They're the daughters of celebrities--the kind all the teen mags gossip about! But the It Girls of Hollywood High are about to discover that fame has a price. And no friendship--or romance--is safe. . . London Phillips will diet as her mother demands. She'll even date the billionaire her mother has chosen for her. But she won't give up her secret hottie, Justice Banks. She and Justice plan to elope--right after he becomes a hip-hop superstar. All he has to do is seduce a media mogul's darling daughter, Rich Montgomery, and a record deal is his! But he better remember London is really his girl. . . Rich is so lucky to have a BFF like London. It was London who introduced her to dreamy Justice. Little does she know that her new heartthrob is about to cause a media explosion that will change this spoiled princess's life forever. . . Spencer Ellington hates to see a billionaire go to waste. That's why she's hooking up with London's boyfriend, Anderson Ford. London may not be in love with Anderson, but she believes he'll do anything for her. Just wait till she finds out the only thing Anderson is doing is Spencer. . . Heather Cummings wants in with the It Girls to secure the spotlight for her actress mother. But when she stumbles upon a secret about the father she never knew, she discovers she has ties to the clique so scandalous it may just bring Hollywood High's in-crowd to their knees! "Simone tells authentic stories of teen life in the 'hood better than any other author currently writing contemporary YA street lit." --Library Journal on Teenage Love Affair (starred review)

What do films such as The Breakfast Club, Dead Poets Society, and Freedom Writers have to teach us about American culture? Robert Bulmans Hollywood Goes to High School takes the reader on a fascinating journey through the high school film genre. Skillfully blending sociological theory and film analysis, Bulmans always accessible writing delightfully challenges the reader to think critically about American individualism and class inequality. Bulmans insightful sociological analysis of 177 new and classic high school films explores the complex ways in which Americans make sense of social class, education, gender and adolescence. Suitable for the beginning and advanced student, Hollywood Goes to High School is an essential piece of reading for a variety of courses in sociology, education, communication, anthropology, American studies, and film studies. For more from Robert Bulman read his analysis of McFarland USA starring Kevin Costner on Sociological Cinema here: http://www.thesociologicalcinema.com/blog/is-kevin-costners-mcfarland-usa-a-white-savior-film-well-yes-and-no.

Steven Spielberg once said, "I like ideas, especially movie ideas, that you can hold in your hand. If a person can tell me the idea in twenty-five words or less, it's going to make a pretty good movie." Spielberg's comment embodies the essence of the high concept film, which can be condensed into one simple sentence that inspires marketing campaigns, lures audiences, and separates success from failure at the box office. This pioneering study explores the development and dominance of the high concept movie within commercial Hollywood filmmaking since the late 1970s. Justin Wyatt describes how box office success, always important in Hollywood, became paramount in the era in which major film studios passed into the hands of media conglomerates concerned more with the economics of filmmaking than aesthetics. In particular, he shows how high concept films became fully integrated with their marketing, so that a single phrase ("Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water...") could sell the movie to studio executives and provide copy for massive advertising campaigns; a single image or a theme song could instantly remind potential audience members of the movie, and tie-in merchandise could generate millions of dollars in additional income.

"Young professional Taylor Henning must attempt the impossible: staying in touch with her inner mean girl while staying true to herself"--Provided by publisher.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of The Searchers, the revelatory story behind the classic movie High Noon and the toxic political climate in which it was created. It's one of the most revered movies of Hollywood's golden era. Starring screen legend Gary Cooper and Grace Kelly in her first significant film role, High Noon was shot on a lean budget over just thirty-two days but achieved instant box-office and critical success. It won four Academy Awards in 1953, including a best actor win for Cooper. And it became a cultural touchstone, often cited by politicians as a favorite film, celebrating moral fortitude. Yet what has been often overlooked is that High Noon was made during the height of the Hollywood blacklist, a time of political inquisition and personal betrayal. In the middle of the film shoot, screenwriter Carl Foreman was forced to testify before the House Committee on Un-American Activities about his former membership in the Communist Party. Refusing to name names, he was eventually blacklisted and fled the United States. (His co-authored screenplay for another classic, The Bridge on the River Kwai, went uncredited in 1957.) Examined in light of Foreman's testimony, High Noon's emphasis on courage and loyalty takes on deeper meaning and importance. In this book, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Glenn Frankel tells the story of the making of a great American Western, exploring how Carl Foreman's concept of High Noon evolved from idea to first draft to final script, taking on allegorical weight. Both the classic film and its turbulent political times emerge newly illuminated.

A lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age. Over the last twenty-five years, the field of cinema studies has offered a dramatic reassessment of the history of film in general and of Hollywood in particular. Writers have drawn on the methodologies of a number of disciplines—literary criticism, sociology, psychology, women's studies, and minority and gay studies—to deepen our understanding of motion pictures, the film industry, and movie theater audiences. In Hollywood's High Noon, noted film historian Thomas Cripps offers a lively narrative history of Hollywood's classical age that brings the insights of recent scholarship to students and general readers. From its origin during the First World War to the beginning of its decline in the 1950s, Cripps writes, Hollywood operated as did other American industries: movies were created by a rational production system, regulated by both government and privately organized interests, and subject to the whims of a fickle marketplace. Yet these films did offer consumers something unique: in darkened movie palaces across the country,audiences projected themselves—their hopes and ideas—onto silver screens, profoundly mediating their reception of Hollywood's flickering images. Beginning with turn-of-the-century moving-picture pioneer Thomas Edison, Cripps traces the invention of Hollywood and the development of the studio system. He explores the movie-going experience, the struggle for social control over the movies through censorship, the impact of sound on the style and content of films, alternatives to Hollywood's oligopoly including "race" films and documentaries, the paradoxical predictability and subversive creativity of genre pictures, and Hollywood's self-proclaimed "shining moment" during the Second World War. Cripps concludes with a discussion of the collapse of the studio system after the war, due in equal parts to suburbanization, the emergence of television, and government anti-trust action.

In High Contrast, Sharon Willis examines the dynamic relationships between racial and sexual difference in Hollywood film from the 1980s and 1990s. Seizing on the way these differences are accentuated, sensationalized, and eroticized on screen--most often with little apparent regard for the political context in which they operate--Willis restores that context through close readings of a range of movies from cinematic blockbusters to the work of the new auteurs, Spike Lee, David Lynch, and Quentin Tarantino. Capturing the political complexity of these films, Willis argues that race, gender, and sexuality, as they are figured in the fantasy of popular film, do not function separately, but rather inform and determine each other's meaning. She demonstrates how collective anxieties regarding social difference are mapped onto big budget movies like the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon series, Basic Instinct, Fatal Attraction, Thelma and Louise, Terminator 2, and others. Analyzing the artistic styles of directors Lynch, Tarantino, and Lee, in such films as Wild at Heart, Pulp Fiction, and Do the Right Thing, she investigates how these interactions of difference are linked to the production of specific authorial styles, and how race functions for each of these directors, particularly in relation to gender identity, erotics, and fantasy.

Today's moviegoers and critics generally consider some Hollywood products--even some blockbusters--to be legitimate works of art. But during the first half century of motion pictures very few Americans would have thought to call an American movie "art." Up through the 1950s, American movies were regarded as a form of popular, even lower-class, entertainment. By the 1960s and 1970s, however, viewers were regularly judging Hollywood films by artistic criteria previously applied only to high art forms. In Hollywood Highbrow, Shyon Baumann for the first time tells how social and cultural forces radically changed the public's perceptions of American movies just as those forces were radically changing the movies themselves. The development in the United States of an appreciation of film as an art was, Baumann shows, the product of large changes in Hollywood and American society as a whole. With the postwar rise of television, American movie audiences shrank dramatically and Hollywood responded by appealing to richer and more educated viewers. Around the same time, European ideas about the director as artist, an easing of censorship, and the development of art-house cinemas, film festivals, and the academic field of film studies encouraged the idea that some American movies--and not just European ones--deserved to be considered art.

Looks at the future of Hollywood in the wake of rapid technological innovation, examining the potential opportunities, for both the entertainment and high-tech industries, of new digital and Web formats in terms of the creation, distribution, and consumption of entertainment products, and arguing that the two industries must work together if they are both to succeed.

The realism of these shots - some posed, but most completely candid - illustrated the high personal exposure that every Hollywood star eventually curses. As personal and private lives merged in the public images that were captured by the Los Angeles Times photo-journalists, art as well as news emerged.