James Bazen wrote:I was going back through the a.m.s archives looking for something or other, when I came across this topic, and since this is a new forum with a lot of new folks who may not have been on the a.m.s board, I thought it would be interesting to ask here.
Aside from Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By, what film books past and recent do you particulaly love. Which books are definitive, highly informative, or just down right enjoyable?
Oooh. Many, many! For the biz in showbiz, I like:
The Genius of the System, Thomas Schatz
The Hollywood Studio System, Douglas Gomery
The American Film Industry, Tino Balio
United Artists, the Company Built by the Stars, Tino Balio
A Million and One Nights, Terry Ramsaye
Biographies:
Lion of Hollywood, Scott Eyman
Without Lying Down, Cari Beauchamp
King Baggott, Sally Dumaux
Florence Lawrence, The Biograph Girl, Kelly Brown
Dark Lover, Emily Leider
Beyond Paradise, Andre Soares
Other types of history
The Speed of Sound, Scott Eyman
Broncho Billy and the Essanay Film Company, David Kiehn
William Fox, Sol M. Wurtzel and the Early Fox Film Corporation: Letters, 1917-1923, ed. Carla Winter
Anything by Jeanine Basinger
Picture Personalities, The Emergence of the Star System in America, Richard deCordova
Adventures with D.W. Griffith, Karl Brown
And in the "let's not be too parochial" category, here are some favorites that place the film industry in a larger context:
Material Dreams, Kevin Starr (Southern California history)
Inventing the Dream, Kevin Starr (Southern California history)
Red Ink, White Lies, Rob Leicester Wagner (Los Angeles newspaper history)
Our Times, all six volumes if you can find 'em, Mark Sullivan (this is an unbelievably valuable work; better histories were written later but no one better illuminated what people in the twenties thought about their own recent history)
Prohibition, Sean Dennis Cashman
And finally, stuff you probably haven't read about the Arbuckle case:
Folk Devils and Moral Panics, Stanley Cohen--the best book ever written about the Arbuckle case that doesn't mention Arbuckle even once
Difficult Reputations, Collective Memories of the Evil, Inept, and Controversial, Gary Alan Fine
Headline Hollywood: A Century of Film Scandal, Adrienne L. McLean and David A. Cook
Directed Verdict, Dean Alan Budnick (unpublished doctoral dissertation on the press coverage of the Arbuckle case)
and on a far less exalted note, there is the hootworthy:
The Fatty Arbuckle Case, Leo Guild ("The Hollywood story no one dared publish!!)
I'll try to refrain from jumping in with the "me toos!" when other people list all the books that I haven't listed here.
Fred