Here are 100 books that The Devil's Candy fans have personally recommended if you like
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I was old (or young) enough to have only seen two Kubrick films in the cinema: Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut. I began teaching film studies and Hollywood in 1998, and I have been teaching and researching Kubrick intensively since 2007, visiting his archive in London on numerous occasions. At one point, I held the record for the researcher who had spent the most hours in the Archive. I also met Christiane and Jan and spoke to many others who knew and worked with Kubrick. Having been familiar with Robert Kolker’s work, it became clear that collaborating with an international authority on film was a necessity as well as a pleasure.
Peter Biskind chronicles the rise of New Hollywood in the 1970s, featuring such "movie brat" directors as Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Steven Spielberg. But he also refers to such older directors as Stanley Kubrick.
It’s written in a chatty and easy-to-read style and is full of useful tidbits of information about Kubrick and especially his new backers at Warner Brothers.
When the low-budget biker movie Easy Rider shocked Hollywood with its success in 1969, a new Hollywood era was born. This was an age when talented young filmmakers such as Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg, along with a new breed of actors, including De Niro, Pacino, and Nicholson, became the powerful figures who would make such modern classics as The Godfather, Chinatown, Taxi Driver, and Jaws. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls follows the wild ride that was Hollywood in the '70s -- an unabashed celebration of sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll (both onscreen and off) and a climate where innovation and…
I have been teaching and writing about post-WWII American film for over thirty years now, with a particular passion for (behind the scenes) Hollywood history. Road Trip to Nowhere follows up on a new sort of movie industry history I introduced in my 2017 book on 1950s Los Angeles, Hard-Boiled Hollywood. Both books focus on actors, writers, producers, and directors who don’t quite make it—aspirants and would-be players kicked to the side of the road, so to speak, and others who for reasons we may or may not understand just walked away from the modern American dream life of stardom and celebrity.
Harris focuses on Oscar night 1968 as four of the five films nominated for Best Picture evinced Hollywood’s reluctant affirmation of the American counterculture. These “pictures at a revolution,” as he terms them—Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the Oscar winnerIn the Heat of the Night—signaled a necessary industry re-think, away from bloated old-Hollywood blockbusters (like Dr. Dolittle, the fifth nominee) and towards something more politically savvy and more hip. Harris does well to chronicle the backstage/behind-the-scenes histories of all five of these films.
“Pictures at a Revolution is probably one of the best books I've ever read in my life.” —Quentin Tarantino
The New York Times bestseller that follows the making of five films at a pivotal time in Hollywood history
In the mid-1960s, westerns, war movies, and blockbuster musicals like Mary Poppins swept the box office. The Hollywood studio system was astonishingly lucrative for the few who dominated the business. That is, until the tastes of American moviegoers radically- and unexpectedly-changed. By the Oscar ceremonies of 1968, a cultural revolution had hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami, and films like…
We write mysteries set during the Golden Age of Hollywood that feature costume designer Edith Head, so naturally, we love books about film history. We’ve found that some of the best books to tackle the subject aren’t biographies of individuals or profiles of film studios but case studies of single films. Concentrating on one movie and all of the personnel and creative decisions behind it allows an author to explore every aspect of filmmaking and explain how it really works…even when the film in question doesn’t.
We’re film noir fanatics, so naturally, we’d be interested in an exhaustive history of the greatest modern example of the form. But Wasson sets his sights even higher. As the subtitle indicates, he also documents the end of multiple eras in the movie business.
Chinatown (1974) marked the close of the “New Hollywood” period when artists called the shots, as well as serving as a lush final example of big studio filmmaking, with all of Paramount’s resources in service of what’s universally acknowledged as one of the finest screenplays ever written. Wasson makes the action behind the scenes as compelling as the mystery on the screen.
Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making. In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of its most colorful characters. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage murder of his wife, returning to…
Chris Nashawaty is a writer, editor and former Entertainment Weekly movie critic whose work regularly appears in Esquire, Vanity Fair, and Sports Illustrated. He is also the author of Caddyshack: The Making of a Hollywood Cinderella Story and Crab Monsters, Teenage Cavemen, and Candystripe Nurses--Roger Corman: King of the B-Movie. He is currently working on a book about eight sci-fi movies from the summer of 1982 that changed Hollywood. He lives in Westport, Connecticut.
I’ve been a fan of Josh Karp’s for years. So much so, that at this point I just blindly trust his taste. If he thinks something is worth writing about, I tend to end up agreeing. In Orson Welles’ Last Movie, he puts on his private-eye hat and starts digging into the legendary Citizen Kane director’s unfinished final film, The Other Side of the Wind (it was completed after Karp’s book was published and aired on Netflix). Yes, the story is about an auteur’s quest to realize his vision against crushing odds, but it’s also about something much larger—a promising young genius who tragically flamed out too soon and battled with every last breath and cent to do what he was born to do. Parts of it almost read like a Shakespearian tragedy.
Come Along...with Orson Welles as he returns to Hollywood in Summer 1970, to make an innovative comeback movie, The Other Side of the Wind, about a legendary director who wants to make an innovative comeback movie. Watch...Welles attempt to create a Citizen Kane-like masterpiece that will restore his career. See...Welles at his most Wellesian: clever, crazed; masterful, maniacal; kind, cruel; enlightened, enraged; in command and out of control. Costarring John Huston...the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking adventurer and filmmaker who portrays Jake Hannaford, the hard-drinking, cigar-smoking adventurer and filmmaker at the center of the film. Running Time: A two-hour movie...about a single day...that…
Having been a Hollywood writer for thirty years, and now written a novel that although satirical still accurately describes the creation of a TV series, I’ve long been amazed at how many Hollywood stories – including films made in Hollywood – offer fantasies that have even less to do with the reality of love and work in film and television than Game of Thrones does with the real Middle Ages. I’ve written fantasy myself, but for people fascinated by Hollywood, or who want to work in film and TV, there’s a reason too to read books that capture the reality, especially when like the books listed here, they do so astonishingly well.
In my book club I’m known as Second Carl, since Carl Gottlieb has been a member far longer than I. In fact, I was still a lawyer in Washington, D.C. secretly dreaming about Hollywood but never suspecting I’d someday myself work on a Spielberg TV series, when I read this short, fast, now revered account of the filming of Spielberg’s breakout film. It proved to be a deeply accurate and comprehensive description – and warning – about what life and work on location and in Hollywood itself would be like. It’s also so engagingly readable and relevant, a Broadway musical based on the book is in tryouts as I write these words.
Winner of 3 Oscars [registered] and the highest grossing film of its time, "Jaws" was a phenomenon, and this is the only book on how 26-year-old Steven Spielberg transformed Peter Benchley's best-selling novel into the classic film it became. Hired by Spielberg as a screenwriter to work with him on the set while the movie was being made, Carl Gottlieb, and actor and writer, was there throughout the production that starred Roy Scheider, Robert Shaw, and Richard Dreyfuss. After filming was over, with Spielberg's cooperation, Gottlieb chronicled the extraordinary year-long adventure in "The Jaws Log", which was first published in…
Tom Santopietro is the author of eight books, including the New York Times Editor’s ChoiceConsidering Doris Day, The Importance of Being Barbra, Sinatra in Hollywood, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters, and The Godfather Effect. A frequent media commentator and interviewer, he lectures on classic films and over the past thirty years has managed more than two dozen Broadway shows.
Film historian and professor Jeanine Basinger covers the entire history of the movie musical with scholarship, laugh-out loud asides, and a love of film that shines through on every page. No one knows more about film than Basinger but she wears her knowledge lightly, inviting the reader to join in the fun.
Irresistible and authoritative, The Movie Musical! is an in-depth look at the singing, dancing, happy-making world of Hollywood musicals, beautifully illustrated in color and black-and-white--an essential text for anyone who's ever laughed, cried, or sung along at the movies.
Leading film historian Jeanine Basinger reveals, with her trademark wit and zest, the whole story of the Hollywood musical--in the most telling, most incisive, most detailed, most gorgeously illustrated book of her long and remarkable career. From Fred Astaire, whom she adores, to La La Land, which she deplores, Basinger examines a dazzling array of stars, strategies, talents, and innovations in…
Tom Santopietro is the author of eight books, including the New York Times Editor’s ChoiceConsidering Doris Day, The Importance of Being Barbra, Sinatra in Hollywood, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters, and The Godfather Effect. A frequent media commentator and interviewer, he lectures on classic films and over the past thirty years has managed more than two dozen Broadway shows.
McClintick makes the Hollywood boardroom scandal that began with David Begelman’s forgery of Cliff Robertson’s name on a $10,000 check, into a compulsively readable account of power run amok amongst Hollywood-Wall Street executives. An expose of theft, cover-up, and blackmail, it is also a beautifully written, incisive portrait of men and women seduced by the glamor and power of Hollywood fame.
When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street. Soon powerful studio executives were engulfed in controversy; careers derailed; reputations died; and a ruthless, take-no-prisoners corporate power struggle for the world-famous Hollywood dream factory began.
First published in 1982, this now classic story of greed and lies in Tinseltown appears here with a stunning final chapter on Begelman's…
Tom Santopietro is the author of eight books, including the New York Times Editor’s ChoiceConsidering Doris Day, The Importance of Being Barbra, Sinatra in Hollywood, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters, and The Godfather Effect. A frequent media commentator and interviewer, he lectures on classic films and over the past thirty years has managed more than two dozen Broadway shows.
Film Historian Eyman eschews the tired caricature of Mayer as a cigar-chomping Hollywood mogul, instead delving into his immigrant roots and love of America, all of it informing Mayer’s tyrannical approach to running MGM, an approach that, unlike today’s dealmakers, was always leavened by a genuine love of movies. In the process, Eyman delivers a sweeping history of Hollywood’s outsized impact upon 20th century American life, filtered through the life story of a studio head who greenlit Ninotchka, The Wizard of Oz, Meet Me in St. Louis, and An American in Paris.
'Lion of Hollywood' is the definitive biography of Louis B Mayer, the chief of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer - MGM - the biggest and most successful film studio of Hollywood's Golden Age.
An immigrant from tsarist Russia, Mayer began in the film business as an exhibitor but soon migrated to where the action and the power were, Hollywood. Through sheer force of energy and foresight, he turned his own modest studio into MGM, where he became the most powerful man in Hollywood, bending the film business to his will. He made legendary films, including the fabulous MGM musicals, and he made iconic stars:…
Tom Santopietro is the author of eight books, including the New York Times Editor’s ChoiceConsidering Doris Day, The Importance of Being Barbra, Sinatra in Hollywood, Why To Kill a Mockingbird Matters, and The Godfather Effect. A frequent media commentator and interviewer, he lectures on classic films and over the past thirty years has managed more than two dozen Broadway shows.
When a Hollywood legend’s child writes a biography of his or her parent, the result usually ends up as either a hatchet job (Mommie Dearest) or candy-coated alternative history. But here, Marlene Dietrich’s daughter Maria Riva delivers a loving but warts and all portrait of her complicated, fascinating mother. Dietrich’s career combined sex, allure, and world-weary refinement to revolutionize our very concept of femininity, in the process fascinating audiences around the world. The only biography of Dietrich to draw upon the star’s own letters and diaries, Riva delivers the ultimate insider’s portrait of both the warmth and suffocating shadow cast by a legend upon her own child.
Wildly entertaining, Maria Riva reveals the rich life of her mother in vivid detail, evoking Dietrich the woman, her legendary career, and her world. Opening with Dietrich's childhood in Berlin, we meet an energetic, disciplined, and ambitious young actress, whose own mother equated the stage with a world of vagabonds and thieves.
Dietrich would quickly rise to stardom on the Berlin stage in the 1920s with her sharp wit and bisexuality-wearing the top hat and tails that revolutionized our concept of beauty and femininity. She would play vulgarity but not become in; startle the world but still maintain the aloofness…
I’ve spent most of my 20-year career as a professional journalist covering the entertainment industry, and I find it endlessly fascinating. As is probably true for you if you’re reading this, I love movies and TV shows. As a curious person, I always want to know why. Why did this movie get made at this time with these people? If you want to know the answer, you’ve got to understand the business. Hollywood is such an interesting business, full of big personalities trying to manage corporate pressure and creative egos and to balance their need to make a profit with their desire to make great art.
The ultimate insider business story at the ultimate Hollywood company. Stewart takes readers unbelievably deep inside Disney at a critical moment when Michael Eisner’s 20-year run as CEO was coming to a dramatic end amidst, as the title implies, a corporate civil war.
While most people know Disney as the happiest place on Earth, the last few years of Eisner’s reign saw big-name moguls like Jeffrey Katzenberg, Michael Ovitz, Eisner, and Walt Disney’s nephew Roy Disney at each other’s throats.
Disneywar is a gripping and illuminating tale that shows how the sausage really gets made in Hollywood and how easily power in this town can disappear.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Den of Thieves draws on extensive research and hundreds of interviews to document the fierce executive battle for control of the foremost entertainment company, in an account that discusses how Michael Eisner lost his chairmanship and how the conflict reflects modern-day American capitalism and popular culture. 250,000 first printing.
