True Stories of Scandal and Hollywood Mysteries

True Stories of Scandal and Hollywood Mysteries
Author: Charles Nuetzel
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Total Pages: 226
Release: 2006-10-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 089370444X

If you have ever wondered what made Hollywood the Sin City of the world during the 1920s and how it finally cleaned itself up, this book will reveal some of the startling answers. Why is it that Hollywood stars, who seem to have everything -- money, fame, love -- find it necessary to take to the needle, booze, and the "dolls"? What is it about the "town" -- the industry -- that uses up talent as if it were some kind of stone object, without feelings, emotions, and driving ambitions, which finally is responsible for the destruction of its most important products? Is it the town or the touch of "talent" that drives the "beautiful people" towards escape through fast sex, wild parties, and the "happy pills"?

True Hollywood Noir

True Hollywood Noir
Author: Dina Di Mambro
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2013
Genre: Hollywood (Los Angeles, Calif.)
ISBN: 9781492338857

2014 IPPY Bronze Medal Award. A tantalizing mixture of classic Hollywood nostalgia and true crime, True Hollywood Noir: Filmland Mysteries and Murder, featuring 100 rare photographs, is suspenseful, entertaining, and eminently readable. Uncover true stories of mystery and murder in a dozen different chapters featuring William Desmond Taylor, Thomas Ince, Jean Harlow, Thelma Todd, Joan Bennett, Lana Turner, George Reeves, Gig Young, Bob Crane, Natalie Wood, Robert Blake, and Mickey Cohen. Included in the cast of characters of this book are Johnny Stompanato, William Randolph Hearst, Marion Davies, and Charlie Chaplin. And find never before told mob stories about Ben "Bugsy" Siegel, Virginia Hill, and a host of notorious underworld figures. From 1922 until 2001, explore some of Filmland's most fascinating mysteries, scandals and murders true Hollywood noir lived by the players behind the scenes. Each chapter dissects the various theories in each case, but it is up to you to make up your own mind. From the West Coast mob and city corruption intertwining with Hollywood mysteries on and off the screen, to the plots of noir films pulled from actual happenings in the underworld, get the stories behind the stories, the darker images playing out in living color behind the silver screen. While most of the actors featured here met with untimely tragic deaths or notorious misfortune coloring the remainder of their lives, the talent of these highly creative individuals and the legacy they've left us gives them a timeless immortality.

Hollywood Horrors

Hollywood Horrors
Author: Andrea Van Landingham
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 313
Release: 2021-11-01
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1493060082

The name “Hollywood” conjures up fantastical images of bright lights, glamorous dreams, and impossible riches. From its humble beginnings as a ranch sprawling northwest of Los Angeles in the late 1800s, Hollywood has spanned lifetimes as a factory of dreams, a dazzling place where all things are possible. This collection of stories takes you on a journey into the golden age, illuminating the space between the airy fantasy and the gritty reality of life in Hollywood. In a transient city where nothing lasts, thousands of stories have taken place in their time here. From the offscreen debauchery of the silent era, to countless dramatic and mysterious deaths, to the sinister past lives of world-famous LA landmarks, vestiges of Hollywood’s checkered past can still be found all over the city. With generations of Tinseltown’s luminaries living and working under the sunny guise of paradisal prosperity, their real stories reveal the sordid underbelly lurking directly beneath the surface. A dangerous collusion between the studios, the press, the mob, and the LAPD forms an impenetrable behind-the-scenes network of corruption, power and control, where the truth is always up for sale. A network in which the most glamorous and well-known figures are merely players in this elaborate charade. It’s magical and gritty, it’s ugly and dirty, it’s the land of dreams...it’s Hollywood.

Scandals of Classic Hollywood

Scandals of Classic Hollywood
Author: Anne Helen Petersen
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2014-09-30
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1101635479

Celebrity gossip meets history in this compulsively readable collection from Buzzfeed reporter Anne Helen Peterson. This guide to film stars and their deepest secrets is sure to top your list for movie gifts and appeal to fans of classic cinema and hollywood history alike. Believe it or not, America’s fascination with celebrity culture was thriving well before the days of TMZ, Cardi B, Kanye's tweets, and the #metoo allegations that have gripped Hollywood. And the stars of yesteryear? They weren’t always the saints that we make them out to be. BuzzFeed's Anne Helen Petersen, author of Too Fat, Too Slutty, Too Loud, is here to set the record straight. Pulling little-known gems from the archives of film history, Petersen reveals eyebrow-raising information, including: • The smear campaign against the original It Girl, Clara Bow, started by her best friend • The heartbreaking story of Montgomery Clift’s rapid rise to fame, the car accident that destroyed his face, and the “long suicide” that followed • Fatty Arbuckle's descent from Hollywood royalty, fueled by allegations of a boozy orgy turned violent assault • Why Mae West was arrested and jailed for "indecency charges" • And much more Part biography, part cultural history, these stories cover the stuff that films are made of: love, sex, drugs, illegitimate children, illicit affairs, and botched cover-ups. But it's not all just tawdry gossip in the pages of this book. The stories are all contextualized within the boundaries of film, cultural, political, and gender history, making for a read that will inform as it entertains. Based on Petersen's beloved column on the Hairpin, but featuring 100% new content, Scandals of Classic Hollywood is sensationalism made smart.

Scandal Sheet

Scandal Sheet
Author: Gemma Halliday
Publisher: Love Spell
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2009
Genre: Bodyguards
ISBN: 9780505528056

When she starts receiving death threats that lead to violence and murder, Tina Bender, the L.A. Informer's gossip columnist, is forced by her boss to hire bodyguard Calvin Dean, and they work together to stop the killer.

Beverly Hills Confidential

Beverly Hills Confidential
Author: Barbara Schroeder
Publisher: Gibbs Smith
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2012
Genre: History
ISBN: 188331870X

The very name Beverly Hills conjures images of glamour, wealth and success; in reality, the place has more than its share of malice, mayhem and even murder. In the breathtaking and sometimes macabre pages of Beverly Hills Confidential, the underbelly of the tummy-tucked gets exposed. Investigative reporter Barbara Schroeder and BHPD CSI inspector Clark Fogg re-examine the sensational stories of the past century, such as the Charlie Chaplin paternity trial and the mystery surrounding the death of Jean Harlow's MGM mogul husband.

Confidential Confidential

Confidential Confidential
Author: Samantha Barbas
Publisher: Chicago Review Press
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2018-09-04
Genre: History
ISBN: 0912777567

In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including sexual affairs, drug use, and sexual orientation, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Eventually the stars fought back, filing multimillion-dollar libel suits against the magazine. The state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted Harrison for obscenity and criminal libel, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial. This is Confidential's story, detailing how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond. With its bold red-yellow-and-blue covers, screaming headlines, and tawdry stories, Confidential exploded the candy-coated image of movie stars that Hollywood and the press had sold to the public. It transformed Americas from innocents to more sophisticated, worldly people, wise to the phony and constructed nature of celebrity. It shifted reporting on celebrities from an enterprise of concealment and make-believe to one that was more frank, bawdy, and true. Confidential's success marked the end of an era of hush-hush—of secrets, closets, and sexual taboos—and the beginning of our age of tell-all exposure.

Pocketbook Writer: Confessions of a Commercial Hack

Pocketbook Writer: Confessions of a Commercial Hack
Author: Charles Nuetzel
Publisher: Wildside Press LLC
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2014-10-23
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1479404284

The publishing memoirs of Charles Nuetzel, legendary paperback author, editor, publisher, and packager. Interviews, reminiscences, tips and tricks of the trade -- everything you ever wanted to know about the early days of publishing from one of the authors who lived through it! "I was lucky enough not only in selling my work to publishers but also ending up packaging books for some of them, and finally becoming a 'publisher' much like those who had bought my first novels. From there it as a simple leap to editing not only a science-fiction anthology, but also a line of SF books for Powell Sci-Fi back in the 1960s." -- Charles Nuetzel

Scandals, Secrets and Swansongs

Scandals, Secrets and Swansongs
Author: Boze Hadleigh
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2021-09-01
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1493063448

Behind the images and facades of stars whose fame and fascination continue to outlive them lies the naked truth. How Hollywood stars lived, worked and died is often more dramatic than their films. When we talk about movie stars we usually dwell not on their movies but their personalities or what happened to them or supposedly happened. Their lives interest us even more than their roles, especially, let’s be honest, their mishaps and tragedies, including early deaths. Their scandals define several movie stars, and Hollywood secrets remain a true-gossip staple, particularly sexual secrets. Scandals, Secrets & Swansongs takes a close-up, no-holds-barred look at 101 stars—at their surprising, often shocking, sometimes sordid but always entertaining real selves and lives.

Tinseltown

Tinseltown
Author: William J. Mann
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 488
Release: 2014-10-14
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0062242229

New York Times Bestseller • Edgar Award winner for Best Fact Crime The Day of the Locust meets The Devil in the White City and Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil in this juicy, untold Hollywood story: an addictive true tale of ambition, scandal, intrigue, murder, and the creation of the modern film industry. By 1920, the movies had suddenly become America’s new favorite pastime, and one of the nation’s largest industries. Never before had a medium possessed such power to influence. Yet Hollywood’s glittering ascendency was threatened by a string of headline-grabbing tragedies—including the murder of William Desmond Taylor, the popular president of the Motion Picture Directors Association, a legendary crime that has remained unsolved until now. In a fiendishly involving narrative, bestselling Hollywood chronicler William J. Mann draws on a rich host of sources, including recently released FBI files, to unpack the story of the enigmatic Taylor and the diverse cast that surrounded him—including three beautiful, ambitious actresses; a grasping stage mother; a devoted valet; and a gang of two-bit thugs, any of whom might have fired the fatal bullet. And overseeing this entire landscape of intrigue was Adolph Zukor, the brilliant and ruthless founder of Paramount, locked in a struggle for control of the industry and desperate to conceal the truth about the crime. Along the way, Mann brings to life Los Angeles in the Roaring Twenties: a sparkling yet schizophrenic town filled with party girls, drug dealers, religious zealots, newly-minted legends and starlets already past their prime—a dangerous place where the powerful could still run afoul of the desperate. A true story recreated with the suspense of a novel, Tinseltown is the work of a storyteller at the peak of his powers—and the solution to a crime that has stumped detectives and historians for nearly a century.