Entertainment History

Drawing on over a hundred interviews with industry insiders, former Spotify employees, and musicians, Mood Machine takes us to the inner workings of today’s highly consolidated record business, showing what has changed as music has become increasingly playlisted, personalized, and autoplayed.

From the award-winning author of Bring It On Home: Peter Grant, Led Zeppelin, and Beyond and Comfortably Numb: The Inside Story of Pink Floyd comes this deeply researched alphabetical biography of Queen and each of its dynamic members. Addressing the phenomenal success of the movie Bohemian Rhapsody, acclaimed music journalist Mark Blake builds on the legend of Queen and their enduring audience appeal.

From grand follies to misunderstood masterpieces, disastrous sequels to catastrophic literary adaptations, Box Office Poison tells a hugely entertaining alternative history of Hollywood, through a century of its most notable flops. What can these films tell us about the Hollywood system, the public’s appetite–or lack of it–and the circumstances that saw such flops actually made? Away from the canon, this is the definitive take on these ill-fated, but essential celluloid failures.

André Gide, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and a devoted pianist, invites readers to reevaluate Frédéric Chopin as a composer "betrayed...deeply, intimately, totally violated" by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. As a profound admirer of Chopin’s "promenade of discoveries", Gide intersperses musical notation throughout the text to illuminate his arguments, but most moving is Gide’s own poetic expression for the music he so loved.

As the influential drummer from iconic rock 'n' roll band The Hollies, Bobby Elliott has six decades' worth of musical anecdotes. Continually touring since 1963, his adventures have seen him beating Keith Moon in a drumming audition for Shane Fenton and the Fentones, being serenaded by Joni Mitchell while she was in bed with Graham Nash, and being offered a job by Paul McCartney to work with Wings.

In the second half of the 20th century New York was the source of new sounds, including the Greenwich Village folk scene, punk and new wave, and hip-hop. But as the end of the millennium neared, cutting-edge bands began emerging from Seattle, Austin, and London, pushing New York further from the epicenter. The behemoth music industry, too, found itself in free fall, under siege from technology. Then 9/11/2001 plunged the country into a state of uncertainty and war.

Updated and timed for the 60th anniversary (Thanksgiving Day, 1942) of this movie, this critically acclaimed book draws upon years of research, including access to Ingrid Bergman's personal acting diaries and the vast Warner Brothers archives, as well as interviews with many of those close to the film, including the late Paul Henreid, Lauren Bacall, and scriptwriters Howard Koch and Julius Epstein.

Cinema has had a hugely influential role on global culture in the twentieth century at multiple levels: social, political, and educational. The part of British cinema in this has been controversial—often derided as a whole, but also vigorously celebrated, especially in terms of specific films and film-makers. In this Very Short Introduction, Charles Barr considers films and filmmakers, and studios and sponsorship, against the wider view of changing artistic, socio-political, and industrial climates over the decades of the twentieth century.

“As Albert Einstein almost certainly never said, everyone is a genius—but if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.” So begins Katie Spalding’s spunky takedown of the Western canon, and how genius may not be as irrefutably great as we commonly understand. While most of us may never become Einstein, it may surprise you to learn that there’s probably a bunch of stuff you can do that Einstein couldn’t. And, as Spalding shows, the famous prodigies she explores here were quite odd by any definition.

In The House of Hidden Meanings, RuPaul strips away all artifice and recounts the story of his life with breathtaking clarity and tenderness, bringing his signature wisdom and wit to his own biography. From his early years growing up as a queer Black kid in San Diego navigating complex relationships with his absent father and temperamental mother, RuPaul excavates his own biography life-story, uncovering new truths and insights in his personal history.

In this brave and moving memoir, Corey Feldman is revealing the truth about what his life was like behind the scenes: His is a past that included physical, drug, and sexual abuse, a dysfunctional family from which he was emancipated at age fifteen, three high-profile arrests for drug possession, a nine-month stint in rehab, and a long, slow crawl back to the top of the box office.

Music journalist Chris Payne experienced emo's mainstream takeover from sweaty crowds and mosh pits growing up in New Jersey. In Where Are Your Boys Tonight? he offers an authoritative, impassioned, and occasionally absurd account told through interviews with more than 150 people, from the scene's biggest bands, producers, and managers to the teenage fans who helped redefine American music culture.

From the New York Times bestselling author of Satchel and Bobby Kennedy, a sweeping and spellbinding portrait of the longtime kings of jazz—Duke Ellington, Louis Armstrong, and Count Basie—who, born within a few years of one another, overcame racist exclusion and violence to become the most popular entertainers on the planet.

By the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back comes a magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges - some of the worst largely unknown until now. Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion.

The idea of American musical theater often conjures up images of bright lights and big city, but its lifeblood is found in amateur productions at high schools, community theaters, after-school programs, summer camps, and dinner theaters. In Beyond Broadway, author Stacy Wolf looks at the widespread presence and persistence of musical theater in US culture and examines it as a social practice - a live, visceral experience of creating, watching, and listening.

Among a crop of fresh filmmakers including Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Martin Scorsese, and Francis Ford Coppola revolutionizing Hollywood in the ’70s, Brian De Palma—a director from Philadelphia with a few social satires under his belt—charted a cinematic path unlike any of his peers. At times he was unfairly dismissed as a Hitchcock copycat; other times he was misunderstood for his peculiar mix of sexuality, humor, music, and violence. But, over the course of ten years, he created a new cinematic language.

In 1984, a new vision of horror was unleashed upon terrified moviegoers—a razor-gloved bogeyman who slashed his way through the children of those who had murdered him years before. In doing so, this cinematic monster would not just invade the dreams of his victims but give those watching a brand-new nightmare to fear forever.

Who made the phone call that got HBO to launch The Sopranos? What’s the significance of all those eggs? And, what the hell ever happened to the Russian? Michael Imperioli, Steve Schirripa, and the entire cast and crew of The Sopranos have all the answers - and they’re revealing where all the bodies are buried.

Whether it's Tom and Jerry, Scooby-Doo, the Jetsons, Yogi Bear, Top Cat, Huckleberry Hound, or hundreds of others, the creations of the Hanna-Barbera studio continue to delight generations worldwide. The groundbreaking company employed thousands in the art and business of animation. Some of them were vintage-era veterans, others were up-and-coming talents, some of whom found blockbuster success at other studios. The power of the sounds that Hanna-Barbera crafted to accompany the compelling visuals was a key factor in its spectacular success.

DisneyWar is an enthralling tale of one of America's most powerful media and entertainment companies, the people who control it, and those trying to overthrow them. It tells a story that - in its sudden twists, vivid, larger-than-life characters, and thrilling climax - might itself have been the subject of a Disney classic - except that it's all true.