Entertainment History

From former screen legends who have faded into obscurity to new revelations about the biggest movie stars, Valderrama unearths the most fascinating little-known tales from the birth of Hollywood through its Golden Age. The shocking fate of the world's first movie star. Clark Gable's secret love child. The film that nearly ended Paul Newman's career. A former child star who, at 93, reveals her #metoo story for the first time. Valderrama unfolds these stories, and many more, in a volume that is by turns riveting, maddening, hilarious, and shocking.

The Beatles landing in New York in February 1964 was the opening shot in a cultural revolution nobody predicted. Suddenly the youth of the richest, most powerful nation on earth was trying to emulate the music, manners and the modes of a rainy island that had recently fallen on hard times.

Scandalous, sentimental, frank, and sincere - the ultimate inside account of a television and film icon. Burt Reynolds has been a Hollywood leading man for six decades, known for his legendary performances, sex-symbol status, and storied Hollywood romances. In his long career of stardom, during which he was number one at the box office for five years in a row, Reynolds has seen it all. But Enough About Me will tell his story through the people he’s encountered on his amazing journey.

In March 2022, Michael Palin travelled the length of the River Tigris through Iraq to get a sense of what life is like in a region of the world that once formed the cradle of civilisation, but that in recent times has witnessed turmoil and appalling bloodshed. It was a journey of sharp, often brutal contrasts. At one moment he would be exploring the old streets of Baghdad or the ancient ruins of Babylon. At the next he would be visiting the war-torn city of Mosul, or learning about the horrific Speicher massacre in Tikrit.

Beneath the stylized violence and thrilling car crashes, the Mad Max films consider universal questions about the nature of human life, order and anarchy, justice and moral responsibility, society and technology, and ultimately, human redemption. In Mad Max and Philosophy, a diverse team of political scientists, historians, and philosophers investigates the underlying themes of the blockbuster movie franchise, following Max as he attempts to rebuild himself and the world.

Sontag's most important critical writings from 1972 to 1980 are collected in Under the Sign of Saturn. One of America's leading essayists, Sontag's writings are commentaries on the relation between moral and aesthetic ideas, discussing the works of Antonin Artaud, Leni Riefenstahl, Elias Canetti, Walter Benjamin, and others. The collection includes a variety of her well-known essays. Sontag's writings are famously full of intellectual range and depth, and are at turns exhilarating, ominous, disturbing, and beautiful.

John Mauceri brings a lifetime of experience to bear in an unprecedented, hugely informative, consistently entertaining exploration of his profession, rich with anecdotes from decades of working alongside the greatest names of the music world. With candor and humor, Mauceri makes clear that conducting is itself a composition: of legacy and tradition, techniques handed down from master to apprentice - and more than a trace of ineffable magic.

The choice is yours, and you'll have to live with the consequences for at least the rest of your life. Will you take the blue pill - skip this audiobook and go on thinking of The Matrix as just a movie? Or will you take the red pill - listen to this book, and find out just how far down the rabbit-hole goes?

Sacha Lord's journey is interwoven with the history and culture of the city of Manchester. Listeners will discover Manchester’s vibrant music scene(s) and the challenges it has faced over the decades. The book takes the listener behind the scenes of Sacha's groundbreaking events, including his early nights at the legendary Haçienda club, the establishment of Warehouse Project and Parklife. Sacha's never-told stories are fascinating and entertaining, covering a three-decade structure through 1990s, 2000s and 2010s.

In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream.

Leaving school and starting his career at Decca Records in 1958 at the age of sixteen, Tony King would soon find himself becoming close friends with Elton John, rekindling John Lennon and Yoko Ono's relationship, mediating a quarrelsome Mick Jagger and Keith Richards and spending time with Freddie Mercury in his final days - a far cry from his childhood days in Eastbourne. Living in an era of seismic social, technological and cultural transformation, King experienced these defining moments as a stalwart in London and New York's gay scenes.

In The Fatal Alliance the acclaimed film critic David Thomson offers us one of his most provocative books yet—a rich, arresting, and troubling study of that most beloved genre: the war movie. It is not a standard history or survey of war films, although Thomson turns his typically piercing eye to many favorites—from All Quiet on the Western Front to The Bridge on the River Kwai to Saving Private Ryan.

Fifty years after her death, Hollywood icon Marilyn Monroe still beguiles the world, her image enthralling millions. Many books have attempted to explain her allure and tell her story, but none has succeeded as well as this work by acclaimed biographer Donald Spoto. Spoto’s exhaustive research uncovers a conspiracy of silence, allowing him to present the facts, free from often-repeated myths and speculation. Granted access to more than thirty-five thousand pages of formerly sealed files containing letters, diaries, appointment books, and other intimate papers, he also interviewed nearly two hundred people who had never before spoken on record.

Kenneth Clark was the grandest figure in the arts in Britain in the 20th century. Museum director, patron, pioneer of television, cultural panjandrum, he effortlessly dominated the art world for over half a century. Clark belonged to that stratum of society that used to be called "the top people" and was befriended by both the Queen Mother and Winston Churchill. His closest friendships, however, were amongst writers and artists, men such as John Betjeman, Graham Sutherland, Henry Moore and John Piper.

An intimate portrait of Handel’s life and inner circle, modeled after one of the composer’s favorite forms: the fugue. During his lifetime, the sounds of Handel’s music reached from court to theater, echoed in cathedrals, and filled crowded taverns, but the man himself - known to most as the composer of Messiah - is a bit of a mystery. Though he took meticulous care of his musical manuscripts and even provided for their preservation on his death, very little of an intimate nature survives.

In this personal journey through a unique performing art, David Copperfield profiles some of the world’s most groundbreaking magicians. From the 16th-century magistrate who wrote an early book on conjuring, to the Roaring Twenties and the man who fooled Houdini, to the woman who levitated, vanished, and caught bullets in her bare hands, David Copperfield’s History of Magic takes you on a wild journey through the remarkable feats of some of the greatest magicians in history.

When the head of Columbia Pictures, David Begelman, got caught forging Cliff Robertson's name on a $10,000 check, it seemed, at first, like a simple case of embezzlement. It wasn't. The incident was the tip of the iceberg, the first hint of a scandal that shook Hollywood and rattled Wall Street.

In the predawn hours of a gloomy February day in 1994, two thieves entered the National Gallery in Oslo and made off with one of the world's most famous paintings, Edvard Munch's Scream. It was a brazen crime committed while the whole world was watching the opening ceremonies of the Winter Olympics in Lillehammer. Baffled and humiliated, the Norwegian police turned to the one man they believed could help: a half English, half American undercover cop named Charley Hill, the world's greatest art detective.

Bob Fosse is recognized as one of the most significant figures in post-World War II American musical theater. With his first Broadway musical, The Pajama Game, in 1954, the "Fosse style" was already fully developed, with its trademark hunched shoulders, turned-in stance, and stuttering, staccato jazz movements. Fosse moved decisively into the role of director with Redhead in 1959 and was a key figure in the rise of the director-choreographer in the Broadway musical.

Howard Bloom - called “the greatest press agent that rock and roll has ever known” by Derek Sutton, the former manager of Styx, Ten Years After, and Jethro Tull - is a science nerd who knew nothing about popular music. But he founded the biggest PR firm in the music industry and helped build or sustain the careers of our biggest rock legends, including Michael Jackson, Prince, Bob Marley, Bette Midler, Billy Joel, Billy Idol, Chaka Khan, and 100 more. What was he after? He was on a hunt for the gods inside of you and me.