Explore the vast range of titles available.

[...]almost simultaneously, the Hollywood moguls confronted Goebbels in the marketplace over whose image of Jewish characters would prevail. [...]Gyssling had close ties with Louis B. Mayer. [...]both Bottome and West knew, with Britain hanging by a thread, half a loaf was better than none. The author also thanks the knowledgeable and welcoming staffs of the Manuscript Collection of the British Library, the Margaret Harrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, the USC Cinema Arts Archive, and the Manuscript Division of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University along with Reeve Lindbergh who gave her generous permission for access to her parents' papers.

Hollywood is ruled by conventional wisdom—or, as it's known when it takes off its coat and tie, magical thinking. Certain factors, they say, make for a surefire hit; certain others mean you'll never make a buck. Some of the rules sound silly, but, really, why tempt fate? Listen to director Bill Condon as he slips one of these showbiz credos into a recent interview: “You know, they say for a great performance you need a great telephone scene.” To the uninitiated, this may sound strange—surely an outlying tenet of the faith!—but Hollywood's belief in the “telephone scene” is curiously devout. And unlike other Tinseltown lore, with its murky past and fractured provenance, this tale of the telephone is easy to track to a single event nearly eighty years ago.

Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra—as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her \"just folks,\" small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 film Citizen Kane and her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched, The First Lady of Hollywood is both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.

According to Gene Tierney, Stahl was “for bringing out the best in an actress”. In Her Code of Honor (1919), we see tropes that would become familiar from a study of Stahl’s output – characteristic staging, mother-daughter doubling, a wife and mistress meeting, secrets, revelations and questions of identity and parentage (46), with co-editor Charles Barr identifying what would become a standard element of Stahl’s films, “the power of the encompassing image” (47), an idea that cuts through the historicising to create the crux of the director’s signature. In the second version of the film (Husband and Wives # 2), Barr describes in his essay (with the helpful inclusion of stills) what are by now standardised images in Stahl’s body of work and his formal visual strategy, a type which would later be attributed to William Wyler’s preference for deep staging with cinematographer Gregg Toland: The camera never once moves, the combination of deep/wide composition with judicious editing makes the footage that follows into a small masterclass of expressive staging (101) . The skilled integration of these two levels of cross-cutting makes this final section – almost devoid of intertitles – a fine demonstration of Stahl’s methods, and altogether a classic illustration of the power of the mature silent medium (104).

America was in the throes of the Great Depression; film attendance was dropping; and Mayer (then the highest-paid executive in the country) wasn't sure how much longer his dream factory could last. Three and a half months since the Writers Guild of America (WGA) stopped work on May 2, and several weeks since the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) did the same on July 14, talks have sputtered off and on at press time, with the latest being held Aug. 15. [...]blue-chip companies like Disney and Warner Bros. have slashed their workforce by thousands, while watching their stock price hit new lows.

Hollywood celebrities feared her. William Randolph Hearst adored her. Between 1915 and 1960, Louella Parsons was America's premier movie gossip columnist and in her heyday commanded a following of more than forty million readers. This first full-length biography of Parsons tells the story of her reign over Hollywood during the studio era, her lifelong alliance with her employer, William Randolph Hearst, and her complex and turbulent relationships with such noted stars, directors, and studio executives as Orson Welles, Joan Crawford, Louis B. Mayer, Ronald Reagan, and Frank Sinatra-as well as her rival columnists Hedda Hopper and Walter Winchell. Loved by fans for her \"just folks,\" small-town image, Parsons became notorious within the film industry for her involvement in the suppression of the 1941 filmCitizen Kaneand her use of blackmail in the service of Hearst's political and personal agendas. As she traces Parsons's life and career, Samantha Barbas situates Parsons's experiences in the broader trajectory of Hollywood history, charting the rise of the star system and the complex interactions of publicity, journalism, and movie-making. Engagingly written and thoroughly researched,The First Lady of Hollywoodis both an engrossing chronicle of one of the most powerful women in American journalism and film and a penetrating analysis of celebrity culture and Hollywood power politics.