Emergence of the Hollywood film studios and films produced within a 30-mile radius of Hollywood with trains and trolleys prominently highlighted.

Steam–powered locomotives helped bring people across the West but they also brought their share of problems. Traveling through enclosed tunnels or past the tall buildings of cities, the smoke from steam engines could be dangerous, even deadly. The story of electric trains is the story of the search for a better way. Electrically powered trains and trolleys helped build cities like Los Angeles. They let people live in new places, even far from where they worked. They were fast and efficient and led to some of the most modern trains on earth.

Climb aboard for a visual road trip across the American Southwest, following famous Route 66 and the trains of the Santa Fe and BNSF Railways. Filled with spectacular photography and engaging text, Route 66 Railway explores the relationship between the "Route of the Warbonnets" and the "Mother Road" through mountains, deserts, forests, cities and quirky towns. Thrill to colorful diesel locomotives and vintage steam trains as they roll past cafes, motor courts, tourist traps, railroad stations, neon signs, and much more.

The Story of Hollywood follows Hollywood from its dusty origins to its glorious rise to stardom. Lavishly illustrated with over 800 vintage images from the author's private collection, the book tells the complete story of Hollywood including its eventual decline and urban renewal. The Story of Hollywood brings new insights to readers with a passion for Hollywood and its place in the history of film, radio, and television.

Chicago's extensive transit system first started in 1859, when horsecars ran on rails in city streets. Cable cars and electric streetcars came next. Where new trolley car lines were built, people, businesses, and neighborhoods followed. Chicago quickly became a world-class city. At its peak, Chicago had over 3,000 streetcars and 1,000 miles of track--the largest such system in the world. By the 1930s, there were also streamlined trolleys and trolley buses on rubber tires. Some parts of Chicago's famous "L" system also used trolley wire instead of a third rail. Trolley cars once took people from the Loop to such faraway places as Aurora, Elgin, Milwaukee, and South Bend. A few still run today.

Studies of "Classic Hollywood" typically treat Hollywood films released from 1930 to 1960 as a single interpretive mass. Veronica Pravadelli complicates this idea. Focusing on dominant tendencies in box office hits and Oscar-recognized classics, she breaks down the so-called classic period into six distinct phases that follow Hollywood's amazingly diverse offerings from the emancipated females of the "Transition Era" and the traditional men and women of the conservative 1930s that replaced it to the fantastical Fifties movie musicals that arose after anti-classic genres like film noir and women's films. Pravadelli sets her analysis apart by paying particular attention to the gendered desires and identities exemplified in the films. Availing herself of the significant advances in film theory and modernity studies that have taken place since similar surveys first saw publication, she views Hollywood through strategies as varied as close textural analysis, feminism, psychoanalysis, film style and study of cinematic imagery, revealing the inconsistencies and antithetical traits lurking beneath Classic Hollywood's supposed transparency.

Since pioneer filmmakers arrived on its shoreline in the early 20th century, the Santa Monica beach has been a popular location for the making of movies and television productions. Its enchanting beauty led studio moguls, producers, and celebrities to build beach houses there, creating what became known as "Hollywood's Playground." The sand and shore of the Santa Monica beach became a favored site for the likes of Charlie Chaplin, Marion Davies, William Randolph Hearst, and Cary Grant. It was on this beach that the Academy Awards were conceived, the movie The Wizard of Oz sprang forth, and a young Pres. John F. Kennedy stunned beachgoers with a surprise ocean swim without the protection of Secret Service agents. In 1962, the beach became the center of the universe as the site of President Kennedy's "Western White House," where the visitors included Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr., Marilyn Monroe, and--famously--"anyone who was anyone."

Hollywood, Sight Unseeing begins with the following paragraph... I was in the batter's box. I was eight years old. The pitcher, ten, wound up, threw. Where was the baseball? I saw it leave his hand, then disappear until it was perhaps twenty feet from where it was headed... directly at my head. Being blessed with fast reflexes, I flattened out, dropped like a stone. I hit the ground with that ball missing my noggin by the wispiest whisker. At the time, it seemed nothing at all to me. I had escaped serious injury - just part of the game, I thought. But that "inconsequential" incident, with unrelenting insistence, uncompromising ferocity, would dictate the direction of the rest of my life Missing that baseball was diagnosed as macular degeneration, a retinal fault very rare in children. No known treatment, vision would continue to decline. By age 17, my vision was 20/200... legal blindness status. I saw at 20 feet what normally sighted people saw easily at 200 feet. Beginning with my first love, the entertainment industry, for 25 years, I earned my living, despite its near total visual nature, in the theater, radio, motion picture and television industries. For ten years of that time, I worked as a Dialogue Coach at Paramount, Twentieth Century Fox and Columbia Studios, working with top Directors, Producers and such stars as Elizabeth Taylor, Vivien Leigh, Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, Burt Lancaster, Charlton Heston, Loretta Young, Jane Wyman, Janet Leigh, Charles Laughton, Claude Rains, Shirley MacLaine, Jayne Mansfield, and 16 pictures with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis. When decreasing vision made Dialogue Coaching impractical, I switched to writing for motion pictures and television. Later, I transitioned to the construction industry as a General Building contractor. Now, with my vison of 20/600, I have returned to writing. After all, I'm only 83. Rudy Makoul