Named after one of the US's most desireable cookbooks in the WALL STREET JOURNAL, a must read culinary history chronicles Hollywood's eighteen best-loved restaurants. Illustrated throughout with vintage photographs.

A collection of favorite healthy recipes by a chef whose practices have been utilized by numerous Hollywood celebrities includes such options as Wild Salmon and Grilled Artichoke Salad with Green Tea Ranch Dressing, Wild Blueberry Cobbler, and Sundance Chocolate Torte. 12,000 first printing.

Severine (Catherine Deneuve) is a listless haute bourgeouise wife with a secret afternoon life of prostitution. Her life twists repression and guilt together with uninhibited behaviour, strangled libido with its liberated counterpart. Luis Bunuel was catapulted into cinematic history by his groundbreaking Dali collaboration, Un Chien Andalou, in 1929, but it is Belle de Jour (1967) which inaugurates the extraordinary late phase of his work. It is a film shimmering with reflections on truth, fiction and fantasy, in addition to caustic social insight, as it tells the story of a woman clearing her mind, perhaps, of its ghosts.

Using the life and career of her father, an early Hollywood actor, New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot tells the thrilling story of the rise of popular culture through a transfixing personal lens. The arc of Lyle Talbot’s career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left his home in small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician’s assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Carole Lombard, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Ultimately, his career spanned the entire trajectory of the industry. In her captivating, impeccably researched narrative—a charmed combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir—Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of ’10s and ’20s small-town America, ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. She transports us to an alluring time, simpler but also exciting, and illustrates the changing face of her father’s America, all while telling the story of mass entertainment across the first half of the twentieth century.

In Hollywood on the Hudson, Richard Koszarski rewrites an important part of the history of American cinema. During the 1920s and 1930s, film industry executives had centralized the mass production of feature pictures in a series of gigantic film factories scattered across Southern California, while maintaining New York as the economic and administrative center. But as Koszarski reveals, many writers, producers, and directors also continued to work here, especially if their independent vision was too big for the Hollywood production line.

What defines 'quality' in contemporary Hollywood film? Although often seen as inhospitable to such work, the studios of the blockbuster-franchise era continue to produce features that make claims to higher status. Films such as The Social Network, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford and Mystic River are marked as distinctive from the mainstream norm. But how exactly, and how are such qualities mixed with more familiar Hollywood ingredients, as found in larger doses in other examples such as Blood Diamond and the blockbuster-scale Inception? Quality Hollywood is the first book to address these issues, featuring close analysis of case study films, critical responses and the wider notions of cultural value on which these draw. Geoff King argues that such films retain a presence as a minority strand of studio output. The reasons for this combine factors relating to economics, the power of certain filmmakers and Hollywood's investment in its own prestige.

This book reveals the sinister true story of the Mafia in Hollywood. Crammed with legends, myths, murders, madness, mayhem, superstar tantrums, super-sexed starlets, power brokers and politics, it is an ambitious account of Hollywood’s hidden history, from the rogue cops who took on the Mob on the streets of Los Angeles to the stars who became stars because Mafia Godfathers said they would. In The Dark Heart of Hollywood, seasoned crime and entertainment writer Douglas Thompson reveals how all is masterminded by the money-obsessed Mafia, for whom everything and everyone is simply a commodity. The intense saga charges across America: from Hollywood bedrooms to the Oval Office, from California’s twenty-first century computer capital to the cocaine-connection HQs stretching from the Sunset Strip to Marseilles, Milan, Moscow, Tokyo and Beijing. In this magnificent and highly compelling volume, Hollywood is unveiled as Tinseltown without the tinsel.

2003 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title Performing Whiteness crosses the boundaries of film study to explore images of the white body in relation to recent theoretical perspectives on whiteness. Drawing on such diverse critical methodologies as postcolonial studies, feminist film criticism, anthropology, and phenomenology, Gwendolyn Audrey Foster examines a wide variety of films from early cinema to the present day in order to explore the ways in which American cinema imposes whiteness as a cultural norm, even as it exposes its inherent instability. In discussions that range from The Philadelphia Story to Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, Foster shows that, though American cinema is an all-white construct, there exists the possibility of a healthy resistance to cultural norms of race, gender, sexuality, and class.

Under modernity, time is regarded as linear and measurable by clocks and calendars. Despite the historicity of clock-time itself, the modern concept of time is considered universal and culturally neutral. What Walter Benjamin called “homogeneous, empty time” founds the modern notions of progress and a uniform global present in which the past and other forms of time consciousness are seen as superseded. In Translating Time, Bliss Cua Lim argues that fantastic cinema depicts the coexistence of other modes of being alongside and within the modern present, disclosing multiple “immiscible temporalities” that strain against the modern concept of homogeneous time. In this wide-ranging study—encompassing Asian American video (On Cannibalism), ghost films from the New Cinema movements of Hong Kong and the Philippines (Rouge, Itim, Haplos), Hollywood remakes of Asian horror films (Ju-on, The Grudge, A Tale of Two Sisters) and a Filipino horror film cycle on monstrous viscera suckers (Aswang)—Lim conceptualizes the fantastic as a form of temporal translation. The fantastic translates supernatural agency in secular terms while also exposing an untranslatable remainder, thereby undermining the fantasy of a singular national time and emphasizing shifting temporalities of transnational reception. Lim interweaves scholarship on visuality with postcolonial historiography. She draws on Henri Bergson’s understanding of cinema as both implicated in homogeneous time and central to its critique, as well as on postcolonial thought linking the ideology of progress to imperialist expansion. At stake in this project are more ethical forms of understanding time that refuse to domesticate difference as anachronism. While supernaturalism is often disparaged as a vestige of primitive or superstitious thought, Lim suggests an alternative interpretation of the fantastic as a mode of resistance to the ascendancy of homogeneous time and a starting-point for more ethical temporal imaginings.

This unique collection of interviews covers the broad spectrum of film directing experience--from first timers to award-winning veterans. Allowed to respond with anonymity, the directors provide candid answers to a wide variety of topics that convey the challenges and rewards of the filmmaking process.