A scalding exploration of love, marriage, fidelity, and betrayal. “Meet me at five,” the voice said on the answering machine. Four ordinary words yet, when heard by the wrong person, enough to change the course of a marriage. Marooned in Hollywood while writing a screenplay based on his latest bestselling novel, Miles King records in his journals his escalating conviction that his glamorous wife, a New York-based journalist named Maggie, is having an affair with Miles’s favorite student. Amidst the sun-buffed egos and the longing for connection and fame he encounters at every cocktail party and no-name bar in Hollywood, Miles finds unexpected comfort in an affair of his own with Lucy, a young mother whose open, eager mind sparks an irresistible passion in him. A potent brew of lust, guilt, anger, and betrayal, Miles’s journals reveal his constantly shifting emotional state and the perils he must navigate as his fantasies become increasingly hard to distinguish from reality. In Hollywood Savage, acclaimed novelist Kristin McCloy probes one modern man’s psychological depths with stunning accuracy, and illuminates the ways men and women try desperately to reveal themselves to one another, while still always keeping a part of their hearts a secret. Kristin McCloy was born in San Francisco and spent her childhood in Spain, India, and Japan. A graduate of Duke University, she is the author of the novels Velocity and Some Girls. Her novels have been published in more than fifteen countries. She currently lives in Oakland, California.

Poetry. Asian & Asian American Studies. California Studies. Film. SAVAGE PAGEANT recounts the history of the defunct zoo, Jungleland, which housed Hollywood's show animals up until its closure in 1969. In it, Stark explores the concept of US American spectacle and its historic ties to celebrity culture, the maternal body, racist taxonomies, the mistreatment of animals, and ecological violence. With a hybrid, documentary poetics, SAVAGE PAGEANT reveals how we attempt to narrate and control geographical space and how ghosts (remainders, the sketch, unfinished stories) collapse the tidy corners of our collective, accumulative histories.

To escape an abusive relationship is not necessarily to find personal Liberty. But for Anne Delaney, the protagonist of Lois Schwarz's contemporary novel Hollywood Con Man, this realization takes almost too long to discover. An unloved and abused child, Anne begins her quest for freedom when she first encounters affection at the age of six. Her methods for finding freedom, however, are merely escape tactics. When she is seventeen, married and pregnant, she leaves her hometown of Bridgeport, Connecticut for Hollywood, California. Rather than finding happiness and liberty there, she in only further abused by her controlling husband, who succumbs to the perfidious Hollywood addictions to sex and drugs. Anne, already accustomed to accepting physical abuse, soon learns also to endure emotional and sexual abuse. It is not until she realizes all that her husband killed within her that Anne stands up for herself. This is one woman's story not only of escape, but also of freedom and it's implications in her life

More than any other filmmaker, Sam Peckinpah opened the door for graphic violence in movies. In this book, Stephen Prince explains the rise of explicit violence in the American cinema, its social effects, and the relation of contemporary ultraviolence to the radical, humanistic filmmaking that Peckinpah practiced. Prince demonstrates Peckinpah's complex approach to screen violence and shows him as a serious artist whose work was tied to the social and political upheavals of the 1960s. He explains how the director's commitment to showing the horror and pain of violence compelled him to use a complex style that aimed to control the viewer's response. Prince offers an unprecedented portrait of Peckinpah the filmmaker. Drawing on primary research materials—Peckinpah's unpublished correspondence, scripts, production memos, and editing notes—he provides a wealth of new information about the making of the films and Peckinpah's critical shaping of their content and violent imagery. This material shows Peckinpah as a filmmaker of intelligence, a keen observer of American society, and a tragic artist disturbed by the images he created. Prince's account establishes, for the first time, Peckinpah's place as a major filmmaker. This book is essential reading for those interested in Peckinpah, the problem of movie violence, and contemporary American cinema.

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Cartel, The Force, and The Border A New York Times, Entertainment Weekly, and Chicago Sun-Times Favorite Book of the Year “A revelation…This is Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid on autoload.” —Stephen King, Entertainment Weekly “Startling…Stylish…Mega-cool.” —Janet Maslin, The New York Times Ben, Chon, and O are twentysomething best friends living the dream in Southern California. Together they have made a small fortune producing premium grade marijuana, a product so potent that the Mexican Baja Cartel demands a cut. When Ben and Chon refuse to back down, the cartel kidnaps O, igniting a dizzying array of high-octane negotiations and stunning plot twists as they risk everything to free her. The result is a provocative, sexy, and darkly engrossing thrill ride, an ultracontemporary love story that will leave you breathless.

The captivity narrative, the earliest genre of American popular literature, continues to be of cultural significance in late 20th-century Hollywood. Many popular films of the last four decades incorporate the most common elements of the captivity narrative tradition, including a politically contested frontier setting and a plot involving innocent, family-oriented white Americans held captive by hostile, culturally alien natives. At the same time, these films offer something new to the narrative tradition: they focus on the captive who resists rescue and the challenge this resistance poses to American cultural self-confidence. By focusing on the lost captive, these films, beginning with The Searchers (1956), deal with questions about American identity raised by a white American's cultural and potentially political transformation. Films as diverse as Little Big Man, Taxi Driver, and The Deer Hunter adapted the captivity narrative's conventions to criticize aspects of contemporary American society and reject outworn models of male heroism; at the same time, however, they retained the genre's traditional assumption of white superiority and its fear of female sexuality. Bibliography. Index.

Two decades of the top twenty fan favorites and the matches that made them famous. It starts with an insult...then comes a push, a shove...a betrayal. Before you know it, the two wrestlers are at each other's throats. It's a rivalry, it's personal...it's a showdown. Some showdowns are straightforward: John Cena wants to prove himself by taking on JBL; Randy Orton knows that if he can slay Undertaker, it will prove that he is the legend killer. Others are grudge matches -- The Rock is finally going to put Stone Cold Steve Austin, the bionic redneck, in his place. There are conflicts we can all identify with: Steve Austin doing to Mr. McMahon what we dream of doing to our boss every Monday morning. There are the epic showdowns that evoke the eternal struggle: Undertaker versus Kane. And the truly bizarre: Mankind against Shawn Michaels. Here for the first time ever, Jeremy Roberts (co-author of Controversy Creates Cash and Batista Unleashed) examines the top twenty rivalries of the past twenty years. Roberts takes us on a veritable tour of recent wrestling history, from Hulk Hogan's showdowns with Randy Savage to the gargantuan struggles between Undertaker and Batista. The high-flying action of the Hardy Boyz, the Dudleys, Edge & Christian -- all are examined in what amounts to a brief for the wrestlers' inclusion in the hall of fame. From the Monday Night Wars between nWo and D-Generation X to the real-life conflict that spawned Matt Hardy's memorable bloodfest with Edge, Roberts takes you into the ring so vividly you'll come away with bruises.