Whether you’ve watched it once or countless times there’s no getting Casablanca out of your blood. “As Time Goes By,” the La Marseillaise sequence, Bogie and Bergman, Casablanca is the film that cemented the Hollywood style, creating a wealth of imitators for decades to come. So with Casablanca’s familiarity, it’s safe to assume there’s nothing new…
Tippi Hedren says in the introduction to her autobiography that so much has been written about her that it’s high time she set the record straight. Tippi is as succinct a title and encapsulation of the writer behind it as the name implies, for good and ill. It’s unclear whether Hedren keeps things close to…
When I started reading Stephen Michael Shearer’s biography, Beautiful, on actress Hedy Lamarr I had no idea a documentary about the raven-haired starlet was being produced. Bombshell: The Life of Hedy Lamarr recently premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival to great reviews and I can’t wait to learn even more about the woman oft-considered the most…
Today’s book is not a biography as the author would claim. Writer Margaret Talbot‘s biography/Hollywood history book The Entertainer: Movies, Magic, and My Father’s Twentieth Century is a fantastic blend of biography and Hollywood history with an eye towards illustrating the changing mores of publicity, and the Hollywood studio system. Talbot openly states in the…
So far this feature has focused on books devoted to classic film but I just couldn’t pass up an opportunity to read and review Twitch Upon a Star: The Bewitched Life and Career of Elizabeth Montgomery. Bewitched is up next to I Love Lucy as being one of my favorite shows and I always found…
I adore coffee table books! I had to say that and preface why Jaws: Memories From Martha’s Vineyard is both the best and most diverse of the coffee table books out there. I know friends like to display their books and show how snooty they are (I’m generalizing) but I’d be happy to put this…
Two weeks ago I reviewed the Veronica Lake biography Peekaboo that sought to tell the “true” story of Lake’s life by way of her estranged mother Constance Marinos. You can read my review of it here but suffice to say I doubted everything author Jeff Lenburg said because he didn’t have a bibliography…
