I am a film fan and scholar who has a joyful yet complex relationship with Hollywood. I have basked in the classics of Hollywood’s Golden Age (1930s-1950s) from my teen years on, including the musical delights of Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, the screwball comedies of Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, the magnificent Universal monsters, and the deliciously dark creativity of film noir. Reading about the history of Hollywood has helped me enjoy this pastime even more, learning everything from economics and politics to method and form. The more I know, the richer grows my interest in both the past and present of that unique institution we call Hollywood.
I wrote...
What Price Hollywood?: Gender and Sex in the Films of George Cukor
George Dewey Cukor, the gay son of Hungarian-Jewish immigrants, was a director determined to achieve Hollywood success at any cost. What Price Hollywood? is about 80 films directed over 80 years of his life. His work centered on romantic comedies and dramas and included musicals, an Indian epic, and a satirical western. Cukor was known as an “actor’s director” and a "woman's director" for his style of close work with performers, and how well he worked with “difficult”
actresses. My book explores Cukor’s successes, his flops, and his surprisingly rich explorations of gender and sexuality despite the constraints of the Hollywood studio system.
Gabler offers a detailed and persuasive history of Hollywood’s first producers, all immigrant Jewish Americans seeking to achieve the American dream.
This handful of men started in New York as peddlers or small business owners and then moved west to build their own film empires. No one saw motion pictures as more than a superficial pastime, but it seemed a good business opportunity. Unfortunately, Thomas Edison owned the rights and patents that kept Jewish entrepreneurs from accessing New York, so the immigrants went west.
MGM, Warner Brothers, Paramount, 20th Century Fox, and Universal: these were their kingdoms and are still the names we know today as the major Hollywood studios. Meet the remarkable (and sometimes horrible) men who built this world and learn about their lives and ambitions in Gabler’s engaging book.
A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry.
The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these émigrés endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood, and what they gained and lost…
Film critic Molly Haskell provides an excellent narrative overview of the major eras, themes, and issues related to women in film, with particular emphasis on Hollywood’s best, worst, and most complex images and genres.
I especially like the section on “The Women’s Film” as it explains the form and function of melodramas, a.k.a. “the weepies,” which later became “the chick flick.” These films that focus on women’s lives and emotions both limit the way women were (and sometimes still are) portrayed on the big screen while simultaneously centering women’s lives in ways too few films have.
Join Haskell on a trip from the 1920s-1980s, full of strong, honest opinions on the images of women that mainstream Hollywood has offered.
A revolutionary classic of feminist cinema criticism, Molly Haskell's From Reverence to Rape remains as insightful, searing, and relevant as it was the day it was first published. Ranging across time and genres from the golden age of Hollywood to films of the late twentieth century, Haskell analyzes images of women in movies, the relationship between these images and the status of women in society, the stars who fit these images or defied them, and the attitudes of their directors. This new edition features both a new foreword by New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis and a new introduction…
I love film noir and have written and published on it. I’ve also read numerous academic books on noir. But for those who want all the information and less of the jargon, no one does it better than Eddie Muller, author and host of Turner Movie Classics’ Noir Alley and president of the Film Noir Foundation, which hosts annual noir screening events in multiple US cities and publishes a wonderful magazine for members.
Dark City is full of amazing, restored photos alongside informative texts, great for reading and rereading. I keep mine on a coffee table.
TCM host Eddie Muller's Dark City is a film noir lover's bible, taking readers on a tour of the urban landscape of the grim and gritty genre in an authoritative, highly illustrated volume.
This narrative history is packed with stories about the stars and makers of both long-recognized classics like The Maltese Falcon and under-the-radar "lost" greats such as Cry Danger. The book highlights more than one hundred films, breaking down plots and offering insider accounts behind-the-scenes of their making.
". . . a righteous, rip-snorting riff on the ultimate cinematic genre-film noir. This book displays a salutary knowledge of…
I once played Henry Higgins' mother in a local theatrical production of My Fair Lady. I delighted in the music and in portraying (in a white wig and wrinkled make-up) the stern, wise Mrs. Higgins, even as I also wondered whether Higgins and Pickering were perhaps secretly a couple and if Eliza was asexual.
This made me want to read the play on which My Fair Lady is based, George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion. I did not get answers to my somewhat whimsical questions about sexuality, but I did see in even greater relief the turning of women into objects that ambitious, selfish men may do.
Katharine Hepburn, who worked with George Cukor in a whopping ten films, was known for her strength. She was a strong actor with strong opinions and a strong presence. She went through phases from atypical ingénue to box office poison to megastar.
Learning about her life through Hepburn’s own perspectives in her own words is riveting. She is prickly and poignant, biting and benevolent.
Photographs from Hepburn's personal collection highlight the candid memoirs of the life, long career, friendships, and loves of the legendary Hollywood actress
As a trauma therapist and dedicated researcher, I love uncovering valuable insights within lesser-known books. There are hidden gems, free from the pressure of commercial success, crafted by authors deeply committed to research, understanding, and the art of writing itself. Their dedication resonates with me, as I believe in the profound value of information and the power of critical thinking. Through my own book, Traumatization and Its Aftermath, I aim to emphasize that psychological concepts often lose their depth in translation and my mission is spreading awareness and fostering a deeper understanding of trauma and its intricate facets. With that idea in mind, I chose these five titles.
A fresh take on the difference between trauma and hardship in order to help accurately spot the difference and avoid over-generalizations.
The book integrates the latest findings in brain science, child development, psycho-social context, theory, and clinical experiences to make the case that trauma is much more than a cluster of symptoms to be tamed, but instead best understood as development gone off course, away from growth and towards (only) survival.
This book prompts a profound shift in perception, inviting to view trauma as an intricate and diverse experience, a point of view that ultimately leads to sharper treatment and, hopefully, more healing. It encourages a transition from asking, "What happened to you?" to the deeper question, "What is your relationship with what happened to you?"
Traumatization and Its Aftermath: A Systemic Approach to Understanding and Treating Trauma Disorders
The book is comprehensive, bold, and practical-a much-needed resource for the assessment and treatment of trauma. Instead of the traditional focus on the overall importance of healing, Traumatization and its Aftermath decodes why some people don't heal as easily as others, analyzes the various failures of diagnosis, and explains how to make therapeutic interventions truly effective.
This book offers a systemic deep dive into traumatization that clarifies myths and misinformation about the entire spectrum of trauma and provides both clinicians and non-clinicians with the right level of validation, preventive measures, conceptualization methodology, assessment tools, and healing facts that have not…
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