Russ Meyer, cult hero, creator of the sexploitation film, and the man the Wall Street Journal called the King Leer of Hollywood, made movies that filled the big screen with “big bosoms and square jaws.” In the first candid and fiendishly researched account of the late cinematic instigator’s life, Jimmy McDonough shows us how Russ Meyer used that formula to turn his own crazed fantasies into movies that made him a millionaire and changed the face of American film forever. This former WWII combat photographer immortalized his personal sexual obsession upon the silver screen, creating box-office gold with The Immoral Mr. Teas in 1959. The modest little film pushed all preexisting limits of on-screen nudity, and with its success, the floodgates of what was permitted to be shown on film were thrust open, never to be closed again. Russ Meyer ignited a true revolution in filmmaking, breaking all sex, nudity, and violence taboos. In a career that spanned more than forty years, Meyer created a body of work that has influenced a legion of filmmakers, fashionistas, comic book artists, rock bands, and even the occasional feminist. Bringing his anecdote- and action-packed biographical style to another renegade of popular culture, New York Times bestselling author of Shakey Jimmy McDonough offers a wild, warts-and-all portrait of Russ Meyer, the director, writer, producer, and commando moviemaking force behind the sexploitation classics Vixen, Beyond the Valley of the Dolls, Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill! and many others. Big Bosoms and Square Jaws blows the lid off the story of Russ Meyer, from the beginning to his recent tragic demise, creating in the process a vivid portrait of a past America.

From the late 50s to the 1980s, Russ Meyer's career left landmarks on the cultural map of the movie industry. His trademark was the large-breasted, dominant, heroic woman. The editor offers a useful film companion to Meyer's oeuvre.

Russ Meyer is the breast-fixated filmmaker who started as a nude pin-up photographer and progressed through his own startling brand of B-cinema to direct probably the most bizarre film ever funded by a major Hollywood -studio-"Beyond the Valley of the Dolls," Meyer's 1960s films-including "Mudhoney, Motorpsycho!" and the legendary "Faster, Pussycat! Kill! Kill!"-are now venerated as modern classics, and "Lips Hips Tits Power" examines Meyer's entire cinematic oeuvre in -detail, affording it the serious analysis it undeniably warrants. Featuring famous girls from Meyer's repertory company such as Tura Satana, Kitten Natividad, Uschi Digard, Haji and Erica Gavin, "Lips Hips Tits Power" offers a visual feast of buxotic female flesh to offset its critical commentary, resulting in a book which operates on two-equally stimulating-levels.

From 1997 to 2003, Buffy the Vampire Slayer single-handedly reinvented the high-school genre, splicing it with action, comedy and the supernatural. Series by series, Anne Billson unravels the magic of Buffy, examining the antecedents, influences and the new twist on the age-old story of the struggle between Good and Evil.

The New York Times Bestselling Book--Great gift for Foodies “The best, funniest, most revealing inside look at the restaurant biz since Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential.” —Jay McInerney With a foreword by Mario Batali Joe Bastianich is unquestionably one of the most successful restaurateurs in America—if not the world. So how did a nice Italian boy from Queens turn his passion for food and wine into an empire? In Restaurant Man, Joe charts a remarkable journey that first began in his parents’ neighborhood eatery. Along the way, he shares fascinating stories about his establishments and his superstar chef partners—his mother, Lidia Bastianich, and Mario Batali. Ever since Anthony Bourdain whet literary palates with Kitchen Confidential, restaurant memoirs have been mainstays of the bestseller lists. Serving up equal parts rock ’n’ roll and hard-ass business reality, Restaurant Man is a compelling ragu-to-riches chronicle that foodies and aspiring restauranteurs alike will be hankering to read.

Action! draws on the very best published and unpublished interviews of the Bright Lights Film Journal, and contains many gems, including the last ever interview given by Francois Truffaut, four months before he died. The book also benefits from many rare photographs of these great directors on set, and scenes from their groundbreaking works.

These days it takes a very special vampire movie to stand out. Like Twilight, the Swedish film Let the Right One In is a love story between a human and a vampire but there the resemblance ends. Let the Right One In is not a romantic fantasy but combines the supernatural with social realism. Set on a housing estate in the suburbs of Stockholm in the early 1980s, it's the story of Oskar, a lonely, bullied child, who makes friends with Eli, the girl in the next apartment. 'Oskar, I'm not a girl,' she tells him and she's not kidding. They forge a relationship which is oddly innocent yet disturbing, two outsiders against the rest of the world. But one of these outsiders is, effectively, a serial killer. While Let the Right One In is startlingly original, it nevertheless couldn't have existed without the near century of vampire cinema that preceded it. Acclaimed film critic and horror novelist Anne Billson looks at how it has drawn from, and wrung new twists on, such classics as Nosferatu (1922), how vampire cinema has already flirted with social realism in films like Near Dark (1987) and how vampire mythology adapts itself to the modern world.