"Driven by his unfulfilled passions .. ... John Wilson could find no peace, in spite of his wealth, hist talent, his fame as a Holywood director. His safari in Africa was another move in his restless search for new sensations. Here at last he found a passion so primitive and elemental he could not control it. Hi veneer of civilization was stripped away and he came fac to face with the dark secret in his evil, twisted soul.
The author, once an aspiring screenwriter, recalls Hemingway's and Huston's influences, Hemingway's tendency toward self-caricature, and Huston's self-absorption.
Brian Herne's White Hunters: The Golden Age of African Safaris is the story of seventy years of African adventure, danger, and romance. East Africa affects our imagination like few other places: the sight of a charging rhino goes directly to the heart; the limitless landscape of bony highlands, desert, and mountain is, as Isak Dinesen wrote, of "unequalled nobility." White Hunters re-creates the legendary big-game safaris led by Selous and Bell and the daring ventures of early hunters into unexplored territories, and brings to life such romantic figures as Cape-to-Cairo Grogan, who walked 4,000 miles for the love of a woman, and Dinesen's dashing lover, Denys Finch. Witnesses to the richest wildlife spectacle on the earth, these hunters were the first conservationists. Hard-drinking, infatuated with risk, and careless in love, they inspired Hemingway's stories and movies with Clark Gable and Gregory Peck.
Through extensive, exclusive interviews with Eastwood (and the friends and colleagues of a lifetime), Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel has penetrated a complex character who has always been understood too quickly, too superficially. Schickel pierces Eastwood's monumental reserve to reveal the anger and the shyness, the shrewdness and frankness, the humor and powerful will that have helped make him what he is today. of photos.
A classic look at Hollywood and the American film industry by The New Yorker's Lillian Ross, and named one of the "Top 100 Works of U.S. Journalism of the Twentieth Century." Lillian Ross worked at The New Yorker for more than half a century, and might be described not only as an outstanding practitioner of modern long-form journalism but also as one of its inventors. Picture, originally published in 1952, is her most celebrated piece of reportage, a closely observed and completely absorbing story of how studio politics and misguided commercialism turn a promising movie into an all-around disaster. The charismatic and hard-bitten director and actor John Huston is at the center of the book, determined to make Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—one of the great and defining works of American literature, the first modern war novel, a book whose vivid imagistic style invites the description of cinematic—into a movie that is worthy of it. At first all goes well, as Huston shoots and puts together a two-hour film that is, he feels, the best he’s ever made. Then the studio bosses step in and the audience previews begin, conferences are held, and the movie is taken out of Huston’s hands, cut down by a third, and finally released—with results that please no one and certainly not the public: It was an expensive flop. In Picture, which Charlie Chaplin aptly described as “brilliant and sagacious,” Ross is a gadfly on the wall taking note of the operations of a system designed to crank out mediocrity.
When she was only twenty-three, Carson McCullers's first novel created a literary sensation. She was very special, one of America's superlative writers who conjures up a vision of existence as terrible as it is real, who takes us on shattering voyages into the depths of the spiritual isolation that underlies the human condition. This novel is the work of a supreme artist, Carson McCullers's enduring masterpiece. The heroine is the strange young girl, Mick Kelly. The setting is a small Southern town, the cosmos universal and eternal. The characters are the damned, the voiceless, the rejected. Some fight their loneliness with violence and depravity, Some with sex or drink, and some -- like Mick -- with a quiet, intensely personal search for beauty. "From the Paperback edition."
A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, complete with encounters with Franz Kafka, Albert Einstein, and Greta Garbo along the way. Salka Viertel’s autobiography tells of a brilliant, creative, and well-connected woman’s pilgrimage through the darkest years of the twentieth century, a journey that would take her from a remote province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire to Hollywood. The Kindness of Strangers is, to quote the New Yorker writer S. N. Behrman, “a very rich book. It provides a panorama of the dissolving civilizations of the twentieth century. In all of them the author lived at the apex of their culture and artistic aristocracies. Her childhood . . . is an entrancing idyll. In Berlin, in Prague, in Vienna, there appears Karl Kraus, Kafka, Rilke, Robert Musil, Schoenberg, Einstein, Alban Berg. There is the suffering and disruption of the First World War and the suffering and agony after it, which is described with such intimacy and vividness that you endure these terrible years with the author. Then comes the migration to Hollywood, where Salka’s house on Maybery Road becomes a kind of Pantheon for the gathered artists, musicians, and writers. It seems to me that no one has ever described Hollywood and the life of writers there with such verve.”
A provocative, candid study of the romantic relationships between white women and black men offers a psychological explanation for the phenomenon, as well as analyzing the influence of the entertainment industry, exposing stereotypes, and assessing the global implications of black and white relationships.
