Movie History

Life is full of choices. Right now, yours is whether or not to buy the autobiography of a mid-grade, kind of hammy actor.

In her acclaimed 1993 book, Denying the Holocaust, Deborah Lipstadt called David Irving, a prolific writer of books on World War II, "one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial". The following year, after Lipstadt's book was published in the United Kingdom, Irving led a libel suit against Lipstadt and her publisher. Denial, previously published as History on Trial, is Lipstadt's riveting, blow-by-blow account of this singular legal battle.

Greg Mitchell's The Beginning or the End chronicles the first efforts of American media and culture to process the Atomic Age. A movie that began as a cautionary tale inspired by atomic scientists aiming to warn the world against a nuclear arms race would be drained of all impact due to revisions and retakes ordered by President Truman and the military.

The future has amazing technology. Our alien allies have magic. Together, we are building a training system to teach the best of humanity to go to the stars. But the training is monumentally expensive. Stephanie Morgana is a genius, she just doesn't know it. Join her on the first half of her adventure with this collected edition, including the first three megabooks in the Federal Histories series.

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 men of the 77th Infantry Division couldn't fathom why Private Desmond T. Doss would venture into the horrors of World War II without a single weapon to defend himself. "You're nothing but a coward!" they said. But the soft-spoken medic insisted that his mission was to heal, not kill. When Desmond knelt by his bunk to pray, his fellow soldiers hurled boots and insults at him. Even his commander wanted to throw him out of the army. But when his unit arrived on the battlefield, the intrepid medic quickly proved he was no coward.

Few filmmakers, if any, make the kind of impact that Martin Scorsese has made on American cinema. The winner of every prestigious film award, including the Oscar, Scorsese is a living legend. Bestselling author and award-winning filmmaker Mary Pat Kelly’s groundbreaking biography reveals how this working-class boy from Manhattan’s Little Italy became one of our most acclaimed, celebrated, and influential filmmakers. Martin Scorsese: A Journey maps Scorsese’s personal and artistic evolution.

Anne Lister was extraordinary. Fearless, charismatic, and determined to explore her lesbian sexuality, she forged her own path in a society that had no language to define her. She was a landowner, an industrialist, and a prolific diarist whose output has secured her legacy as one of the most fascinating figures of the 19th century. Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister follows Anne from her crumbling ancestral home in Yorkshire to the glittering courts of Denmark as she resolves to put past heartbreak behind her and find herself a wife.

Baseball has always been a symbol as much as a sport. With a blend of individual confrontation and team play, a luxurious pace, and an immaculate urban parkland setting, it offers a sunny rendering of the American Dream, both the hard work that underpins it and the rewards it promises. Film, America's other national pastime, which magnifies and mythologizes all it touches, has long been the ideal medium to canonize this aspirational idea.

Best known for his horror/sci-fi/fantasy films including Phantasm, The Beastmaster, Bubba Ho-tep, and John Dies at the End, now Don Coscarelli’s taking you on a white-knuckle ride through the rough and tumble world of indie film. This memoir fits an entire film school education into a single audiobook. It’s loaded with behind-the-scenes stories and will prove indispensable for fans of Coscarelli’s movies, aspiring filmmakers, and anyone who loves a story of an underdog who prevails while not betraying what he believes.

Of all the celebrities who served their country during World War II - and they were legion - Jimmy Stewart was unique. On December 7, when the attack on Pearl Harbor woke so many others to the reality of war, Stewart was already in uniform - as a private on guard duty south of San Francisco at the Army Air Corps Moffet Field. Seeing war on the horizon, Jimmy Stewart, at the height of his fame after Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and his Oscar-winning turn in The Philadelphia Story in 1940, had enlisted several months earlier.

By the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back comes a magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges - some of the worst largely unknown until now. Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion.

Unearth the terrifying and true tales behind some of the scariest horror movies to ever haunt our screens, including the Enfield poltergeist case that was retold in The Conjuring 2 and the serial killers who inspired Hannibal Lector in The Silence of the Lambs. Behind the Horror dissects these and other bizarre tales to reveal haunting real-life stories of abduction, disappearance, murder, and exorcism.

Fifteen-year-old Lina is a Lithuanian girl living an ordinary life - until Soviet officers invade her home and tear her family apart. Separated from her father and forced onto a crowded train, Lina, her mother, and her young brother make their way to a Siberian work camp, where they are forced to fight for their lives. Lina finds solace in her art, documenting these events by drawing. Risking everything, she embeds clues in her drawings of their location and secretly passes them along, hoping her drawings will make their way to her father's prison camp.

While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley, this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom Parker written by someone who knew him personally. And for anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the greatest and most influential of the 20th century, it is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker, the man who virtually controlled Elvis' every move.

On December 26, 1973, The Exorcist was released. Within days it had become legend. Moviegoers braved hours-long lines in winter weather to see it. Some audience members famously fainted or vomited. Half a century later, the movie that both inspired and transcends the modern horror genre has lost none of its power to terrify and unsettle. The Exorcist Legacy reveals the complete story of this cultural phenomenon, from the real-life exorcism in 1949 Maryland that inspired William Peter Blatty's bestselling novel on which the movie is based, to its many sequels, prequels, TV series, and homages.

In this intensive, intimate, and anything-but-glamorous behind-the-scenes account, film insider and cinephile Paul M. Sammon explores how Ridley Scott used his creative genius to transform the work of science fiction's most uncompromising author into a critical sensation, a commercial success, and a cult classic that would reinvent the genre.

It is often claimed that the French invented cinema. Dominating the production and distribution of cinema until WWI, when they were supplanted by Hollywood, the French cinema industry encompassed all genres, from popular entertainment to avant-garde practice. This Very Short Introduction opens up French cinema through focusing on some of its most notable works, using the lens of the New Wave decade (1958-1968) that changed cinema worldwide.

On a cold Saturday afternoon in 1975, two men (who had known each other for eight years before they’d ever exchanged a word) met for lunch in a Chicago pub. Gene Siskel was the film critic for the Chicago Tribune. Roger Ebert had recently won the Pulitzer Prize—the first ever awarded to a film critic—for his work at the Chicago Sun-Times. To say they despised each other was an understatement.

The future has amazing technology. Our alien allies have magic. Together, we are building a training system to teach the best of humanity to go to the stars. But the training is monumentally expensive. Stephanie Morgana is a genius, she just doesn't know it. The artificial intelligence that runs the virtual world is charged with testing Stephanie, a task it has never performed before. Will Stephanie pass the test and be moved to the advanced preparatory schools, or will the system miss her?