Hal Wallis (1898-1986) might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced—Casablanca, Jezebel, Now, Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies)—have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America's film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked. Bernard Dick offers the first comprehensive assessment of the producer's incredible career. A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the film business as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater in 1922. He attracted the notice of the Warner brothers, who hired him as a publicity assistant. Within three months he was director of the department, and appointments to studio manager and production executive quickly followed. Wallis went on to oversee dozens of productions and formed his own production company in 1944. Dick draws on numerous sources such as Wallis's personal production files and exclusive interviews with many of his contemporaries to finally tell the full story of his illustrious career. Dick combines his knowledge of behind-the-scenes Hollywood with fascinating anecdotes to create a portrait of one of Hollywood's early power players.

Hal Wallis (1898-1986) might not be as well known as David O. Selznick or Samuel Goldwyn, but the films he produced—Casablanca, Jezebel, Now, Voyager, The Life of Emile Zola, Becket, True Grit, and many other classics (as well as scores of Elvis movies)—have certainly endured. As producer of numerous films, Wallis made an indelible mark on the course of America's film industry, but his contributions are often overlooked. Bernard Dick offers the first comprehensive assessment of the producer's incredible career. A former office boy and salesman, Wallis first engaged with the film business as the manager of a Los Angeles movie theater in 1922. He attracted the notice of the Warner brothers, who hired him as a publicity assistant. Within three months he was director of the department, and appointments to studio manager and production executive quickly followed. Wallis went on to oversee dozens of productions and formed his own production company in 1944. Dick draws on numerous sources such as Wallis's personal production files and exclusive interviews with many of his contemporaries to finally tell the full story of his illustrious career. Dick combines his knowledge of behind-the-scenes Hollywood with fascinating anecdotes to create a portrait of one of Hollywood's early power players.

During the mid-1950s, when Hollywood found itself struggling to compete within an expanding entertainment media landscape, certain producers and studios saw an opportunity in making films that showcased performances by rock 'n' roll stars. Rock stars eventually found cinema to be a useful space to extend their creative practices, and the motion picture and recording industries increasingly saw cinematic rock stardom as a profitable means to connect multiple media properties. Indeed, casting rock stars for film provided a tool for bridging new relationships across media industries and practices. From Elvis Presley to Madonna, this book examines the casting rock stars in films. In so doing, Rock Star/Movie Star offers a new perspective on the role of stardom within the convergence of media industries. While hardly the first popular music culture to see its stars making the transition to screen, the timing of rock's emergence and its staying power within popular culture proved fortuitous for a motion picture business searching for its place in the face of continuous technological and cultural change. At the same time, a post-star-system film industry provided a welcoming context for rock stars who have valued authenticity, creative autonomy, and personal expression. This book uses illuminating archival resources to demonstrate how rock stars have often proven themselves to be prominent film workers exploring this terrain of platforms old and new - ideal media laborers whose power lies in the fact that they are rarely recognized as such. Combining star studies with media industry studies, this book proposes an integrated methodology for writing media history that combines the actions of individuals and the practices of industries. It demonstrates how stars have operated as both the gravitational center of media production as well as social actors who have taken on a decisive role in the purposes to which their images are used.

Lois Simmie was born in Edam, Saskatchewan in 1932. Filled with awe and wonder at the bountiful and remarkable world unfolding around her Simmie takes us on the journey of her life and the events that shaped her into a writer. She describes her whimsical youth in Saskatchewan in a bygone era of Frank Sinatra on the radio, Amos ‘n’ Andy, the jitterbug, jazz, square dances, and Hollywood movies every Friday night in the town hall. Simmie’s magical delight in all things transports us through the Depression and war years to childhood summer visits to Hopkinsville, Kentucky in her relatives’ Gone With the Wind-style southern mansion, an adventure in the lush beauty of Brazil, and to Scotland while writing her first non-fiction book, The Secret Lives of Sgt. John Wilson, about the murder of a young Scottish woman by her RCMP husband. Simmie fell in love with words at a young age but it isn’t until later in life that she takes up her calling as a writer while living in Saskatoon. She describes the burgeoning Saskatchewan writing scene as “electric” as she enters an exciting community of like-minded writers and poets, a hotbed of creativity and inspiration that is the impetus of her finest writing and the culmination of an astonishing life story.

The Islamic world stretches from North America to Southeast Asia and includes some forty independent states in which Muslims constitute a majority of the population. Islam has approximately 750 million adherents and, therefore, is the second largest of the world's religions. A distinctive feature of the Islamic tradition is the belief that Islam is a total, comprehensive way of life. Religion has an integral, organic relationship to politics and society. This Islamic ideal is reflected in the development of Islamic law which was a comprehensive law, encompassing a Muslim's duties to God (worship, fasting, pilgrimage) and duties to one's fellow man (family, commercial, and criminal laws). Therefore, the Islamic tradition provided a normative system in which religion was integral to all areas of Muslim life - politics, economics, law, education, and the family. In the twentieth century Muslim countries have faced formidable political and social challenges: the struggle for independence from colonial dominance, the formation and development of independent nation states with all the pressures and problems of modernization, the Arab‐ Israeli conflict, and more recently, the emergence of the oil-producing states as a major world economic power bloc. The history of Islam in the modern period reflects the continued interaction of the Islamic tradition with the forces of change. While Islam may be acknowledged as a significant force in the precolonial period and to varying degrees during the twentieth-century independence movements, the strength and interaction of Islam in sociopolitical change has often been overlooked or underestimated. For most observers, Islam was simply an obstacle to change, an obstacle whose relevance to the political and social order would increasingly diminish

Almost the only indisputable fact about Colonel Tom Parker is that he was the manager of the greatest performer in popular music: Elvis Presley. His real name wasn’t Tom Parker †“ indeed, he wasn’t an American at all, but a Dutch immigrant called Andreas van Kujik. And he certainly wasn’t a proper military colonel: he purchased his title from a man in Louisiana. But while the Colonel has long been acknowledged as something of a charlatan, this book is the first to reveal the extraordinary extent of the secrets he concealed, and the consequences for the career, and ultimately the life, of the star he managed. As Alanna Nash’ prodigious research has discovered, the Colonel left Holland most probably because, at the age of twenty, he bludgeoned a woman to death. Entering the US illegally, he then enlisted in the army as ‘Tom Parker’. But, with supreme irony for someone later styling himself as Colonel, Parker’s military career ended in desertion, and discharge after a psychiatrist had certified him as a psychopath. He then became a fairground barker, working sideshows with a zeal for small-scale huckstering and the casual scam that never left him. And by the height of Elvis’s success, Parker had become a pathological gambler who, at the same time as he was taking, amazingly, a full 50% of Presley’s earnings, frittered away all his wealth in the casinos of Las Vegas. As Nash shows, therefore, the often baffling trajectory of Elvis Presley’s career makes perfect sense once the secret imperatives of the Colonel’s life are known. Parker never booked Presley for a tour of Europe because of the dark secret that ensured he himself could never return there. Even at his most famous, Elvis was still being booked to play out-of-the-way towns in North Carolina †“ because the former fairground barker (who shamelessly negotiated as such even with top record company and film executives) knew them from his days on the circus circuit. And Elvis was trapped playing years of arduous seasons in Las Vegas †“ two shows nightly, seven days a week, until boredom and despair brought on the excessive drug use that killed him †“ because for Parker he was “an open chit†? whose huge earnings prevented his manager’s losses at the gambling tables being called in. Alanna Nash knew Parker towards the end of his life, and has now uncovered the whole story, improbable, shocking, and never less than compelling, of how this larger-than-life man made, and then unmade, popular music’s first and greatest superstar.

ONE OF THE HOLLYWOOD REPORTER'S 100 GREATEST FILM BOOKS OF ALL TIME • The first book to bring together interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute’s renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers, offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang (“I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini (“Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It’s absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema’s most talented pioneers.

From dealing blackjack in the small-time gangster town of Steubenville, Ohio, to carousing with the famous "Rat Pack" in a Hollywood he called home, Dean Martin lived in a grandstand, guttering life of booze, broads, and big money. He rubbed shoulders with the mob, the Kennedys, and Hollywood's biggest stars. He was one of America's favorite entertainers. But no one really knew him. Now Nick Tosches reveals the man behind the image--the dark side of the American dream. It's a wild, illuminating, sometimes shocking tale of sex, ambition, heartaches--and a life lived hard, fast, and without apologies.

A history of the Hollywood film industry as a modern system of labor, this book reveals an important untold story of an influential twentieth-century workplace. Ronny Regev argues that the Hollywood studio system institutionalized creative labor by systemizing and standardizing the work of actors, directors, writers, and cinematographers, meshing artistic sensibilities with the efficiency-minded rationale of industrial capitalism. The employees of the studios emerged as a new class: they were wage laborers with enormous salaries, artists subjected to budgets and supervision, stars bound by contracts. As such, these workers--people like Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn, and Anita Loos--were the outliers in the American workforce, an extraordinary working class. Through extensive use of oral histories, personal correspondence, studio archives, and the papers of leading Hollywood luminaries as well as their less-known contemporaries, Regev demonstrates that, as part of their contribution to popular culture, Hollywood studios such as Paramount, Warner Bros., and MGM cultivated a new form of labor, one that made work seem like fantasy.

Though there have been myriad books on Errol Flynn - scores of biographies, film studies, analyses, etc. - there has never been one that unfurls his dashing life day-by-day, predominantly through photos, letters, news clippings, and documents. This book does so: from Flynn’s birth in Hobart, Australia in 1909 through to his death in Vancouver, Canada in 1959, with over 1,000 images (many rarely or never before published) culled from Florczak's personal collection of over 11,000. The book is the result of the author’s travels around the world to photograph locations key to Flynn’s life, and with text gathered from years of research in the Warner Bros. Archives, the USC Cinematic Arts Library, and the Margaret Herrick Library. Among other popular day-by-day pictorial biographies are those of Frank Sinatra, Marilyn Monroe, Judy Garland, Ernest Hemingway, Elvis Presley, The Beatles, and Eric Clapton. Flynn’s colorful life was lived out on the world stage and a better candidate for a book of this style would be hard to find.