The story of Adolph Zukor and the rise of the motion picture industry.

"The entire field of film historians awaits the AFI volumes with eagerness."--Eileen Bowser, Museum of Modern Art Film Department Comments on previous volumes: "The source of last resort for finding socially valuable . . . films that received such scant attention that they seem 'lost' until discovered in the AFI Catalog."--Thomas Cripps "Endlessly absorbing as an excursion into cultural history and national memory."--Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.

The story of Adolph Zukor and the rise of the motion picture industry.

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy's War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union. Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, and featuring hundreds of rare photographs, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

Ghosts, intrigue and a murder long ago sit at the heart of House of Many Shadows, the gripping Gothic romance by New York Times bestseller Barbara Michaels. When a car crash leaves Meg Rittenhouse suffering from strange hallucinations, an invitation to recuperate at her elderly relative’s crumbling mansion in the Pennsylvania hills seems like the answer to her prayers. But she couldn’t be more wrong . . . There, in a remote old house miles from anywhere, the terrible sights and sounds become even worse. Suddenly eerie black shapes dance in the shadows – mocking Meg, haunting her . . . threatening her. And the presence of kind, considerate Andy Brenner, the caretaker, both reassures her and terrifies her – because Andy also sees these dark spectres . . .

When Carole Lombard was tragically killed in a plane crash on January 16, 1942, she was 33 years old and had been a film actress for almost 20 years, yet her best work probably still lay ahead. She had reached a career high point, earning praise for her talents as a comedienne as well as a dramatic actress. As well liked as she was on screen, she was equally popular off screen, known for being witty, uninhibited and a great party-giver. Blonde and beautiful, she reigned as the queen of Hollywood when she married Clark Gable, its king. This book offers a thorough examination of her too-short life and provides information about her 78 films, including cast and credits, synopses, reviews and comments. Photographs from her life and films complete the work.

Known as much today for its theme park, Universal City is also the largest and the longest continuously operating movie studio in "Hollywood." The Universal Film Manufacturing Company was formed by a dozen independent producers in 1912, and Universal City was designed to provide a single facility in which to make their films. Since its official opening on March 15, 1915, Universal City has served as a training ground for great directors such as John Ford, William Wyler, and James Whale and as home to stars like Hoot Gibson, Deanna Durbin, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Lon Chaney Sr. and Jr., and Tom Mix. This evocative volume explores the studio that brought The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1923), The Phantom of the Opera (1925), All Quiet on the Western Front (1930), Dracula (1930), Frankenstein (1931), and 100 Men and a Girl (1936) to the screen.

How New York’s Lower East Side inspired new ways of seeing America New York City's Lower East Side, long viewed as the space of what Jacob Riis notoriously called the "other half," was also a crucible for experimentation in photography, film, literature, and visual technologies. This book takes an unprecedented look at the practices of observation that emerged from this critical site of encounter, showing how they have informed literary and everyday narratives of America, its citizens, and its possible futures. Taking readers from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, Sara Blair traces the career of the Lower East Side as a place where image-makers, writers, and social reformers tested new techniques for apprehending America—and their subjects looked back, confronting the means used to represent them. This dynamic shaped the birth of American photojournalism, the writings of Stephen Crane and Abraham Cahan, and the forms of early cinema. During the 1930s, the emptying ghetto opened contested views of the modern city, animating the work of such writers and photographers as Henry Roth, Walker Evans, and Ben Shahn. After World War II, the Lower East Side became a key resource for imagining poetic revolution, as in the work of Allen Ginsberg and LeRoi Jones, and exploring dystopian futures, from Cold War atomic strikes to the death of print culture and the threat of climate change. How the Other Half Looks reveals how the Lower East Side has inspired new ways of looking—and looking back—that have shaped literary and popular expression as well as American modernity.

A well-researched, informative book in which Robert Sobel, the noted financial historian, explores the lives and careers of nine representative innovators in business during the last 200 years, men frequently overlooked by contemporary social and political historians: Francis Cabot Lowell, John Wanamaker, Cyrus McCormick, James Hill, James Duke, Theodore Vail, Marcus Loew, Donald Douglas, and Royal Little. Each one was selected to illustrate a different aspect of American business tradition. All share the ability to grasp opportunity and to oppose conventional wisdom when necessary, both of which contributed to the fabric of modern corporate life. In the aggregate they created new organizational traditions that were imitated throughout the Western world. Book jacket.