Lugosi

Lugosi

Author: Gary Don Rhodes

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2006-04-05

Total Pages: 431

ISBN-13: 0786427655

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

He was born Bela Ferenc Dezso Blasko on October 20, 1882, in Hungary. He joined Budapest's National Theater in 1913 and later appeared in several Hungarian films under the pseudonym Arisztid Olt. After World War I, he helped the Communist regime nationalize Hungary's film industry, but barely escaped arrest when the government was deposed, fleeing to the United States in 1920. As he became a star in American horror films in the 1930s and 1940s, publicists and fan magazines crafted outlandish stories to create a new history for Lugosi. The cinema's Dracula was transformed into one of Hollywood's most mysterious actors. This exhaustive account of Lugosi's work in film, radio, theater, vaudeville and television provides an extensive biographical look at the actor. The enormous merchandising industry built around him is also examined.


The Immortal Count

The Immortal Count

Author: Arthur Lennig

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2013-07-24

Total Pages: 1013

ISBN-13: 0813143764

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This definitive biography of the silver screen legend is “a moving, lively, witty, sad book that revives once more the long dead Count Dracula” (Kirkus Reviews). Bela Lugosi won immediate fame for his starring role in the 1931 film Dracula—the role that would forever define his persona. After a decade of trying to broaden his range, Lugosi resigned himself to a career as the world's most recognizable vampire, often playing opposite his horror film rival Boris Karloff. When he died in 1956, Lugosi could not have known that vindication of his talent would come—his face would adorn theaters and his Hungarian accent would be instantly recognized across the globe. In 1974, silent film expert Arthur Lennig published The Count, a highly regarded biography of the unsung actor. Now Lennig returns to his subject with a completely revised volume more than twice the length of the original. The Immortal Count provides deeper insights into Lugosi's films and personality. Drawing upon personal interviews, studio memos, shooting scripts, research in Romania and Hungary, and his own recollections, Lennig has written the definitive account of Lugosi's tragic life.


No Traveler Returns

No Traveler Returns

Author: Gary Don Rhodes

Publisher:

Published: 2012-07

Total Pages: 346

ISBN-13: 9781593932855

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

"Gary Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger have added the final chapter to Bela Lugosi's career, combining fascinating unknown details of his film and stage activities with post-WWII film history. Superbly researched and written as an engrossing story of an actor's struggle against professional decline. A must-read!" - Robert Cremer, author of Lugosi: The Man Behind the Cape (Henry Regnery, 1976). "Gary Rhodes represents that elusive Gold Standard in narrative research into the full depth and breadth of Bela Lugosi's complicated career. Rhodes' devotion to the banishment of myth, and to its replacement with frank and humanizing truth, has provided a wealth of historical storytelling that, in turn, renders the actor's known body of work all the more fascinating and comprehensible. Just when I catch myself believing I know all there is to be known about Lugosi - along comes Gary Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger with a fresh brace of revelations. The process advances immeasurably in No Traveler Returns: The Lost Years of Bela Lugosi." - Michael H. Price, coauthor of the Forgotten Horrors series. In No Traveler Returns, Bela Lugosi scholar extraordinaire Gary D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger provide a fascinating time travel journey back to the late 1940s/early 1950s, when Lugosi - largely out of favor in Hollywood - embarked on a Gypsy-like existence of vaudeville, summer stock, and magic shows. While many historians have considered this era a limbo in Lugosi's career, with precious few facts unearthed, Rhodes and Kaffenberger take the reader along for a wide-eyed ride as Bela performs in a nightclub so notorious that armed guards keep watch on the roof, dresses as Dracula in a magic show where he and a gorilla (a man in a suit) play football with the guillotined head of a woman (a dummy), and races from one stock engagement to another without ever missing a cue. Never in his American career was Bela so busy, and never did his light shine so brightly as he valiantly troupes to support his family, dominate age and illness, and please his audiences. It's a fastidiously researched education in the show business world of the time - and a stirring tribute to the charm, brilliance and inexhaustible professionalism of the star who was Dracula. - Gregory William Mank, author of Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff: The Expanded Story of a Haunting Collaboration (McFarland, 2009).


Rod Serling and the Birth of Television

Rod Serling and the Birth of Television

Author: Koren Shadmi

Publisher: Humanoids, Inc.

Published: 2019-10-08

Total Pages: 179

ISBN-13: 1643378821

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A biographical tale that follows Hollywood revolutionary Rod Serling's rise to fame in the Golden Age of Television, and his descent into his own personal Twilight Zone.


Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff

Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff

Author: Gregory William Mank

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2010-03-08

Total Pages: 702

ISBN-13: 0786454725

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Dracula and Frankenstein's Monster are horror cinema icons, and the actors most deeply associated with the two roles also shared a unique friendship. Bela Lugosi and Boris Karloff starred in dozens of black-and-white horror films, and over the years managed to collaborate on and co-star in eight movies. Through dozens of interviews and extensive archival research, this greatly expanded new edition examines the Golden Age of Hollywood, the era in which both stars worked, recreates the shooting of Lugosi and Karloff's mutual films, examines their odd and moving personal relationship and analyzes their ongoing legacies. Features include a fully detailed filmography of the eight Karloff and Lugosi films, full summaries of both men's careers and more than 250 photographs, some in color.


Hollywood Gothic

Hollywood Gothic

Author: David J. Skal

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2004-10-18

Total Pages: 637

ISBN-13: 1429998458

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A fully updated edition of David J. Skal's Hollywood Gothic, "The ultimate book on Dracula" (Newsweek). The primal image of the black-caped vampire Dracula has become an indelible fixture of the modern imagination. It's recognition factor rivals, in its own perverse way, the familiarity of Santa Claus. Most of us can recite without prompting the salient characteristics of the vampire: sleeping by day in its coffin, rising at dusk to feed on the blood of the living; the ability to shapeshift into a bat, wolf, or mist; a mortal vulnerability to a wooden stake through the heart or a shaft of sunlight. In this critically acclaimed excursion through the life of a cultural icon, David J. Skal maps out the archetypal vampire's relentless trajectory from Victorian literary oddity to movie idol to cultural commodity, digging through the populist veneer to reveal what the prince of darkness says about us all. includes black-and-white Illustrations throughout, plus a new Introduction.


Becoming Dracula - The Early Years of Bela Lugosi Vol. 1

Becoming Dracula - The Early Years of Bela Lugosi Vol. 1

Author: Gary D. Rhodes

Publisher:

Published: 2021-03

Total Pages: 448

ISBN-13: 9781629335322

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

The cobwebs of time and space are finally cleared. Drawing on years of research across four countries, excavating and analyzing thousands of yellowed documents in archives as well as every digitized source, Gary D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger shine light from their candelabrum onto a long-forgotten past, onto the creation of a legend. Becoming Dracula is a two-volume biography covering Bela Lugosi's life from his birth to 1930, when he first played the famous vampire onscreen. "No one has chronicled the life and career of Bela Lugosi with more precision than Gary Rhodes. With Becoming Dracula: The Early Years of Bela Lugosi, Volume One, Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger detail Lugosi's heretofore obscure early life in Austria-Hungary with a level of focused research akin to literary paleontology. As fascinating as the future Count Dracula's journey through Europe to America is, Lugosi-philes everywhere will rejoice that there will be a Volume Two continuation!" - Alan K. Rode, author of Michael Curtiz: A Life in Film (2017) "The path to becoming a vampire is simplicity itself: one need only fall victim to the notorious Count Dracula. The path that led to becoming Count Dracula, though, was lengthy, arduous, and fraught with disappointment, especially for the noble bloodsucker's initial cinematic portrayer, Bela Lugosi. Gary D. Rhodes and Bill Kaffenberger have returned to focus their impeccable research and unimpeachable historicity on that path. 'Tis a path that begs to be followed." - John Soister, author of Conrad Veidt on Screen (2009) and Many Selves: The Horror and Fantasy Films of Paul Wegener (2017)


Universal Horrors

Universal Horrors

Author: Tom Weaver

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2011-12-20

Total Pages: 617

ISBN-13: 0786491507

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Revised and updated since its first publication in 1990, this acclaimed critical survey covers the classic chillers produced by Universal Studios during the golden age of hollywood horror, 1931 through 1946. Trekking boldly through haunts and horrors from The Frankenstein Monster, The Wolf Man, Count Dracula, and The Invisible Man, to The Mummy, Paula the Ape Woman, The Creeper, and The Inner Sanctum, the authors offer a definitive study of the 86 films produced during this era and present a general overview of the period. Coverage of the films includes complete cast lists, credits, storyline, behind-the-scenes information, production history, critical analysis, and commentary from the cast and crew (much of it drawn from interviews by Tom Weaver, whom USA Today calls "the king of the monster hunters"). Unique to this edition are a new selection of photographs and poster reproductions and an appendix listing additional films of interest.