A collection of short stories from the darkside of showbusiness,including strange tales set in the movie,television & music industries!!

A collection of short stories from the darkside of showbusiness set in modern day Hollywood!!

Quentin Tarantino’s long-awaited first work of fiction—at once hilarious, delicious and brutal—is the always surprising, sometimes shocking, novelization of his Academy Award winning film. RICK DALTON—Once he had his own TV series, but now Rick’s a washed-up villain-of-the week drowning his sorrows in whiskey sours. Will a phone call from Rome save his fate or seal it? CLIFF BOOTH—Rick’s stunt double, and the most infamous man on any movie set because he’s the only one there who might have got away with murder. . . . SHARON TATE—She left Texas to chase a movie-star dream, and found it. Sharon’s salad days are now spent on Cielo Drive, high in the Hollywood Hills. CHARLES MANSON—The ex-con’s got a bunch of zonked-out hippies thinking he’s their spiritual leader, but he’d trade it all to be a rock ‘n’ roll star.

Hollywood marks the fifth episode in Gore Vidal's "Narratives of Empire," his celebrated series of six historical novels that form his extended biography of the United States. It is 1917, and President Woodrow Wilson is about to lead the country into the Great War in Europe. In California, a new industry is born that will irreversibly transform America. Caroline Sanford, the alluring heroine of Empire, discovers the power of moving pictures to manipulate reality as she vaults to screen stardom under the name of Emma Traxler. Just as Caroline must balance her two lives--West Coast movie star and East Coast newspaper publisher and senator's mistress--so too must America balance its two power centers: Hollywood and Washington. Here is history as only Gore Vidal can re-create it: brimming with intrigue and scandal, peopled by the greats of the silver screen and American politics. "Hollywood shimmers with the illusion of politics and the politics of illusion," wrote the Chicago Sun-Times. "A wonderfully literate and consistently impressive work of fiction that clearly belongs on a shelf with Vidal's best," said The New York Times Book Review. With a new Introduction by the author.

All too often, highly fictionalized cinematic depictions of the past are accepted as the unassailable truth by those unfamiliar with the "real" account. This book profiles sixty movies that portray actual moments in history, and compares the mythologized account of each event to what really happened. Movies chronicled include The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, A Man for All Seasons, Gladiator, Gandhi, Apollo 13, The Thin Red Line, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The Last Emperor, All the Presidents Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Bonnie & Clyde, Patton, and Elizabeth. Sanello also contrasts several historical figures with their filmed treatments, including Julius Caesar, Henry V, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Jesus Christ, Catherine the Great, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. Lavishly illustrated with sixty film stills, Reel v. Real shows how a happening's genuine details are frequently reshaped and distorted by Hollywood's bottomless appetite for over-the-top flamboyance and melodrama.

$50 Billion of Advice in One Book* Have you ever wondered why some books and stories are adapted into movies, and others aren't? Or wished you could sit down and pick the brains of the people whose stories have been adapted--or the screenwriters, producers, and directors who adapted them? Author John Robert Marlow has done it for you. He spoke to book authors, playwrights, comic book creators and publishers, as well as Hollywood screenwriters, producers and directors responsible for adapting fictional and true stories into Emmy-winning TV shows, Oscar-winning films, billion-dollar megahits and smaller independents. Then he talked to the entertainment attorneys who made the deals. He came away with a unique understanding of adaptations--an understanding he shares in this book: which stories make good source material (and why); what Hollywood wants (and doesn't); what you can (and can't) get in a movie deal; how to write and pitch your story to maximize the chances of a Hollywood adaptation--and how much (and when) you can expect to be paid. *This book contains the distilled experience of creators, storytellers and others whose works have earned over $50 billion worldwide. Whether you're looking to sell film rights, adapt your own story (alone or with help), or option and adapt someone else's property--this book is for you.

One evening, spying on his Hollywood Hills neighbours through his $4,000 electronic telescope, Bobby witnesses a beautiful woman making love to a handsome Latin actor called Ramon. As their pillow talk turns ugly, Bobby watches in horror as the woman appears to bludgeon her lover to death with his own acting trophy. Instead of rushing to the cops, Bobby decides to find out more about the events that led up to the crime, and to use the material for his next movie screenplay. However, when he sneaks into the actor's apartment, the discovery he makes changes his life forever. Empowered by his secret knowledge, Bobby is able to seduce the beautiful woman, while forging a unique friendship with Detective Dennis Farentino, the cop in charge of the investigation. Before long Bobby has dragged the detective, his wife, his lover, and his agent into a Hollywood fun-house hall of mirrors, where only the most manipulative player will survive.