“Long and short stories from one of our most distinctive prose stylists,” the author of the National Book Award finalist, Florida: A Novel (New York, “The Best Books of the Year So Far”). Hailed by George Saunders as “a truly gifted writer,” with Pure Hollywood & Other Stories, Pulitzer Prize finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt returns to the short story form that launched her acclaimed career and her inimitable style that John Ashbery once described as “pared down but rich, dense, fevered, exactly right and even eerily beautiful.” In 11 captivating tales, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert seclusion, to a young mother whose rejection of her child has terrible consequences, a newlywed couple who ignore the violent warnings of a painter burned by love, to an eerie portrait of erotic obsession, each story in Pure Hollywood is an imagistic snapshot of what it means to live and learn love and hurt. In league with JD Salinger, Katherine Mansfield and Guy De Maupassant, in Pure Hollywood Schutt gives us sharply suspenseful and masterfully dark interior portraits of ordinary lives, infused with her signature observation and surprise. Timeless, incisive, and precise, these tales are a rush of blood to the head, portals through which we open our eyes and see the world anew. “Schutt’s haunting yet lyrical words linger long after the final page.”—Los Angeles Times “Think Gatsby with a twist of Didion.”—BBC.com “Schutt writes stories that don’t have an ounce of melodrama in them—they feel unusually alive and honest—and few writers capture bereavement with Schutt’s precision and elegance.”—Oprah.com

Jeffrey Richards examines the cultural, social, economic and technological circumstances that dictated the rise and decline of each successive cycle of Ancient World epics, from the silent film era, to the "golden age" of the 1950s, right up to the present day (Gladiator, 300, Rome). Analysis reveals that historical films are always as much about the time in which they are made as they are about the time in which they are set. The ancient world is often used to deliver messages to the contemporary audience about the present: hostility to totalitarian regimes both Fascist and Communist, concern at the decline of Christianity, support for the new state of Israel, celebrations of equality and democracy, and concern about changing gender roles. The whole adds up to a fresh look at a body of films that people think they know, but about which they will learn a good deal more.

Leading us on a journey through familiar twentieth-century American films, this engaging and provocative book proposes that Hollywood has created an imaginary cinematic geography filled with people and places we recognize and to which we are irresistibly drawn. Each viewing of a film stirs, in a very real and charismatic way, feelings of home. The comfort of returning to films like familiar haunts is at the core of our nostalgic desire. Elisabeth Bronfen examines the different ways home is constructed in the development of cinematic narrative, offering close readings of crucial scenes in classic films.

The backstudio picture, or the movie about movie-making, is a staple of Hollywood film production harking back to the silent era and extending to the present day. What gives backstudios their coherence as a distinctive genre, Steven Cohan argues in Hollywood by Hollywood, is their fascination with the mystique of Hollywood as a geographic place, a self-contained industry, and a fantasy of fame, leisure, sexual freedom, and modernity. Yet by the same token, if backstudio pictures have rarely achieved blockbuster box-office success, what accounts for the film industry's interest in continuing to produce them? The backstudio picture has been an enduring genre because, aside from offering a director or writer a chance to settle old scores, in branding filmmaking with the Hollywood mystique, the genre solicits consumers' strong investment in the movies. Whether inspiring the "movie crazy" fan girls of the early teens and twenties or the wannabe filmmakers of this century heading to the West Coast after their college graduations, backstudios have given emotional weight and cultural heft to filmmaking as the quintessential American success story. But more than that, a backstudio picture is concerned with shaping perceptions of how the film industry works, with masking how its product depends upon an industrial labor force, including stardom, and with determining how that work's value accrues from the Hollywood brand stamped onto the product. Cohan supports his well theorized and well researched claims with nuanced discussions of over fifty backstudios, some canonical and well-known, and others obscure and rarely seen. Covering the hundred-year timespan of feature length film production, Hollywood by Hollywood offers an illuminating perspective for considering anew the history of American movies.

To most Americans, Hollywood activism consists of self-obsessed movie stars promoting their pet causes, whether defending marijuana legalization or Second Amendment rights. There's some truth in that stereotype, and in this book you'll find the close personal friends of Fidel Castro, the wannabe cowboys, and the ever-ubiquitous Barbra Streisand. But Citizen Hollywood makes a far more serious case--that Hollywood's influence in Washington runs deeper and affects the country's government more than most of us imagine. Celebrity activism exerts a subtle power over the American political process, and that pressure is nothing new. Through money, networking, and image making, the movie industry has shaped the way that politics works for nearly a century. It has helped to forge a culture that is obsessed with celebrity and spectacle. In return, politicians have become part of the fabric of Hollywood society and cater to the wishes of their new-found friends and fund-raisers. Using original archival research and exclusive interviews with stars, directors, producers, and politicians from both parties, Timothy Stanley's Citizen Hollywood shows that the only way to understand the image-obsessed, volatile politics of modern America is to understand the hidden history of Hollywood's influence on Washington.

Bizarre inside stories of Hollywood's most beautiful women who were doomed for death. Hollywood's Babylon Women takes the reader behind closed doors and beyond the official reports of law enforcement agencies and studio public relations departments to reveal the sordid romantic, sexual, political and financial factors behind these tragedies. Photos.

A provocative account of the impact of Hollywood on other national and alternative cinema traditions. Mills argues that despite popular belief in the dominance of the Hollywood aesthetic, it actually borrows from other cinemas. Jane Mills is Associate Professor of Communications at Charles Sturt University.