Illustration on front cover of the title, a large cross, a movie camera, and a red question mark.

Before the film industry arrived, Hollywood was filled with quaint bungalows, millionaires' estates, and churches dedicated to teetotalism. Movies shattered Hollywood's tranquillity, and brought wealth, fame and glamorous movie stars. The giants of the movie industry invented klieg-lighted movie premieres and the Academy Awards in Hollywood. Go beyond the star-studded surface to the district's days of union busting, gangsters, and scandal, foreshadowing Hollywood's seedy decline. The book concludes with Hollywood's redevelopment that continues today. The book features the famous faces and places that made the town legendary, offering a unique perspective on celebrity nightlife and the behind-the-scenes stories of day-to-day life. Lavishly illustrated with over 800 vintage images from the author's private collection, "The Story of Hollywood" brings new insights to readers with a passion for Hollywood and its place in the history of film, radio, and television.

The Last Word argues that the Hollywood novel opened up space for cultural critique of the film industry at a time when the industry lacked the capacity to critique itself. While the young studio system worked tirelessly to burnish its public image in the wake of celebrity scandal, several industry insiders wrote fiction to fill in what newspapers and fan magazines left out. Throughout the 1920s and 1930s, these novels aimed to expose the invisible machinery of classical Hollywood cinema, including not only the evolving artifice of the screen but also the promotional discourse that complemented it. As likeminded filmmakers in the 1940s and 1950s gradually brought the dark side of the industry to the screen, however, the Hollywood novel found itself struggling to live up to its original promise of delivering the unfilmable. By the 1960s, desperate to remain relevant, the genre had devolved into little more than erotic fantasy of movie stars behind closed doors, perhaps the only thing the public couldn't already find elsewhere. Still, given their unique ability to speak beyond the institutional restraints of their time, these earlier works offer a window into the industry's dynamic creation and re-creation of itself in the public imagination.

What do the following have in common? Let there be light -- A fly in the ointment -- A rod of iron -- New wine in old bottles -- Lick the dust -- How are the mighty fallen -- Kick against the pricks -- Wheels within wheels. They're all in the King James Bible. This astonishing book "has contributed far more to English in the way of idiomatic or quasi-proverbial expressions than any other literary source." So wrote David Crystal in 2004. In Begat he returns to the subject: he asks how a work published in 1611 could have had such an influence on the language and looks closely at what the influence has been. He comes to some surprising conclusions. No other version of the Bible however popular (such as the Good News Bible) or put upon the church (like the New English Bible) has had anything like the same impact. David Crystal shows how its words and phrases found independent life in the work of poets, playwrights, novelists, and politicians, and how more recently they have been taken up by journalists, advertisers, Hollywood, and hip-hop. He reveals the great debt the King James Bible owes to its English forbears, especially John Wycliffe's in the fourteenth century and William Tyndale's in the sixteenth. He also shows that the revisions and changes made by King James's translators were crucial to its universal success. "A person who professes to be a critic in the delicacies of the English language ought to have the Bible at his finger's ends," Lord Macaulay advised Lady Holland in 1831. David Crystal shows how true this is. His book is a revelation.

The beginning of the twentieth century evolved out of an era of Freethinking atheists and agnostics who challenged the Protestant hegemony of the day. Key among these mavericks was author and filmmaker Rupert Hughes, uncle to Howard Hughes. In 1922, Hughes published Souls for Sale, his wickedly playful satire of the Bible belt and Hollywood, offering a mischievous snapshot of the film industry as it struggled against a conservative Zeitgeist. The novel follows the prodigal adventures of a clergyman's daughter as she stumbles into the movie industry and finds it to be a new and liberating moral universe. Hughes's adaptation of his sly work challenged the religious hierarchy of his day, but ultimately fell by the wayside, even with the support of Hollywood icons like Eric von Stroheim and Charlie Chaplin. Souls for Sale offers a glimpse into the emerging Jazz age of moviemaking against the backdrop of a country moving from its traditional roots into the kinetic ways of Hollywood.