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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.

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.

Hedda Hopper is known as the great rival of William Randolph Hearst's Hollywood columnist, Louella Parsons. But in her columns and radio broadcasts, Hopper found ways of her own to incorporate highly charged political opinions alongside privileged accounts of Hollywood celebrity culture. Working with the Hopper papers at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, this essay reveals the ways in which the columnist's conservative political agenda dealt with domestic issues, appropriate responses to the outbreak of war in Europe, and the aftermath of the Pearl Harbor attack. Hopper's leading role in the anti-communist movement which affected Hollywood in the post-war period is seen the logical continuation of her earlier positions.

Through extensive research into local newspapers throughout the United States in the early 'teens, the author chronicles the work of little-known columnist Gertrude Price, demonstrating how she crafted an appeal to female movie fans while highlighting the powerful roles played by women in the early industry.

\"Golden Age\" Hollywood gossip columnist and political conservative Hedda Hopper used her journalistic platform to promote anticommunist campaigns during the cold war. Analysis of letters to Hopper demonstrates her success in mobilizing her readers to participate and how, together, they made her column part of the public sphere in the United States.

For many scholars and students of American film history, the black press campaign against D. W. Griffith's \"The Birth of a Nation\" (1915) signifies the founding moment of significant black writing on the cinema. This essay investigates the pre-Birth film criticism of \"New York Age\" columnist Lester A. Walton so as to challenge that misconception and recover a lost legacy of early black film spectatorship.

Oliver Stone's motion picture 'JFK' has received scathing criticism from the press and other segments of society, while at the same time stirring patriotic sentiments with some. The motion picture is based on the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Many feel the movie's underlying theme is unfounded, and that the film is heavy with political innuendos aimed at the US government. Most political analysts have dismissed 'JFK's' thesis as a fallacy, a mere manifestation of Stone's outrage at America's involvement in the Vietnam war, which he has nurtured since the Woodstock days.