Entertainment History

Growing up on Long Island, lonely and quiet and queer, she was enchanted by Hollywood starlets like Kim Novak. She found her turn in New York’s early Off-Off-Broadway theater scene, in Warhol’s films Flesh and Women in Revolt, and at the famed nightclub Max's Kansas City. She inspired songs by Lou Reed and the Rolling Stones. She became friends with Jane Fonda and Lily Tomlin, borrowed a dress from Lauren Hutton, posed for Richard Avedon, and performed alongside Tennessee Williams in his own play.

In a race against time, behind enemy lines, often unarmed, a special force of American and British museum directors, curators, art historians, and others, called the Monuments Men, risked their lives scouring Europe to prevent the destruction of thousands of years of culture.

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

Authors Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins are back to bring you an inside look at 24 lost Halloween sequels you never saw on the big screen! Learn about these fascinating unmade visions direct from their creators, many of whom have never spoken publicly on the subject before. With a running time of over 24 hours, Taking Shape II is brimming with untold franchise history. The journey begins with an insightful foreword by Halloween: 25 Years of Terror producer Anthony Masi.

Pamela Des Barres, the world’s foremost supergroupie, here offers an all-access backstage pass to the world of rock stars and the women who love them. Having had her own affairs with legends such as Keith Moon and Jimmy Page--as documented in her bestselling memoir I’m with the Band--Pamela now turns the spotlight onto other women who have found their way into the hearts and bedrooms of some of the world’s greatest musicians.

From the authors who brought you TAKING SHAPE comes REIGN OF CHUCKY, an exhaustive new look at the cinematic history of everyone’s favorite Good Guy. Covering all seven films in the franchise, this is the book that Chucky fans have been waiting for. Go behind the scenes of the first film to learn how Don Mancini’s original Blood Buddy script evolved into Child’s Play as we know it, then listen about how the franchise was continually reinvented across a slew of clever sequels

These biographies of the great quattrocento artists have long been considered among the most important of contemporary sources on Italian Renaissance art. Vasari, who invented the term "Renaissance", was the first to outline the influential theory of Renaissance art that traces a progression through Giotto, Brunelleschi, and finally the titanic figures of Michaelangelo, Da Vinci, and Raphael.

In this New York Times best seller, legendary actor and star of the acclaimed documentary Val shares the stories behind his most beloved roles, reminisces about his star-studded career and love life, and reveals the truth behind his recent health struggles in a remarkably candid autobiography.

Based on years of astonishing research, Natalie Wood (previously published as Natasha) raises the curtain on Wood’s turbulent life. Award-winning author Suzanne Finstad conducted nearly 400 interviews with Natalie Wood’s family, close friends, legendary costars, lovers, film crews, and virtually everyone connected to her death. Through these firsthand accounts, Finstad reconstructs a life of emotional abuse and exploitation, of unimaginable fame, great loneliness, and loss.

The definitive book on the TV show Ted Lasso, written by New York Times journalist and editor Jeremy Egner, celebrating the show’s improbable rise and cultural impact while never losing sight of the heart, friendship, and passion that have made it an enduring favorite for the ages.

In Elvis Presley: A Southern Life, one of the most admired Southern historians of our time takes on one of the greatest cultural icons of all time. The result is a masterpiece: a vivid, gripping biography, set against the rich backdrop of Southern society - indeed, American society - in the second half of the 20th century.

More than 50 years ago, John Coltrane drew the 12 musical notes in a circle and connected them with straight lines, forming a five-pointed star. Inspired by Einstein, Coltrane had put physics and geometry at the core of his music. Physicist and jazz musician Stephon Alexander returns the favor, using jazz to answer physics' most vexing questions about the past and future of the universe.

"Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" Mae West invited and promptly captured the imagination of generations. Even today, years after her death, the actress and author is still regarded as the pop archetype of sexual wantonness and ribald humor. But who was this saucy starlet, a woman who was controversial enough to be jailed, pursued by film censors, and banned from the airwaves for the revolutionary content of her work, and yet would ascend to the status of film legend?

Cinema is full of neurotic personalities, but few things are more transfixing than a woman losing her mind onscreen. Horror as a genre provides the most welcoming platform for these histrionics: crippling paranoia, desperate loneliness, masochistic death-wishes, dangerous obsessiveness, apocalyptic hysteria. Unlike her male counterpart—the eccentric'—the female neurotic lives a shamed existence, making these films those rare places where her destructive emotions get to play.

Silver Shamrock. Thorn. White Horses. It’s all in here. Join authors Dustin McNeill and Travis Mullins for a deep dive into the evolution of Halloween’s vast mythology. Extensively researched, Taking Shape is the ultimate guide to the first 40 years of Haddonfield history. Featuring exclusive interviews with filmmakers from every installment, prepare to gain new insight into Halloween’s iconic boogeyman. Oh, you don’t believe in the boogeyman? You should.

John Wayne projected dignity, integrity, and strength in all his films, even when his characters were flawed, and whatever character he played was always prepared to confront injustice in his own way. More than thirty years after his death, he remains the standard by which male stars are judged and an actor whose morally unambiguous films continue to attract sizeable audiences.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

The defining, behind-the-scenes chronicle of one of the most extraordinary, beloved, and dominant pop cultural entities in America’s history - Marvel Comics - and the outsized personalities who made Marvel, including Martin Goodman, Stan Lee, and Jack Kirby.

What exactly is a work of art? Within the context of this guided trip inside the artist's psyche, Author traces the development of transcendent books, paintings, jokes, movies, songs, and other forms of artistic expression. Together with the diary entries, napkin doodles, and sketches that were their tools, Moss lays down the work—the tortuous roads and creative decisions—that lead to outstanding art. He does this by weaving together conversations with some of the most renowned artists of our time.

Russell Martin, author of Beethoven's Hair, and his wife, Lydia Nibley, tell the story of how a lock of Ludwig von Beethoven's hair, clipped from the composer's head on his deathbed in Germany in 1827, ended up in Nazi-occupied Denmark in 1943 and was later sold at auction in London in 1994. Learn about this incredible journey through history and the mysteries revealed about Beethoven's deafness and death. Correspondence, research, and forensics further inform this fascinating story.