Davis's path-breaking study relating film-making to broader social issues explains in part why the world tolerated South Africa's apartheid and racial brutality for so long.

Hollywood and Africa - recycling the Dark Continent myth from 19082020 is a study of over a century of stereotypical Hollywood film productions about Africa. It argues that the myth of the Dark Continent continues to influence Western cultural productions about Africa as a cognitive-based system of knowledge, especially in history, literature and film. Hollywood and Africa identifies the colonial mastertext of the Dark Continent mythos by providing a historiographic genealogy and context for the terms development and consolidation. An array of literary and paraliterary film adaptation theories are employed to analyse the deep genetic strands of HollywoodAfrica film adaptations. The mutations of the Dark Continent mythos across time and space are then tracked through the classical, neoclassical and new wave HollywoodAfrica phases in order to illustrate how Hollywood productions about Africa recycle, revise, reframe, reinforce, transpose, interrogate and even critique these tropes of Darkest Africa while sustaining the colonial mastertext and rising cyberactivism against Hollywoods whitewashing of African history.

The darkest Batman is unmasked. During the London press junket for The Dark Knight in the summer of 2008, Christian Bale was infamously accused of assaulting his mother and sister at the five-star Dorchester Hotel. Six months later, a recording of Bale's rant on the set of Terminator Salvation was leaked, and the star's anger began to define him. But beyond his notorious temper, Bale, an Academy Award-winning actor for his role in The Fighter, is known for his ability to physically transform himself for roles in American Psycho, The Machinist, and as one of Hollywood's most revered and bankable characters—Batman. In Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman, Best Biography winner in the 2013 Indie Excellence Awards and finalist in the 2013 Indie Book Awards, a 2013 Indie Book Awards Finalist for Best Biography, Bale's former publicist and assistant Harrison Cheung—his real-life Alfred—shares an inside look into the little-known personal life of the intensely private and reclusive actor. In the first biography of the Batman star, Cheung, who lived and worked with Christian and his father for 10 years, shares firsthand accounts of the Bales' familial dysfunction, Christian's morbid fascinations and dark humor, and his extreme dedication to his craft. Aware that Bale hated his traditional publicity duties, Cheung launched an extensive Internet marketing campaign for the actor, built the first official actor website for him, and cultivated the Baleheads, an online fan community that was used to garner editorial coverage and ultimately help Bale secure the role of the Caped Crusader. Written with veteran Hollywood and entertainment reporter Nicola Pittam, Christian Bale: The Inside Story of the Darkest Batman uncovers Bale's transformation from shy, English child actor to Internet sensation to Hollywood bad boy. *FOR DISTRIBUTION IN THE U.S. AND CANADA ONLY*

Pre-Code Hollywood explores the fascinating period in American motion picture history from 1930 to 1934 when the commandments of the Production Code Administration were violated with impunity in a series of wildly unconventional films—a time when censorship was lax and Hollywood made the most of it. Though more unbridled, salacious, subversive, and just plain bizarre than what came afterwards, the films of the period do indeed have the look of Hollywood cinema—but the moral terrain is so off-kilter that they seem imported from a parallel universe. In a sense, Doherty avers, the films of pre-Code Hollywood are from another universe. They lay bare what Hollywood under the Production Code attempted to cover up and push offscreen: sexual liaisons unsanctified by the laws of God or man, marriage ridiculed and redefined, ethnic lines crossed and racial barriers ignored, economic injustice exposed and political corruption assumed, vice unpunished and virtue unrewarded—in sum, pretty much the raw stuff of American culture, unvarnished and unveiled. No other book has yet sought to interpret the films and film-related meanings of the pre-Code era—what defined the period, why it ended, and what its relationship was to the country as a whole during the darkest years of the Great Depression... and afterward.

Taylor exposes the concept of 'art' as a tool of ethnocentricity and radical ideology. He challenges the history of aesthetics as a recent invention of privileged Western consumerism and questions the myth of its ancient Greek origin.

The illustrated history of the sex, excess, murder, suicide, ambition, betrayal, and compromise behind the silver screen. It is now over 100 years since Hollywood became the center of American cinema and, while it has always presented itself as a place of glamour and home to the beautiful and talented, from its very creation there was a darker side to Tinseltown. Filmmakers didn't just move to southern California for its sunny weather, they went west to evade the patent laws restricting the use of movie cameras. From its earliest days, Hollywood, the home of fantasy, created a hothouse of excess--too much money, too much adulation, too much expectation, and too much ego. But while stars have always been indulged, once their moment in the limelight has passed, their fall can be cruel. The History of Hollywood covers it all, from the setting up of the studios by the movie moguls to the corporations that run them today, from drug addictions to McCarthy-era witch-hunts to #metoo. Intensively researched and superbly entertaining, the book reveals that the stories behind the silver screen are at least as gripping as many of those on it.