In 1944, Laird Cregar played Jack the Ripper in The Lodger, giving one of the most haunting performances in Hollywood history. It was the climax of a strange celebrity that saw the young American actor--who stood 6' 3" and weighed more than 300 pounds--earn distinction as a portrayer of psychopaths and villains. Determined to break free of this typecasting, he desperately desired to become "a beautiful man," embarking on an extreme diet that killed him at 31. This first biography of Cregar tells the heartbreaking story of the brilliant but doomed actor. Appendices cover his film, theatre, and radio work. Many never before published photographs are included.

Raymond Burr (1917-1993), a film noir regular known for his villainous roles in movies like Rear Window, became one of the most popular stars in television history. He delighted millions of viewers each week in the toprated shows Perry Mason and Ironside, which ran virtually uninterrupted for nearly twenty years.

This book chronicles the radio appearances of all prominent classic horror movie stars--Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre, Vincent Price, and two dozen more, including "scream queens" like Fay Wray. It contains script excerpts from radio shows as well as material from narrated albums and music singles. Each star's appearances are listed by show and air date, with descriptions of the subject matter.

Hollywood is haunted by the ghost of playwright and novelist Oscar Wilde. This is the story of his haunting, told for the first time. Set within the rich evolving context of how the American entertainment industry became cinema, and how cinema become the movies, it reveals how Wilde helped to shape Hollywood in the early twentieth century. It begins with his 1882 American tour, and traces the ongoing popularity of his plays and novel in the early twentieth century, after his ignominious death. Following the early filmmakers, writers and actors as they headed West in the Hollywood boom, it uncovers how and why they took Wilde's spirit with them. There, in Hollywood, in the early days of silent cinema, Wilde's works were adapted. They were also beginning to define a new kind of style -- a 'Wilde-ish spirit', as Ernst Lubitsch called it -- filtering into the imaginations of Lubitsch himself, as well as Alla Nazimova, Ben Hecht, Samuel Hoffenstein and many others. These were the people who translated Wilde's queer playfulness into the creation of screwball comedies, gangster movies, B-movie horrors, and films noir. There, Wilde and his style embodied a spirit of rebellion and naughtiness, providing a blue-print for the charismatic cinematic criminal and screwball talk onscreen. Discussing films including Bringing Up Baby, Underworld, and Laura, alongside definitive adaptations of Wilde's works, including, The Picture of Dorian Gray, Lady Windermere's Fan, and Salome, Wilde in the Dream Factory revises how we understand both Wilde's afterlife and cinema's beginnings.

Thirteen of Hollywood's horror classics in detail: Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1931), The Old Dark House(1932), The Mask of Fu Manchu (1932), Mark of the Vampire (1935), Mad Love (1935), The Black Room (1935), The Walking Dead (1936), Cat People (1942), Bluebeard (1944), The Lodger (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), Hangover Square (1945) and Bedlam (1946). From original interviews and research, the styles of the various studios (from giant M-G-M to Poverty Row's PRC), along with the performers, directors, and backstage events, are examined.

They made fans go crazy and censors apoplectic, spent fortunes faster than they made them, forged Rembrandts and hung them in major museums, went on trial for committing statutory rape with necrophiliac teenage girls, reinterpreted Hamlet as an incestuous mama's boy,and swilled immeasurable quantities of spirits during week-long parties on wobbly yachts. They were "The Bundy Drive Boys," and they made the Rat Pack look like Cub Scouts. Their self-destructiveness was spectacular, the misanthropy profound, but behind the boozy bravado was a devoted mutual affection. The Bundy Drive Boys' un-bowdlerized stories have never been illustrated so well or told so completely as within Hollywood's Hellfire Club. Author Gregory William Mank also wrote It's Alive!: The Classic Cinema Saga of Frankenstein and Hollywood Cauldron.