Film Entertainment

Walt Disney is an American hero. From Mickey Mouse to Disneyland, he changed the face of American culture. His is a success story like no other: a man who developed animated film into an art form and made a massive contribution to the folklore of the world. After years of research, respected Hollywood biographer Bob Thomas produced a definitive biography of the man behind the legend of Disney: the unschooled cartoonist from Kansas City who when bankrupt on his first movie venture and developed into the genius who produced unmatched works of animation.

For 13 years, 22 series and 175 shows, Richard Porter was script editor of Top Gear, from the first faltering pilot episode in 2002 until the very last show presented by Jeremy Clarkson, Richard Hammond and James May in 2015. Along the way they destroyed cars, sparked diplomatic incidents, set fire to caravans, almost killed one of the presenters, and somehow transformed Top Gear from a shabby BBC Two motoring show into an Emmy-winning, record-breaking, planet-straddling behemoth.

Believe it or not, America's fascination with celebrity culture was thriving well before the days of TMZ, Perez Hilton, Charlie Sheen's breakdown, and allegations against Woody Allen. And the stars of yesteryear? They weren't always the saints that we make them out to be. Part biography, part cultural history, the stories contained in this book cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups.

Told with the same intimate style, brutal honesty, and uproarious wisdom that placed Wishful Drinking on the New York Times bestseller list for months, Shockaholic is the juicy account of Carrie Fisher’s life, focusing more on the Star Wars years and dishing about the various Hollywood relationships she’s formed since she was chosen to play Princess Leia at only 19 years old.

From such cult hits as Raising Arizona and The Big Lebowski to major critical darlings Fargo, No Country for Old Men, and Inside Llewyn Davis, Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly comical, instantly recognizable voice in modern American cinema. Film critic Adam Nayman carefully sifts through their complex cinematic universe in an effort to plot, as he puts it, "some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness." The book combines critical text with a visual aesthetic that honors the Coens' singular mix of darkness and levity.

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.

How does an immortal deal with death? What kind of person makes the best companion? Why does the Doctor say he and Freud "got on very well"? How do the Daleks and Cybermen reflect concerns about losing our humanity? And what can looking at an ancient Time Lord teach us about real human nature? Doctor Who Psychology: A Madman with a Box explores these questions and many more.

Batman is one of the most compelling and enduring characters to come from the Golden Age of Comics, and interest in his story has only increased through countless incarnations since his first appearance in Detective Comics #27 in 1939. Why does this superhero without superpowers fascinate us? What does that fascination say about us? Batman and Psychology explores these and other intriguing questions about the masked vigilante.

One of my dad’s favorite jokes about getting older was: “I went out for coffee when I was twenty-one and when I got back I was fifty-eight!” I get what he meant now. Time flies. My first book, If Chins Could Kill: Confessions of a "B" Movie Actor, was published back in 2001 and it chronicles the adventures of a “mid-grade, kind of hammy actor" (my words), cutting his teeth on exploitation movies far removed from mainstream Hollywood. This next book, an “Act II” if you will, could be considered my “maturing years” in show business, when I began to say “no” more often and gravitated toward self-generated material. Taking stock in the overall quality of my life, I fled Los Angeles and moved to a remote part of Oregon to renew, regroup and reload. If that sounds tame, the journey from Evil Dead to Spider-Man to Burn Notice was long, with plenty of adventures/mishaps along the way. I never pictured myself hovering above Baghdad in a Blackhawk helicopter, facing a pack of wild dogs in Bulgaria, or playing an aging Elvis Presley with cancer on his penis - how can you predict this stuff? The sheer lunacy of show business is part of the fun for me and I hope you'll come along for the ride.

Among a crop of fresh filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola revolutionizing Hollywood in the ’70s, Brian De Palma—a director from Philadelphia with a few social satires under his belt—charted a cinematic path unlike any of his peers. At times he was unfairly dismissed as a Hitchcock copycat; other times he was misunderstood for his peculiar mix of sexuality, humor, music, and violence. But, over the course of ten years, he created a new cinematic language.

The Fifty-Year Mission: The Next 25 Years: From the Next Generation to J. J. Abrams is an incisive, no-holds-barred oral history telling the story of post-Original Series Star Trek, told exclusively by the people who were there, in their own words - sharing the inside scoops they've never told before, unveiling the oftentimes shocking true story of the history of Star Trek, and chronicling the trials, tribulations, and tribbles that have remained deeply buried secrets until now.

No one knows the writer's Hollywood more intimately than William Goldman. Two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the best-selling author of Marathon Man, Tinsel, Boys and Girls Together, and other novels, Goldman now takes you into Hollywood's inner sanctums...on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films...into the plush offices of Hollywood producers...into the working lives of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman, and Hoffman...and more.

For 60 years, since the birth of United Artists, the studio landscape was unchanged. Then came Hollywood’s Circus Maximus---created by director Steven Spielberg, billionaire David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg, who gave the world The Lion King---an entertainment empire called DreamWorks.

David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful playwright summoned west in 1980 to write a vehicle for Jack Nicholson. He arrived just in time to meet the luminaries of old Hollywood and revel in the friendship of giants like Paul Newman, Mike Nichols, Bob Evans, and Sue Mengers. Over the next forty years, Mamet wrote dozens of scripts, was fired off dozens of movies, and directed eleven himself. In Everywhere an Oink Oink, he revels of the taut and gag-filled professionalism of the film set.

It’s harder today than ever before for independent filmmakers to make money with their films. From predatory film distributors ripping them off to huckster film aggregators who prey upon them, the odds are stacked against the indie filmmaker. The old distribution model for making money with your film is broken, and there needs to be a change.

Boldly going where no audio has gone before, Star Trek Memories is William Shatner's own behind-the-scenes look at the legendary '60s television series that continues to spawn movies, books, and series spin-offs 26 years after the last episode aired. Avid Trekkers are sure to be delighted with this first-hand account from Captain Kirk himself.

The original Star Trek series debuted in 1966 and has spawned five TV series spin-offs and a dozen feature films, with an upcoming one from Paramount arriving in 2016. The Fifty-Year Mission is a no-holds-barred oral history of five decades of Star Trek, told by the people who were there. Hear from the hundreds of television and film executives, programmers, writers, creators, and cast as they unveil the oftentimes shocking story of Star Trek's ongoing 50-year mission.

Blake Snyder's Save the Cat!, the world's top-selling story method for filmmakers and novelists, introduces The Last Book on Creating Binge-Worthy Content You'll Ever Need.

There is a common belief that we live in unprecedented times, that people are too sensitive today, that nobody objected to the actions of actors, comedians, and filmmakers in the past. Modern pundits would have us believe that Americans of a previous generation had tougher skin and seldom complained. But does this argument hold up to scrutiny? In Outrageous, celebrated cultural historian Kliph Nesteroff demonstrates that Americans have been objecting to entertainment for nearly two hundred years, sometimes rationally, often irrationally.

The story of how The Godfather was made is as dramatic, operatic, and entertaining as the film itself. Over the years, many versions of various aspects of the movie’s fiery creation have been told - sometimes conflicting, but always compelling. Mark Seal sifts through the evidence, has extensive new conversations with director Francis Ford Coppola and several heretofore silent sources, and complements them with colorful interviews with key players including actors Al Pacino, James Caan, Talia Shire, and others.