The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything news, politics, religion, high culture into one vast public entertainment. Neal Gabler calls them "lifies," those blockbusters written in the medium of life that dominate the media and the national conversation for weeks, months, even years: the death of Princess Diana, the trial of O.J. Simpson, Kenneth Starr vs. William Jefferson Clinton.Real Life as Entertainment is hardly a new phenomenon, but the movies, and now the new information technologies, have so accelerated it that it is now the...
The story of how our bottomless appetite for novelty, gossip, and melodrama has turned everything news, politics, religion, high culture into one vast...
A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America's motion picture industry. The names Harry Cohn, William Fox, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, Jack and Harry Warner, and Adolph Zucker are giants in the history of contemporary Hollywood, outsiders who dared to invent their own vision of the American Dream. Even to this day, the American values defined largely by the movies of these emigres endure in American cinema and culture. Who these men were, how they came to dominate Hollywood,...
A provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who were the moving forces behind the creation of America...
The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney.
Walt Disney was a true visionary whose desire for escape, iron determination and obsessive perfectionism transformed animation from a novelty to an art form, first with Mickey Mouse and then with his feature films-most notably Snow White, Fantasia, and Bambi. In his superb biography, Neal Gabler shows us how, over the course of two decades, Disney revolutionized the entertainment industry. In a way that was unprecedented and later widely imitated, he built a...
The definitive portrait of one of the most important cultural figures in American history: Walt Disney.
Hailed as the most important and entertaining biography in recent memory, Gabler's account of the life of fast-talking gossip columnist and radio broadcaster Walter Winchell "fuses meticulous research with a deft grasp of the cultural nuances of an era when virtually everyone who mattered paid homage to Winchell" (Time). of photos.
Hailed as the most important and entertaining biography in recent memory, Gabler's account of the life of fast-talking gossip columnist and radio broa...
His classic films illuminated everyone's childhood. The theme parks are on every tourist itinerary. The movie empire is one of Hollywood's biggest players. Walt Disney is one of the few men who unquestionably changed our culture. This is the definitive biography of this remarkable man.
His classic films illuminated everyone's childhood. The theme parks are on every tourist itinerary. The movie empire is one of Hollywood's biggest pla...
