Theda Bars's remarkable life as told by Eve Golden's heartfelt account is short of discovering a means of traveling through time and as close as we are ever likely to get to meeting the screen's great Vamp!

Despite being a mediocre actress with less than classic beauty, Theda Bara was one of Hollywood's leading performers in the early years of cinema. Her success was mostly due to Fox Studio's publicity: they made her a screen vamp and used her to titillate the public. And Theda Bara, ambitious and nearing 30 when she made her first film, enthusiastically played the role. In real life, Theodosia Goodman bore little resemblance to the vampish Theda Bara character. But the studio-created persona, with the invented name, evil personality and fictional history, was a major star. Though her films were often trite, poorly acted, extravagant and crude, the public packed movie houses. But her film career ended once the public tired of the persona. Through contemporary newspaper accounts, film reviews, interviews and other sources, this is a comprehensive account of the life and times of one of Hollywood's first female stars.

Despite being a mediocre actress with less than classic beauty, Theda Bara was one of Hollywood's leading performers in the early years of cinema. Her success was mostly due to Fox Studio's publicity: they made her a screen vamp and used her to titillate the public. And Theda Bara, ambitious and nearing 30 when she made her first film, enthusiastically played the role. In real life, Theodosia Goodman bore little resemblance to the vampish Theda Bara character. But the studio-created persona, with the invented name, evil personality and fictional history, was a major star. Though her films were often trite, poorly acted, extravagant and crude, the public packed movie houses. But her film career ended once the public tired of the persona. Through contemporary newspaper accounts, film reviews, interviews and other sources, this is a comprehensive account of the life and times of one of Hollywood's first female stars.

Although a major star in the 1910s, Theda Bara--known as "The Vamp"--was largely neglected until the 1990s, when her fame began to resurface. Since then, there have been biographies, documentaries and other works that have brought the silent film actress back into the spotlight, including a painstaking stills reconstruction of her lost epic Cleopatra. This is a complete examination of Bara's more than 40 films, as well as her theater and radio appearances, down to the smallest detail. With the vast majority of Bara's films considered lost, it is a particularly valuable resource for fans and scholars, and includes information about each film's genesis, director, plot, censorship problems, and critical and public reactions. Also included is a biographical overview, with many illuminating anecdotes.

As movie patrons sat in darkened theaters in January 1914, they were mesmerized by an alluring temptress with long sable hair and kohl-rimmed eyes. Theda Bara--"the vamp," as she would come to be known--would soon be one of the highest paid film stars of the 1910s, earning an unheard of $4,000 per week, before retiring from the screen in 1926. In 1946, at age five, the author met Bara--then 61--at her Beverly Hills home and the actress became her mentor. This memoir is the story of their friendship.

In Theda Bara's Tent follows the adventures of a spirited orphan who makes his way into the burgeoning movie business in the days when the screen was silent and the moguls were just small-time theater owners. Harry Sirkus is so brave and lovable everyone wants to help him including a struggling theater owner named Louis B. Mayer who, at age 22, living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, is years away from being studio head at MGM. Harry runs away from Haverhill at age 13 and must make his way in the world alone. After many adventures and heartbreaking struggles he goes to New York to work for the avaricious William Fox, founder of Fox News, a newsreel company. In his search for love and prosperity, Harry encounters screen stars, Tin Pan Alley song pluggers, bootleggers, dare-devil cameramen, movie moguls, and a young gossip columnist who steals his heart. Rich in historical context, with a cast of characters real and imagined, this page-turner follows Harry Sirkus as he makes a mark in the flourishing film industry and goes on to become a famous news broadcaster. Harry's personality is so captivating and vivid readers will be hard-pressed to remember that the author made him up. Written by Diana Altman who grew up in the movie business, this is fictionalized history at its best.

A riveting story of ambition, greed, and genius unfolding at the dawn of modern America. This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire. Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood. At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history. Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.

Although a major star in the 1910s, Theda Bara--known as "The Vamp"--was largely neglected until the 1990s, when her fame began to resurface. Since then, there have been biographies, documentaries and other works that have brought the silent film actress back into the spotlight, including a painstaking stills reconstruction of her lost epic Cleopatra. This is a complete examination of Bara's more than 40 films, as well as her theater and radio appearances, down to the smallest detail. With the vast majority of Bara's films considered lost, it is a particularly valuable resource for fans and scholars, and includes information about each film's genesis, director, plot, censorship problems, and critical and public reactions. Also included is a biographical overview, with many illuminating anecdotes.

"I wanted a job. I got a murder."When makeup artist Toby Swanson joined the Fox Film Corporation in 1914, he hoped to sneak a kiss from the studio's newest star, the seductive vamp Theda Bara. But when a scene goes horribly wrong, Bara's film is canceled and her dreams of stardom crushed. Unless she can prove what looked like an accident was really murder.So together, Theda and Toby dive into showbiz New York, from dancing with a young Rudolph Valentino to sharing the vaudeville stage with Sophie Tucker and learning lockpicking secrets from Harry Houdini, all leading to a long-forgotten church crypt holding a desperate secret.It's New York at the dawn of the twentieth century, a time of big bridges, big skyscrapers and big money. And it's a time when movies - the biggest new business of them all - joins hands with the oldest.The Director's Cut is the first of the Theda Bara Mysteries.

This book investigates how popular American literature and film transformed the poisonous woman from a misogynist figure used to exclude women and minorities from political power into a feminist hero used to justify the expansion of their public roles. Sara Crosby locates the origins of this metamorphosis in Uncle Tom’s Cabin where Harriet Beecher Stowe applied an alternative medical discourse to revise the poisonous Cassy into a doctor. The newly “medicalized” poisoner then served as a focal point for two competing narratives that envisioned the American nation as a multi-racial, egalitarian democracy or as a white and male supremacist ethno-state. Crosby tracks this battle from the heroic healers created by Stowe, Mary Webb, Oscar Micheaux, and Louisia May Alcott to the even more monstrous poisoners or “vampires” imagined by E. D. E. N. Southworth, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Theda Bara, Thomas Dixon, Jr., and D. W. Griffith.