Explore the vast range of titles available.

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.

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.

Almost completely forgotten today, Ketti Gallian was a young French actress who made four films in Hollywood in the mid-1930s, playing the female lead opposite Spencer Tracy and Warner Baxter in two of them. Gallian's example is rare in that she was a virtual unknown within the film community in France when she signed a Hollywood contract. Once enmeshed in the machinery of the studio system, she found ways to resist its myriad constraints but ultimately failed to realize her ambitions, a victim of studio mismanagement and, especially, linguistic insecurity, which undermined her onscreen performance and marketability—a problem also faced by some of her better-known compatriots in Hollywood.

Files from the Studio Publicity Directors Committee of the Association of Motion Picture Producers (AMPP), housed in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Margaret Herrick Library (MHL), reveal that studio publicity directors in the postwar era considered many articles in fan magazines to be “unfriendly and destructive” to the industry. This essay examines the perspectives of both studio publicity directors and members of the Hollywood press on what constituted “fan magazine trouble” in postwar Hollywood, the relation of that trouble to studio controls in place over these publications since 1934, and how fan-magazine editors and newspaper reporters and columnists conceptualized their coverage of Hollywood stars, studios, and productions within ongoing developments in reporting practices and their relation to the professionalization of journalism.

Narratives of rebellion, alienation, and loss affixed to James Dean have long been axiomatic in mainstream US culture, bound up with an abiding iconic visage of cool melancholic youth frozen in time. His ubiquity has led numerous scholars to investigate the actor's symbolic intersections with social justice movements, commodification and postcolonialism, audience desire and contested sexuality. His sudden death has given rise to notable overlaps in his perceived cultural meaning, linking him to antiestablishment rebellion and locating within his aloofness a decidedly progressive political identity alienated by the contradictions of postwar containment culture. This essay counters such enduring associations, arguing that these interpretations of Dean overlook the pitched battles and mobilizations occurring over his meaning within the interstitial spaces of \"distribution\" between the Hollywood film industry and its audiences. A key figure within these overlooked areas of cultural production, gossip columnist Hedda Hopper exercised power by constructing and defending preferred interpretations of Dean and others within (and potentially without) her own epistolary community of readers, listeners, and viewers. Moreover, she assumed an archival role in her sustained efforts to manage the young actor's meaning, thereby expanding the possibilities of what (or who) an archive may be and lending greater dimensionality to the variety of practices-and the exercises of power-that exist between producers and consumers. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]

At the same time, there's not a mean thing about it. The star of \"There's No Business Like Show Business\" and \"South Pacific\" is merely trying to capture the moment she's describing with Broadway belter Ethel Merman goading [Mitzi Gaynor] to dance with the \"little duke\" -- Merman's exact words -- at El Moroco, and the duchess encouraging her husband, \"David, do dance with Mitzi.\" \"And I'm back in the saddle again,\" says Gaynor. \"It's not that I don't miss ([Jack Bean]). I still keep some of his clothes.\" \"I'm Mitzi Gaynor,\" she told him. \"Don't you recognize me? I'm in all the movies.\"

Louella Parsons:In 1914, Parsons began writing American's first movie gossip column in the Chicago Record-Herald, and was eventually syndicated in 600 newspapers worldwide with a readership of 25 million.

JENNIFER Tilly says she was shocked when offered the role of American gossip columnist Louella Parsons in The Cat's Meow, directed by Peter Bogdanovich, \"But...