Showing results by publisher "Blackstone Publishing" in Entertainment & Celebrities

For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy’s birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy’s creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood’s history. Now that story is finally being told.

The killing of six-year-old beauty queen JonBenét Ramsey—found in the basement of her family home in Boulder, Colorado, with a smashed skull and a garrote placed around her neck—remains one of America’s most shameful unsolved crimes. A flawed investigation, fraught with police, prosecutorial misconduct, and widespread evidence tampering, means that the little girl’s killer remains at large after more than two decades.

In 1996, Patterson Hood recruited friends and fellow musicians in Athens, Georgia, to form his dream band: a group with no set lineup that specialized in rowdy rock and roll. The Drive-By Truckers, as they named themselves, grew into one of the best and most consequential rock bands of the 21st century, a great live act whose songs deliver the truth and nuance rarely bestowed on Southerners, so often reduced to stereotypes. Where the Devil Don’t Stay tells the band’s unlikely story not chronologically but geographically.

Is any superhero cooler than Batman? He’s a crime-fighting vigilante with a tragic past, a lawless attitude, and a seemingly endless supply of high-tech gadgetry. In this memoir, author Michael E. Uslan recalls his journey from early childhood fandom through to the decades he spent on a caped crusade of his own: to bring Batman to the silver screen as the dark, serious character he was at heart.

Academy Award-winning director Michael Curtiz—whose best-known films include Casablanca, Yankee Doodle Dandy, Mildred Pierce, and White Christmas—was in many ways the anti-auteur. During his 27-year tenure at Warner Bros., he directed swashbuckling adventures, Westerns, musicals, war epics, romances, historical dramas, horror films, tearjerkers, melodramas, comedies, and film noir masterpieces. In the first biography of this colorful, instinctual artist, Alan K. Rode illuminates the life and work of one of the film industry's most complex figures.

In this long-awaited memoir, dancer and choreographer John Clifford offers a highly personal look inside the day-to-day operations of the New York City Ballet and its creative mastermind, George Balanchine. Balanchine’s Apprentice is the story of Clifford - an exceptionally talented artist - and the guiding inspiration for his life’s work in dance.

In the years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, women in the workplace still found themselves relegated to secretarial positions or locked out of jobs entirely. This was especially true in the news business, a backwater of male chauvinism in which a woman might be lucky to get a foothold on the “women’s pages”. But when a pioneering nonprofit called National Public Radio came along in the 1970s and the door to serious journalism opened a crack, four remarkable women came along and blew it off the hinges.

Brian Holland, Edward Holland, and Lamont Dozier, known as Holland-Dozier-Holland or H-D-H, were the greatest songwriting team in American pop music history. Seventy of the songs they wrote reached the Billboard Top 40, with 15 of these reaching number one on the Billboard Hot 100 pop chart. No other songwriting team or individual has come close to equaling, let alone surpassing, this record. They’ve been inducted into both the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and the Songwriters Hall of Fame.

Perfect for old and new fans alike, Dancing on the Edge is an intimate and powerful story about the singular life of one of our most gifted storytellers, artists, and stars of the silver screen.

In Keanu Reeves: Most Triumphant, cultural critic Alex Pappademas attempts to address Keanu’s unmatched eternality and the other big questions raised by his career arc. Sharp, funny, deeply researched, and fully celebratory of the enigmatic actor, this is the first book to take Keanu’s whole deal as seriously as it deserves. Yes, even Johnny Mnemonic, where Keanu mind melds with a dolphin. Along the way, Pappademas reveals the lessons we can learn from Keanu about Hollywood, our broader culture, and even life itself.

Phantom Lady chronicles the untold story of Hollywood’s most powerful female writer-producer of the 1940s. In 1933 Joan Harrison was a 26-year-old former salesgirl with a dream of escaping her stodgy London suburb and the dreadful prospect of settling down with one of the local boys. A few short years later, she was Alfred Hitchcock’s confidante and the Oscar-nominated screenwriter of his first American film, Rebecca. Harrison had quickly grown from being the worst secretary Hitchcock ever had to one of his closest collaborators.

Stevie Salas was one of many boys coming of age in the 1980s—when the American dream was rock superstardom. As lead guitarist for a San Diego band, Salas played backyard parties and school dances and even scored the music for the cult classic Bill & Ted’s Excellent Adventure. When he auditioned for Rod Stewart—where he was the youngest band member by a decade—Salas’s life truly hit a turning point.

Beginning with his childhood growing up in Chicago’s Cabrini Green neighborhood, Ramsey Lewis recounts his memories of the music in his parents’ church and his early piano lessons. As he learned classical technique, Lewis also absorbed countless jazz records and heard gospel music weekly, finally becoming a performer himself in his teenage years. With his coauthor and collaborator, Aaron Cohen, Lewis describes his early steps in jazz from joining the Clefs in the ’50s, to eventually establishing the Ramsey Lewis Trio. This memoir provides an evocative tour of Lewis’s life.

John Cotter was thirty years old when he first began to notice a ringing in his ears. Soon the ringing became a roar inside his head. Next came partial deafness, then dizziness and vertigo that rendered him unable to walk, work, sleep, or even communicate. At a stage of life when he expected to be emerging fully into adulthood, teaching, and writing books, he found himself “crippled and dependent” and in search of care.

Martin Duberman, one of the LGBTQ+ community’s maverick thinkers and historians, looks back on ninety years of life, his history in the movement, and what he’s learned. In the early sixties, Martin Duberman published a path-breaking article defending the Abolitionists against the then-standard view of them as “misguided fanatics.” In 1964, his documentary play, In White America, which reread the history of racist oppression in this country, toured the country—most notably during Freedom Summer—and became an international hit.

Anna May Wong remains one of Hollywood’s best-known Chinese American actors. Between 1919 and 1960, Anna May Wong starred in over fifty movies, sharing billing with stars such as Douglas Fairbanks Sr., Marlene Dietrich, Joan Crawford, Ramon Novarro, and Warner Oland. Her life, though, is the prototypical story of an immigrant’s difficult path through the prejudices of American culture. In a narrative that recalls the pathos of life in LA's Chinese neighborhoods and the glamour of Hollywood’s pleasure palaces, Graham Russell Gao Hodges recovers the life of a Hollywood legend.

This is a collection of twenty-three original interviews with stars of the silent screen, with biographical information and a filmography included for each. Interviewed are Lew Ayres, William Bakewell, Lina Basquette, Madge Bellamy, Eleanor Boardman, Ethlyne Clair, Junior Coghlan, Joyce Compton, Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Dorothy Gulliver, Maxine Elliott Hicks, Dorothy Janis, George Lewis, Marion Mack, Patsy Ruth Miller, Lois Moran, Baby Marie Osborne, Muriel Ostriche, Eddie Quillan, Esther Ralston, Dorothy Revier, David Rollins, and Gladys Walton.

As a Ziegfeld Follies girl and film actress, Justine Johnstone (1895-1982) was celebrated as "the most beautiful woman in the world." Her career took an unexpected turn when she abruptly retired from acting at 31. For the remainder of her life, she dedicated herself to medical research and social activism. The first full-length biography of Johnstone chronicles her extraordinary success in two male-dominated fields - show business and medical science - and follows her remarkable journey into a fascinating and fulfilling life.

For 35 years, it has been a riddle which has gripped the world. Part love story, part tragedy, it has all the elements of a Hollywood blockbuster: a beautiful actress, a handsome leading man, a brooding sidekick...and a moment of sickening terror with the most horrific consequences. When Natalie Wood - one-time America’s sweetheart and star of West Side Story, Rebel Without a Cause, and Miracle on 34th Street - was found washed up in the cold waters off Catalina Island, California on Thanksgiving weekend 1981, it initially looked like a freak accident.

In Ernesto, Andrew Feldman uses his unprecedented access to newly available archives to tell the full story of Hemingway’s self-professed Cuban-ness: his respect for Cojímar fishermen, his long-running affair with a Cuban lover, the warmth of his adoptive Cuban family, the strong influences on his work by Cuban writers, his connections to Cuban political figures and celebrities, his denunciation of American imperial ambitions, and his enthusiastic role in the revolution.