“Delightful....In flashbacks, Dawson does a fine job bringing WWII-era Los Angeles to life.” -Publishers Weekly (2/28/11) What now remains of Hollywood's Golden Era? A wealth of publicity materials was distributed nationwide to theaters, but they were usually treated as rubbish and disposed of when each movie finished its run. However, a surprising number of posters, still production photos, lobby cards, inserts, title cards, and the like have survived, and some of these memorabilia are of enormous value to collectors. Like any objects of value, these occasionally motivate crimes-sometimes even murder. PI Jeri Howard scours Northern California from the Bay Area to Sonoma County to the Eastern Sierra, trying to connect events of sixty years ago with the murder of a prominent arts patron and avid collector of Hitchcock memorabilia-and learns a lot about her grandmother’s years as a bit player in Hollywood along the way. With frequent flashbacks to the late 1930s and early ’40s, Bit Player features the life of bit player Jerusha Layne, who may figure in the unsolved murder of an aspiring leading man.

An insightful, often humorous look at how Washington works, or doesn't The title “Bit Player” perfectly reflects Stephen Hess's long and distinguished career as a Washington insider. As a 25-year-old, recently discharged Army private in 1958, he suddenly found himself as part of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s speechwriting team that ultimately helped draft the famed “Farewell Address” warning of the influence of the “military industrial complex.” Then over the next two decades, Hess played bit roles aiding Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter, and Ronald Reagan—along the way observing up-close those presidents and many other senior political leaders. During his subsequent four-and-a-half decades at the Brookings Institution, Hess was well-positioned to monitor and comment on the achievements and failures of successive administrations. This memoir by a certified member of Washington's old-guard establishment is rich with insight into contemporary American democracy, poignant in its reflections of avoidable missteps by even the best and most experienced leaders, and consistently good-humored in the author's self-awareness of his own role behind the scenes of political power. Now in his mid-eighties, still involved at Brookings as a “senior fellow emeritus,” Hess uses this memoir to look back at what he describes as concentric circles of research, travel, advising, writing, and teaching. But more than just a memoir, Bit Player offers deeply informed commentary on the major political actors and seminal events in the nation's capital over the past six decades. One of the foremost authorities on media and government in the United States, Stephen Hess is a senior fellow emeritus in Governance Studies at The Brookings Institution. He first joined Brookings in 1972 and was distinguished research professor of media and public affairs at the George Washington University (2004–2009). Hess served on White House staff during the Eisenhower and Nixon presidencies and as advisor to Presidents Ford and Carter.

The untold tale of bit players, doubles, Central Casting, and extras in American film

Do you always somehow either wind up creating or getting swept up in a bunch of big relationship dramas? If so, time to live your life offstage, and THE PLAY’S THE (DESTRUCTIVE) THING will show you how.

Defining more than 10,000 words and phrases from everyday slang to technical terms and concepts, this dictionary of the audiovisual language embraces more than 50 subject areas within film, television, and home entertainment. It includes terms from the complete lifecycle of an audiovisual work from initial concept through commercial presentation in all the major distribution channels including theatrical exhibition, television broadcast, home entertainment, and mobile media. The dictionary definitions are augmented by more than 700 illustrations, 1,600 etymologies, and nearly 2,000 encyclopedic entries that provide illuminating anecdotes, historical perspective, and clarifying details.

"There are fundamental principles for problem analysis and algorithm design that are continuously used in bioinformatics. This book concentrates on a clear presentation of these principles, presenting them in a self-contained, mathematically clear and precise manner, and illustrating them with lots of case studies from main fields of bioinformatics. Emphasis is laid on algorithmic "pearls" of bioinformatics, showing that things may get rather simple when taking a proper view into them. The book closes with a thorough bibliography, ranging from classic research results to very recent findings, providing many pointers for future research. Overall, this volume is ideally suited for a senior undergraduate or graduate course on bioinformatics, with a strong focus on its mathematical and computer science background."--BOOK JACKET.

A non-mathematician explores mathematical terrain, reporting accessibly and engagingly on topics from Sudoku to probability. Brian Hayes wants to convince us that mathematics is too important and too much fun to be left to the mathematicians. Foolproof, and Other Mathematical Meditations is his entertaining and accessible exploration of mathematical terrain both far-flung and nearby, bringing readers tidings of mathematical topics from Markov chains to Sudoku. Hayes, a non-mathematician, argues that mathematics is not only an essential tool for understanding the world but also a world unto itself, filled with objects and patterns that transcend earthly reality. In a series of essays, Hayes sets off to explore this exotic terrain, and takes the reader with him. Math has a bad reputation: dull, difficult, detached from daily life. As a talking Barbie doll opined, “Math class is tough.” But Hayes makes math seem fun. Whether he's tracing the genealogy of a well-worn anecdote about a famous mathematical prodigy, or speculating about what would happen to a lost ball in the nth dimension, or explaining that there are such things as quasirandom numbers, Hayes wants readers to share his enthusiasm. That's why he imagines a cinematic treatment of the discovery of the Riemann zeta function (“The year: 1972. The scene: Afternoon tea in Fuld Hall at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey”), explains that there is math in Sudoku after all, and describes better-than-average averages. Even when some of these essays involve a hike up the learning curve, the view from the top is worth it.