker profiles for which he is famous, of the Hollywood mogul Harvey Weinstein, then at the height of his powers. The profile created waves for exposing how volatile, even violent, Weinstein was to his employees and collaborators. But there was a much darker story that was just out of reach: rumors had long swirled that Weinstein was a sexual predator, but no one was willing to go on the record, and in the end he and the magazine concluded they couldn't close the case. But the story always nagged at him, and many years later, he was able to share his reporting notes and all that he knew with Ronan Farrow, and to cheer him along with Jodi Kantor and Megan Twohey as they broke their pioneering stories and wrote their bestselling books. But the story continued to nag at him. Farrow, Twohey, and Kantor did a brilliant job exposing the trail of assaults and their cover-up, but the larger questions remained: what explained Weinstein's monstrousness? Even more importantly, how and why was it never checked? How does a man run the day to day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever being caught, for years and years? How much is this a story about Harvey Weinstein, and how much is this a story about Hollywood and power? To answer that question fully, Ken Auletta has spent the past three years constructing a full reckoning with a career in film that has no parallel in Hollywood's history in its combination of extraordinary business and creative success and a personal brutality and viciousness that left a trail of ruined lives in its wake. How did one thing relate to the other? Hollywood Ending is an unflinching examination of Weinstein's life and career in full. Not simply a prosecutor's litany of crimes, it embeds them in the context of his overall business, his failures but also his outsized successes. To understand how he could behave as he did, we have to understand the power he wielded. Iconic film stars, Miramax employees and board members, old friends and family, even the person who knew him best, Harvey's brother Bob, all talked to Auletta at length. The result is not simply the portrait of a predator, it is a portrait of the power that allowed Weinstein to operate with such impunity for so many years, the spider web in which his victims found themselves trapped. To understand Weinstein's web is to understand how many other spider webs no doubt still remain."--

Cameron Paradise, a stunningly beautiful twenty-four-year-old personal trainer, flees her abusive boyfriend in Australia and ends up in L.A. Cameron soon gets a job at a private fitness club where she encounters the city's most important players. She has plans to open her own studio, and while every man she meets comes on to her, she is focused on working hard and saving money to achieve her goal. Until she meets Ryan Lambert, that is. An extremely successful independent movie producer, he's married to overly privileged Mandy Lambert, the daughter of Hamilton J. Heckerling, a Hollywood power-player son-of-a-bitch mogul. Ryan has never cheated on his demanding Hollywood Princess wife, but when he meets Cameron, all bets are off.--From publisher description.

"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 author recalls his tenure at Paramount Pictures during a tumultuous time when the studio produced such films as "The Godfather," "Chinatown," and "True Grit" but was also plagued by drugs, the mafia, and runaway budgets

"Based on long-lost recordings, a set of riveting and revealing conversations with America's great cultural provocateur. There have long been rumors of a lost cache of tapes containing private conversations between Orson Welles and his friend the director Henry Jaglom, recorded over regular lunches in the years before Welles died. The tapes, gathering dust in a garage, did indeed exist, and this book reveals for the first time what they contain.Here is Welles as he has never been seen before: talking intimately, disclosing personal secrets, reflecting on the highs and lows of his astonishing career, the people he knew--FDR, Winston Churchill, Charlie Chaplin, Marlene Dietrich, Laurence Olivier, David Selznick, Rita Hayworth, and more--and the many disappointments of his last years. This is the great director unplugged, free to be irreverent and worse--sexist, homophobic, racist, or none of the above-- because he was nothing if not a fabulator and provocateur. Ranging from politics to literature to the shortcomings of his friends and the many films he was still eager to launch, Welles is at once cynical and romantic, sentimental and raunchy, but never boring and always wickedly funny.Edited by Peter Biskind, America's foremost film historian, My Lunches with Orson reveals one of the giants of the twentieth century, a man struggling with reversals, bitter and angry, desperate for one last triumph, but crackling with wit and a restless intelligence. This is as close as we will get to the real Welles--if such a creature ever existed. "--

In this wildly imaginative, powerfully moving, "psychomagical" autobiography-cum-novel, Alejandro Jodorowsky tells the story of how his Ukrainian Jewish grandfather, his fiery wife, Teresa, and their four children moved to Chile under fake passports and assumed Christian identities, with only a half-kopek to their name and no idea how they'd forge their new lives. His book is a visionary family saga filled with ancestors both mythical and real including bee-covered relatives, women who commune with wolves, snake charmers, and militant anarchists. Where the Bird Sings Best owes its title to Jean Cocteau's reflection: "A bird sings best on its family tree."

From the heyday of the '50s B-movies through the disaster genre of the '70s, William Castle was an extraordinary movie mogul who produced such classic thrillers as Straight Jacket, Homicidal and Rosemary's Baby. Here are the outrageous memoirs of an American original whose life was every bit as outlandish as his movies. Photographs. Filmography.

This is a moving, star-filled account of one of Hollywood’s true golden ages as told by a man in the middle of it all. Walter Mirisch’s company has produced some of the most entertaining and enduring classics in film history, including West Side Story , Some Like It Hot , In the Heat of the Night , and The Magnificent Seven . His work has led to 87 Academy Award nominations and 28 Oscars. Richly illustrated with rare photographs from his personal collection, I Thought We Were Making Movies, Not History reveals Mirisch’s own experience of Hollywood and tells the stories of the stars—emerging and established—who appeared in his films, including Natalie Wood, John Wayne, Peter Sellers, Sidney Poitier, Steve McQueen, Marilyn Monroe, and many others. With hard-won insight and gentle humor, Mirisch recounts how he witnessed the end of the studio system, the development of independent production, and the rise and fall of some of Hollywood’s most gifted (and notorious) cultural icons. A producer with a passion for creative excellence, he offers insights into his innovative filmmaking process, revealing a rare ingenuity for placating the demands of auteur directors, weak-kneed studio executives, and troubled screen sirens. From his early start as a movie theater usher to the presentation of such masterpieces as The Apartment , Fiddler on the Roof , and The Great Escape , Mirisch tells the inspiring life story of his climb to the highest echelon of the American film industry. This book assures Mirisch’s legacy—as Elmore Leonard puts it—as “one of the good guys.” Best Books for Special Interests, selected by the American Association of School Librarians, and Best Books for General Audiences, selected by the Public Library Association

From the legendary producer and author of The Kid Stays in the Picture—one of the greatest Hollywood memoirs ever written—comes a long-awaited second work with all the elements of a star-studded blockbuster: glamour and conflict, giddy highs and near-fatal lows, struggle and perseverance, tragedy and triumph.

"Film and television director and notable raconteur Barry Sonnenfeld's outrageous and hilarious memoir, tracing his idiosyncratic upbringing in Washington Heights, his breaking into film as a cinematographer with the Coen brothers, and his unexpected career as the director behind such huge film franchises as The Addams Family and Men in Black, and beloved work like Get Shorty and A Series of Unfortunate Events"--

From the first drawing board sketch to wriggling TV character, Makin’ Toons illustrates the thrills and challenges of making animated cartoon movies as told by the industry’s most successful creators. Cartoon lovers everywhere will be treated to 47 personal interviews with animation artists and industry leaders ranging from Shrek director Andrew Adamson to Rugrats producer Gabor Csupo. These and dozens of other fascinating firsthand accounts chronicle the behind-the-scene antics and commercial dynamics behind such blockbusters as The Simpsons, South Park, Beauty and the Beast, and Dragon Tales, to name just a few. Author Allan Neuwirth—an accomplished animation artist and writer himself—spices the book with insightful comments, hilarious anecdotes, and a true “toon artist’s” sense of humor. He also includes 75 never-before-published concept drawings, character designs, storyboards, and much more. Allworth Press, an imprint of Skyhorse Publishing, publishes a broad range of books on the visual and performing arts, with emphasis on the business of art. Our titles cover subjects such as graphic design, theater, branding, fine art, photography, interior design, writing, acting, film, how to start careers, business and legal forms, business practices, and more. While we don't aspire to publish a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are deeply committed to quality books that help creative professionals succeed and thrive. We often publish in areas overlooked by other publishers and welcome the author whose expertise can help our audience of readers.

From his first feature film, Fear and Desire (1953), to his final, posthumously released Eyes Wide Shut (1999), Stanley Kubrick excelled at probing the dark corners of human consciousness. In doing so, he adapted such popular novels as The Killing , Lolita , A Clockwork Orange , and The Shining and selected a wide variety of genres for his films -- black comedy ( Dr. Strangelove ), science fiction ( 2001: A Space Odyssey ), and war ( Paths of Glory and Full Metal Jacket ). Because he was peerless in unveiling the intimate mysteries of human nature, no new film by Kubrick ever failed to spark debate or to be deeply pondered. Kubrick (1928-1999) has remained as elusive as the subjects of his films. Unlike many other filmmakers he was not inclined to grant interviews, instead preferring to let his movies speak for themselves. By allowing both critics and moviegoers to see the inner workings of this reclusive filmmaker, this first comprehensive collection of his relatively few interviews is invaluable. Ranging from 1959 to 1987 and including Kubrick's conversations with Gene Siskel, Jeremy Bernstein, Gene D. Phillips, and others, this book reveals Kubrick's diverse interests -- nuclear energy and its consequences, space exploration, science fiction, literature, religion, psychoanalysis, the effects of violence, and even chess -- and discloses how each affects his films. He enthusiastically speaks of how advances in camera and sound technology made his films more effective. Kubrick details his hands-on approach to filmmaking as he discusses why he supervises nearly every aspect of production. "All the hand-held camerawork is mine," he says in a 1972 interview about A Clockwork Orange . "In addition to the fun of doing the shooting myself, I find it virtually impossible to explain what I want in a hand-held shot to even the most talented and sensitive camera operator. " Neither guarded nor evasive, the Kubrick who emerges from these interviews is candid, opinionated, confident, and articulate. His incredible memory and his gift for organization come to light as he quotes verbatim sections of reviews, books, and articles. Despite his reputation as a recluse, the Kubrick of these interviews is approachable, witty, full of anecdotes, and eager to share a fascinating story. Gene D. Phillips, S.J., is a professor of English at Loyola University in Chicago, where he teaches fiction and the history of film. He is the author of many notable books on film and is a founding member of the editorial board of both Literature/Film Quarterly and The Tennessee Williams Journal . He was acquainted with Stanley Kubrick for twenty-five years.

"Laurents passed away early in 2011, but not before writing The Rest of the Story, in which he revealed all that had happened in his life since Original Story By, filled with the wisdom he gained in growing older and a new perspective brought on by Laurents' experience of deep personal loss, including the death of his longtime companion, Tom Hatcher"--

"Best possible place, worst possible time" is a collection of sometimes baffling, often enlightening, and always funny anecdotes from Barry Sonnenfeld's extensive career in film and television. From fighting with studio executives to creative problem-solving on set, Sonnenfeld provides a glimpse into what it takes to make commercial art in the face of constant human foibles.

Son of pioneer movie producer Harry Rapf, Maurice Rapf grew up in Hollywood in that city's golden age. After moving from independent filmmaking to Warner Bros., in 1924 the senior Rapf joined Louis Mayer and became one of the founding members of MGM. Hence, movies were a huge influence in Maurice Rapf's early life. After graduating from college, Rapf worked as a screenwriter for major Hollywood studios, but, in 1947, he left Hollywood, never to work for a major studio again. On numerous occasions, he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as an alleged communist, although he never made a public confession or denial. As a result he was blacklisted from the industry and forced to begin a new career in the East. He eventually became a movie critic and film studies professor. Maurice Rapf knows movies and the movie business as an insider, from first-hand experience, not from books. His autobiography is the story of one person's interaction with an evolving Hollywood. Rapf witnessed the historical progression of movie production: from silents to sound, from a fun-loving frontier community to a huge and fiercely competitive industry, from an apolitical never-never land to a community very much aware of-and nervous about-its social responsibility in a period of economic depression and in a period of world peace seriously threatened by the aggression of fascism. Of interest to students and teachers of film studies, of American history, and of American popular culture, as well as anyone who loves movies.

For investing movies with an image of style and glamour George Cukor (1899--1983) is considered one of the founding fathers of the Golden Age of Hollywood. The roll call of the great films he made and the stars he directed validates his rank as one of cinema's greatest moviemakers. "The only really important thing I have to say about George Cukor," Katharine Hepburn proclaimed, "is that all the other directors I have worked with starred themselves. But George 'starred' the actor. He didn't want people to say, 'this great director.' He wanted them to say 'this great actor.' " Along with introducing Hepburn and Greta Garbo to American audiences, he worked with many of the most acclaimed movie actresses of his day, including Vivien Leigh, Olivia de Havilland, Jean Harlow, Elizabeth Taylor, Joan Crawford, Ingrid Bergman, Ava Gardner, Claudette Colbert, Angela Lansbury, Judy Holliday, Audrey Hepburn, and Marilyn Monroe. These interviews are a pleasure to read because Cukor is so immersed in his subject and so forthright in his observations. He comes to life immediately with disarming candor and infectious enthusiasm for cinema and the people who make it. In addition to discussing his romantic comedies, Cukor talks about his famous screen adaptations of classic novels and plays, including Little Women (1933) and David Copperfield (1935). His experience of being fired by producer David O. Selznick partway through the shooting of Gone With the Wind (1939) surfaces in nearly every interview. Instead of having his career derailed by this dismissal, however, he continued his rise as one of America's premier directors. In his cornucopia of films are Holiday (1938), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Adam's Rib (1949), Born Yesterday (1950), A Star Is Born (1954), Let's Make Love (1960), and My Fair Lady (1964). Cukor was a man of myriad dimensions. In his last years he opened up about his private life and his previously undisclosed homosexuality. He was ardent in his friendships and single-minded in his devotion to making quality movies for a popular audience. Robert Emmet Long, a literature and film scholar and writer living in Fulton, New York, is the author or editor of more than forty books, including John Huston: Interviews (University Press of Mississippi).

Fred Zinnemann (1907-1997) was one of Hollywood's most honored directors. In a career that spanned fifty years, he won four Academy Awards and directed such classic movies as From Here to Eternity, A Man for All Seasons, The Day of the Jackal, and High Noon. Covering thirty-three years of conversations (1964-1997), Fred Zinnemann: Interviews provides a revealing glimpse into the director's vision as he discusses in his cultivated, elegant voice his varied experiences as a filmmaker. He defends himself against charges that his films are too objective or unemotional. He reminisces about his experiences with independent director Robert Flaherty and his early years in the American studios and recounts his disappointment and frustration over his abortive attempt to film Man's Fate. Filled with intelligent commentary and recollections about all of his important work, the interviews disclose an artist committed to his craft, his vision, and the human enterprise. Despite the range of genres in which he worked-the western, the musical, film noir, and the ""social problem"" film-Zinnemann was aesthetically committed to social realism. Due in part to his training under Flaherty and his upbringing in Austria, where he witnessed firsthand the rise of fascism, Zinnemann was always drawn to stories that highlighted the testing of conscience in people caught up in a historical moment. World War II provided the backdrop to much of his work. As he put it, ""I have always been concerned with the problem of the individual who struggles to preserve personal integrity and self-respect."" Gabriel Miller is a professor of English at Rutgers University, Newark, and has written several other books on film and theater.