The apocalypse on the big screen has expanded beyond the familiar end-of-the-world movies. Romantic comedies, teen adventures and even children's films frequently feature apocalyptic imagery--disintegrating cities, extreme weather events, extinctions, rogue military forces, epidemics, zombie armies and worlds colliding. Using sophisticated CGI effects, filmmakers are depicting the end of the world ever more stunningly.The authors explore the phenomenon of the cinematic apocalypse a...

Few lives provide as much history or drama as those of monarchs. Filmmakers from the silent era to onward have displayed a deep fascination with the lives of royalty and with queens in particular. Still, the question remains: what do these films really tell us about the women beneath the crowns?Drawing on films from the 1930s to those of today, Royal Portraits in Hollywood: Filming the Lives of Queens investigates the ways in which these films reproduce history and represe...

In the past 30 years, Diane Keaton has been an actress, a director and a photographer. This work begins with her early years in California, but the primary focus is on her film career from the 1970s through the present. The author examines Keaton's image as star and public figure, drawing on information from interviews (including personal conversations with Keaton), feature pieces, press releases, books, photographs, posters, films, and reviews of films. Each chapter provides an overview o...

What do the rich and famous really get up to behind closed doors? When does sexual passion become sordid perversion? Who are history's most shocking deviants and what are their sex secrets? The pages of this book reveal 45 shocking, scandalous - and often disturbing - stories of promiscuity and sexual perversion throughout the ages. Uncovered here are the orgies of Cleopatra and the incest of the Romans; the darkest fantasies of Michelangelo and the gross indecencies of the Marquis de Sade...

A history of heartbreak—replete with beheadings, uprisings, creepy sex dolls, and celebrity gossip—and its disastrously bad consequences throughout time.Spanning eras and cultures from ancient Rome to medieval England to 1950s Hollywood, Jennifer Wright's It Ended Badly guides you through the worst of the worst in historically bad breakups. In the throes of heartbreak, Emperor Nero had just about everyone he ever loved—from his old tutor to most of his frie...

Into The Twilight Zone: The Rod Serling Programme Guide includes complete episode guides with cast, credits and story summaries of the original Twilight Zone series, as well as its many film and television revivals, and Rod Serling's Night Gallery. The book features an overview and filmography of Serling's life and career, and interviews with many of his colleagues, including Buck Houghton, Richard Matheson, Frank Marshall, Joe Dante, Phil DeGuere, Wes Craven, Al...

Take your fiction to the next level!Maybe you're a first-time novelist looking for practical guidance. Maybe you've already been published, but your latest effort is stuck in mid-list limbo. Whatever the case may be, author and literary agent Donald Maass can show you how to take your prose to the next level and write a breakout novel - one that rises out of obscurity and hits the best-seller lists.Maass details the elements that all breakout novels share -...

Beginning with Whip Wilson's "Abilene Trail" and Tim McCoy's "Aces and Eights" and ambling through Gene Autry's "The Old Barn Dance" and "The Old Corral", this guide winds up with one of Autry's best films, "Yodelin' Kid from Pine Ridge", in which Gene's co-star is none other than the wonderful "Peter Pan" herself, Betty Bronson. Yes, Gene's favorite sidekick, Smiley Burnette, is also along for the ride and really excels himself here in what amounts to a character role. Many other Autry oa...

In the days when cinema audiences insisted that movie programs include two features, plus shorts, plus a newsreel, plus trailers, plus a cartoon, the supporting feature was known in the film trade as a "B". On many occasions, the unheralded "B" movie turned out to be more entertaining than the "A" attraction. Many of Hollywood's biggest stars, like John Wayne, Clark Gable, Alan Ladd and Carole Lombard, got their start in "B" pictures. Some, like Gene Autry (once voted the tenth most popula...

Before he gave us the classic title On Writing, ('part biography, part collection of tips for the aspiring writer' - Guardian) Stephen King wrote a nonfiction masterpiece in Danse Macabre, 'One of the best books on American popular culture' (Philadelphia Inquirer).It was not long after Halloween when Stephen King received a telephone call from his editor. 'Why don't you do a book about the entire horror phenomenon as you see it? ...

In this road map to restoring feminine sexual power, Betsy Prioleau introduces and analyzes the stories and stratagems of history's greatest seductresses. These are the women who ravished the world—from such classic figures as Cleopatra and Mae West to such lesser-known women as the infamous Violet Gordon Woodhouse, who lived in a ménage with four men. Smarts, imagination, courage, and killer charm helped these love maestras claim the men of their choice and keep them fascinated for life. ...

An American icon, Joseph Frank "Buster" Keaton is easily acknowledged as one of the greatest filmmakers in early cinema and beyond. His elaborate slapstick made audiences scream with laughter. But, his stone face hid an internal turmoil. In BUSTER KEATON: CUT TO THE CHASE, biographer Marion Meade seamlessly lays out the life and works of this comedy genius who lacked any formal education."Buster" made his name as a child of vaudeville, thrown around the stage by his father in a cart...