American historians such as Frederick Jackson Turner have argued that the West has been the region that most clearly defines American democracy and the national ethos. Throughout the twentieth century, the "frontier thesis" influenced film and television producers who used the West as a backdrop for an array of dramatic explorations of America's history and the evolution of its culture and values. The common themes found in Westerns distinguish the genre as a quintessentially American form of dramatic art. In Hollywood's West, Peter C. Rollins, John E. O'Connor, and the nation's leading film scholars analyze popular conceptions of the frontier as a fundamental element of American history and culture. This volume examines classic Western films and programs that span nearly a century, from Cimarron (1931) to Turner Network Television's recent made-for-TV movies. Many of the films discussed here are considered among the greatest cinematic landmarks of all time. The essays highlight the ways in which Westerns have both shaped and reflected the dominant social and political concerns of their respective eras. While Cimarron challenged audiences with an innovative, complex narrative, other Westerns of the early sound era such as The Great Meadow (1931) frequently presented nostalgic visions of a simpler frontier era as a temporary diversion from the hardships of the Great Depression. Westerns of the 1950s reveal the profound uncertainty cast by the cold war, whereas later Westerns display heightened violence and cynicism, products of a society marred by wars, assassinations, riots, and political scandals. The volume concludes with a comprehensive filmography and an informative bibliography of scholarly writings on the Western genre. This collection will prove useful to film scholars, historians, and both devoted and casual fans of the Western genre. Hollywood's West makes a significant contribution to the understanding of both the historic American frontier and its innumerable popular representations.

Brings into focus the most influential characters and themes of the Hollywood Western.

West Hollywood, which began as Sherman, a rail yard town, played an integral role in creating the "Hollywood" film industry while it grew up alongside the fashionable Beverly Hills to house the service industries needed by these wealthy neighbors. During Prohibition, the still unincorporated area was the site of the entertainment industry's watering holes and gambling parlors, and nicknames such as the "Sinful Drag," "The Adult Playground," and "Hollywood's Soul" were bestowed upon West Hollywood's world-famous Sunset Strip, where today's visitors can still dance in the footsteps of legends like Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, and Douglas Fairbanks Sr. As time marched on, the predominantly renter, Jewish, gay, and senior citizen residents of the progressive-minded area determined to step out of the shadows of nearby communities and create a city of their own, an effort that caused some controversy but resulted in the incorporation of West Hollywood in 1984. Since incorporation West Hollywood has been a beacon of hope, drawing refugees from Russia and around the world to its tolerant streets.

From New Orleans (Love, Bourbon Street), to San Francisco (Love, Castro Street), Alyson's detailed, highly acclaimed Lambda Award-winning series finds its way to the sun-dappled land of Southern California. The story of LA's gay history is often overshadowed by the mystique of Hollywood, but now Los Angeles' rich literary and cultural heritage is revealed in these thoughtful, humourous and insightful essays.

In the spring of 1937, Daniel Fuchs, twenty-seven years old and the author of three acclaimed novels of Brooklyn tenement life, came to Hollywood to bang out a treatment of one of his short stories. His thirteen-week contract turned into a permanent residence-and a lifelong love affair. "Writing for the movies was fine," he would later recall, "the freedom and fun, the hard work," but even finer were the movies themselves-team-built, mass-market miracles, "brisk and full of urgent meaning." Finest of all were the people-hustling producers, inscrutable directors, cracker-jack screenwriters, and charismatic stars-their virtues and flaws and egos and disappointments all visible in high relief "because the sunlight over everything was so clear and brilliant." Fuchs worked with the best: Warners and Metro and RKO, Wilder and Huston and Joe Pasternak, William Faulkner and Irwin Shaw, Raft and Cagney and Doris Day. He spent his days crafting screenplays, but off the lot he continued to write prose, mainly stories for The New Yorker and Collier's and "Letters from Hollywood" for Commentary. The Golden West collects, for the first time, the best of Fuchs's writings about the movie business, from a novice screenwriter's anxious diaries (1937-38) to a fifty-year veteran's mellow memoirs (1989). The centerpiece of the book is "West of the Rockies," a haunting short novel, set in the late 1950s, about a half-mad woman, immature and incapable, who is, almost despite herself, a star, "a quantity indefinable, ephemeral, everlastingly elusive-Hollywood's chief stock in trade." It is also a bitter portrait of the star's agent, a grifter who is tempted to use her and her weaknesses to his own ends. Fuchs loved Hollywood, but his affection didn't blind him to the town's Babylon aspect: he never blinked when depicting the conniving and the treachery, the dysfunction and the waste. He saw life as it is, gold and tinsel both, and described it without falling into easy sentiment or condescending laughter. He is the Bellow of the Brown Derby, the Chekhov of the back lot. Book jacket.

What chance does a small-town girl have with a world-famous rock star? Two years after his wife’s death, rock star Garrett Hayes hasn’t moved on. But he has moved out of L.A. Where better to escape his past than a small town in the northern California mountains? If only he could get the townsfolk of Wildwood to leave him the hell alone. Ani Bennet returned to her hometown for some much-needed serenity. The last thing she needs is a grumpy, too hot for his own good, rich and famous rock star living next door—and rent-free in her brain. She set her fangirl tendencies aside and deleted his photo from her cell when they became neighbors. But when Garrett asks for help, she can’t say no. The problem is, spending time together is making those fangirl feelings resurface—and bringing them to a whole new level. What chance does a small-town girl have with world-famous rock star? It’s time for Ani to set her fears aside and find out.

“Masterfully flips the first installment on its head... James makes the mythic tantalizingly real.’” —Esquire "Even more brilliant than the first.” —Buzzfeed An Instant New York Times Bestseller and NPR Best Book of 2022 pick From Marlon James, author of the bestselling National Book Award finalist Black Leopard, Red Wolf, the second book in the Dark Star trilogy. In Black Leopard, Red Wolf, Sogolon the Moon Witch proved a worthy adversary to Tracker as they clashed across a mythical African landscape in search of a mysterious boy who disappeared. In Moon Witch, Spider King, Sogolon takes center stage and gives her own account of what happened to the boy, and how she plotted and fought, triumphed and failed as she looked for him. It’s also the story of a century-long feud—seen through the eyes of a 177-year-old witch—that Sogolon had with the Aesi, chancellor to the king. It is said that Aesi works so closely with the king that together they are like the eight limbs of one spider. Aesi’s power is considerable—and deadly. It takes brains and courage to challenge him, which Sogolon does for reasons of her own. Both a brilliant narrative device—seeing the story told in Black Leopard, Red Wolf from the perspective of an adversary and a woman—as well as a fascinating battle between different versions of empire, Moon Witch, Spider King delves into Sogolon’s world as she fights to tell her own story. Part adventure tale, part chronicle of an indomitable woman who bows to no man, it is a fascinating novel that explores power, personality, and the places where they overlap.

In the early part of the twentieth century, migrants made their way from rural homes to cities in record numbers and many traveled west. Los Angeles became a destination. Women flocked to the growing town to join the film industry as workers and spectators, creating a "New Woman." Their efforts transformed filmmaking from a marginal business to a cosmopolitan, glamorous, and bohemian one. By 1920, Los Angeles had become the only western city where women outnumbered men. In Go West, Young Women, Hilary A. Hallett explores these relatively unknown new western women and their role in the development of Los Angeles and the nascent film industry. From Mary Pickford’s rise to become perhaps the most powerful woman of her age, to the racist moral panics of the post–World War I years that culminated in Hollywood’s first sex scandal, Hallett describes how the path through early Hollywood presaged the struggles over modern gender roles that animated the century to come.

A leading expert on the family, Judith Stacey is known for her provocative research on mainstream issues. Finding herself impatient with increasingly calcified positions taken in the interminable wars over same-sex marriage, divorce, fatherlessness, marital fidelity, and the like, she struck out to profile unfamiliar cultures of contemporary love, marriage, and family values from around the world. Built on bracing original research that spans gay men’s intimacies and parenting in this country to plural and non-marital forms of family in South Africa and China,Unhitcheddecouples the taken for granted relationships between love, marriage, and parenthood. Countering the one-size-fits-all vision of family values, Stacey offers readers a lively, in-person introduction to these less familiar varieties of intimacy and family and to the social, political, and economic conditions that buttress and batter them. Through compelling stories of real families navigating inescapable personal and political trade-offs between desire and domesticity, the book undermines popular convictions about family, gender, and sexuality held on the left, right, and center. Taking on prejudices of both conservatives and feminists, Unhitched poses a powerful empirical challenge to the belief that the nuclear family--whether straight or gay--is the single, best way to meet our needs for intimacy and care. Stacey calls on citizens and policy-makers to make their peace with the fact that family diversity is here to stay.

Once Upon a Time in West Hollywood is a personal journey, a portrait of '70s Los Angeles based on different chapters of my life, and the photographs I took along the way, starting when I was only 10 years old. People have asked me what it was like growing up in Hollywood. Apartment living is tough, especially coming from the Midwest suburbs and having to share a bedroom but when you are seven you don't know what you don't have anymore. Personal memories like ditching Bancroft Junior High School, walking up Highland past Sunset to Hollywood Boulevard, playing pinball for hours at long-forgotten arcades that were popular then. Hanging out at the rooftop pool at the legendary Hyatt (Riot) House on Sunset or hanging out at Tower Records during the memorable summer of 1974, too young at 14 to appreciate the classic rock n' roll scene that was The Strip in the '70s. Working in my father's hardware store in East Los Angeles, a boy of 15, or riding the bus to Dodger Stadium alone at night, no fear. I hope the book brings back memories for the reader, wherever you grew up.