Showing titles in Film & TV

The Blues Brothers hit theatres on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local Chicago orphanage; but Aykroyd, who conceived and wrote much of the film, had a greater mission: to honour the then-seemingly forgotten tradition of rhythm and blues, some of whose greatest artists.

From 1941 to 1953, director John Huston and actor Humphrey Bogart made one classic film after another, from The Maltese Falcon to The African Queen. Here is the story of their close but combative friendship that produced some of the best movies ever made. Their friendship was as dramatic as any of their movies. It survived nine marriages, a world war, the blacklist, leeches, alcohol, and Jack L. Warner.

Over the course of its seven-year run, Buffy the Vampire Slayer cultivated a loyal fandom and featured a strong, complex female lead, at a time when such a character was a rarity. Evan Ross Katz explores the show’s cultural relevance through a book that is part oral history, part celebration, and part memoir of a personal fandom that has universal resonance still, decades later. Katz reveals that although Buffy contributed to important conversations about gender, sexuality, and feminism, it was not free of internal strife, controversy, and shortcomings.

Despite being underestimated due to his accent and origins, Desi Arnaz’s legacy is monumental. Purdum’s biography, enriched with unpublished materials and interviews, reveals the man behind the legend and highlights his enduring contributions to pop culture and television. This book is a must-hear biography about innovation, resilience, and the relentless drive of a man who changed TV forever.

There is one sure-fire way of improving your novel fast...You may know the fundamentals of how to write fiction. You may be more than competent in plot, structure and characters. But if your dialogue is dull it will drag the whole story down...Don't sabotage your chances of selling your work to readers or publishers because the dialogue is unexceptional. Dazzle them with what the characters say. How to Write Dazzling Dialogue will give you the tools to do it.

A 13th-century toxic jungle, a bathhouse for tired gods, a red haired fish girl, and a furry woodland spirit - what do these have in common? They all spring from the mind of Hayao Miyazaki, one of the greatest living animators, known worldwide for films such as My Neighbor Totoro, Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, Howl’s Moving Castle, and The Wind Rises. Japanese culture and animation scholar Susan Napier explores the life and art of this extraordinary Japanese filmmaker to provide a definitive account of his oeuvre.

The Simpsons has been predicting major events with scary accuracy for over three decades, from Donald Trump's presidency to Disney buying 20th Century Fox. People just can't seem to get enough and are eager to know what it's going to predict next. This book goes behind the scenes of this adored cartoon series, and the family we've grown to love. Between Homer, Marge, Bart, Lisa, and the rest of the Simpsons family, the show has stolen our hearts, and also left us amazed at how often The Simpsons predicts the future!

In the past decade, Hollywood has endured a cataclysm on a par with the end of silent film and the demise of the studio system. Stars and directors have seen their power dwindle, while writers and producers lift their best techniques from TV, comic books, and the toy biz. The future of Hollywood is being written by powerful corporate brands like Marvel, Amazon, Netflix, and Lego, as well as censors in China. Ben Fritz chronicles this dramatic shakeup with unmatched skill, bringing equal fluency to both the financial and entertainment aspects of Hollywood.

Eric Edson has developed a new tool for bringing depth and passion to any screenplay or novel - the 23 Actions All Great Heroes Must Take. It's an easy-to-understand paradigm that provides writers and filmmakers the interconnecting, powerful storytelling elements they need. With true insight, this accomplished screenwriter and university professor pinpoints the story structure reasons most new spec scripts don't sell.

ECW was one extreme contradiction piled on top of another. It was an incredibly influential company in the world of professional wrestling during the 1990s, yet it was never profitable. It portrayed itself as the ultimate in anti-authority rebellion, but its leadership was, at various points, working covertly with the two wrestling giants, the World Wrestling Federation and World Championship Wrestling. Most of all, it blurred the line between real life and the fantasy world of professional wrestling like no other company before it.

One of my dad’s favorite jokes about getting older was: “I went out for coffee when I was twenty-one and when I got back I was fifty-eight!” I get what he meant now. Time flies. My first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a "B" Movie Actor, was published back in 2001 and it chronicles the adventures of a “mid-grade, kind of hammy actor" (my words), cutting his teeth on exploitation movies far removed from mainstream Hollywood. This next book, an “Act II” if you will, could be considered my “maturing years” in show business, when I began to say “no” more often and gravitated toward self-generated material. Taking stock in the overall quality of my life, I fled Los Angeles and moved to a remote part of Oregon to renew, regroup and reload. If that sounds tame, the journey from Evil Dead to Spider-Man to Burn Notice was long, with plenty of adventures/mishaps along the way. I never pictured myself hovering above Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, facing a pack of wild dogs in Bulgaria, or playing an aging Elvis Presley with cancer on his penis - how can you predict this stuff? The sheer lunacy of show business is part of the fun for me and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

Down and Dirty Pictures chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers and of the twin engines - the Sundance Film Festival and Miramax Films - that have powered them. Peter Biskind profiles the people who took the independent movement from obscurity to the Oscars, most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax an indie powerhouse.

In this elegant and compelling biography, best-selling writer Shawn Levy writes of these many De Niros - the characters and the man - seeking to understand the evolution of an actor who once dove deeply into his roles as if to hide his inner nature, and who now seemingly avoids acting challenges, taking roles which make few apparent demands on his overwhelming talent.

Zombies in North London, death cults in the West Country, the engineering deck of the Enterprise: actor, comedian, writer, and self-proclaimed supergeek Simon Pegg has been ploughing some bizarre furrows in recent times. Having blasted on to the small screen in the gut-busting and now legendary sitcom Spaced, his enduring appeal and rise to nation’s-favourite-son status has been mercurial, meteoric, megatronic, but mostly just plain great.

This is the full story of the unstoppable rise of Clarkson, Hammond, May and The Stig – and how they have transformed an ordinary programme about cars into one of the most famous and best-loved TV programmes of the 21st century. Reaching a peak in the 1990s thanks to presenter Jeremy Clarkson, the original series then faced the axe in 2001 – but Clarkson and producer Andy Wilman successfully pitched a new format to BBC bosses and Top Gear returned to become the irreverent, funny and often controversial show we now know and love.

This book is a comprehensive history of the most successful straight-to-video horror franchise of all time: Puppet Master. It provides an in-depth exploration of all 14 films to date—including a made-for-TV crossover and a theatrical reboot—and the action figures, comics, and other merchandise that have helped to keep the brand alive for the past 30 years.

The quirky autobiography of Charlotte Crosby - Celebrity Big Brother winner, fitness DVD best seller and Geordie Shore's best loved and funniest star. Charlotte Crosby has been one of the UK's best-loved TV stars since she burst onto the celeb scene in 2011 with Geordie Shore. Laugh-out-loud hilarious, genuine, and a proper Geordie, Charlotte's popularity has even seen her crowned winner of 2013's Celebrity Big Brother.

You may have watched hundreds of episodes of The Simpsons (and its sister show Futurama) without ever realising that they contain enough maths to form an entire university course. In The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets, Simon Singh explains how the brilliant writers, some of the mathematicians, have smuggled in mathematical jokes throughout the cartoon’s 25-year history, exploring everything from p to Mersenne primes, from Euler’s equation to the unsolved riddle of P vs. NP, from perfect numbers to narcissistic numbers and much more.

In Burn It Down, veteran reporter Maureen Ryan does just that. She draws on decades of experience to connect the dots and illuminate the deeper forces sustaining Hollywood’s corrosive culture. Fresh reporting sheds light on problematic situations at companies like Lucasfilm and shows like Lost, Saturday Night Live, The Goldbergs, Sleepy Hollow, Curb Your Enthusiasm and more.

At once a pop culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch's work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch's life also evades simple categorization, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur, and vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation.