The Father Of Hollywood

The life of visionary real estate developer HJ Whitley is told by his great-granddaughter, based on his letters, memoirs and reminiscences of his wife, and other documentation.

The life of visionary real estate developer HJ Whitley is told by his great-granddaughter, based on his letters, memoirs and reminiscences of his wife, and other documentation.

Offering a broad perspective on the Hollywood dad, looking at important Hollywood fathers and discussing films from many genres, this book adopts a multi-faceted theoretical approach, making use of psychoanalysis, sociology and masculinity studies and contextualising the father figure within both Hollywood and American history.

Joseph P. Kennedy’s reputation as a savvy businessman, diplomat, and sly political patriarch is well-documented. But his years as a Hollywood mogul have never been fully explored until now. In Joseph P. Kennedy Presents, Cari Beauchamp brilliantly explores this unknown chapter in Kennedy’s biography. Between 1926 and 1930, Kennedy positioned himself as a major Hollywood player. In two short years, he was running three studios simultaneously and then, in a bold move, he merged his studios with David Sarnoff to form the legendary RKO Studio. Beauchamp also tells the story of Kennedy’s affair with Gloria Swanson; how he masterminded the mergers that created the blueprint for contemporary Hollywood; and made the fortune that became the foundation of his empire.

Jack H. Harris started out as a child performer in vaudeville and has done everything related to the movies including projectionist, usher, theatre manager, actor, distributor and producer. His life encompasses the history of the movies and so do the anecdotes he so eloquently shares. There's plenty of celebrity "dish," but in a nice way. Whether talking about Burns and Allen, Mary Pickford, Laurel and Hardy, Howard Hughes, Jack Nicholson, Jackie Kennedy, Natalie Wood or Barbra Streisand and Jon Peters, he's got the stories. Some of those he helped to start in the business include Steve McQueen, Patty Duke, Ivan Reitman, John Carpenter, John Landis and so many more.

Hollywood & God is a virtuosic performance, filled with crossings back and forth from cinematic chiaroscuro to a kind of unsettling desperation and disturbing—even lurid—hallucination. From the Baltimore Catechism to the great noir films of the last century to today’s Elvis impersonators and Paris Hilton (an impersonator of a different sort), Robert Polito tracks the snares, abrasions, and hijinks of personal identities in our society of the spectacle, a place where who we say we are, and who (we think) we think we are fade in and out of consciousness, like flickers of light dancing tantalizingly on the silver screen. Mixing lyric and essay, collage and narrative, memoir and invention, Hollywood & God is an audacious book, as contemporary as it is historical, as sly and witty as it is devastatingly serious.

Spanning nearly 50 years of family history, the book chronicles the remarkable lives of two creative talents, Martin Sheen and Emilio Estevez. It's a story of father and son set against the backdrop of Hollywood; this narrative is organized around their physical and spiritual journey along the Camino de Santiago, Spain, the thousand-year-old pilgrimage path which traverses Galicia. It is the area from which Sheen's father emigrated to the U.S. and to which Estevez's own son has returned. Along the Waywill focus not just on the lives these men have chosen as artists, but also (and most importantly) on the one they have lived together. It is a story of family bonds and artistic advances and setbacks; of good choices and hard choices; of opportunities lost and opportunities found. Sheen and Estevez will share what they have experienced and learned from each other in their forty eight years as father and son, as fathers of sons, as actors and director, as spiritual seekers, and as concerned citizens of the world. Readers will meet them as real people rather than icons, as two men who have accumulated decades of wisdom and insight they are now ready to share.

In 1946, with the war over and Japan occupied, 2nd Lt. Herbert Sussan received a plum assignment. He would get to use his training as a cinematographer and join a Strategic Bombing Survey crew to record the results of the atomic bombings in Nagasaki and Hiroshima. From his first arrival in Nagasaki, he knew that something completely novel and appalling had happened and that he had to preserve a record of the results, especially the ongoing suffering of those affected by the bomb (known as hibakusha) even months later. When the U.S. government decided that the gruesome footage would not be "of interest" to the American public and therefore classified it top secret, he spent decades arguing for its release. His last wish was that his ashes be scattered at ground zero in Hiroshima. The author, his daughter, followed his footsteps in 1987, met survivors he had filmed more than 40 years before. And found that she met there a father she never really knew in life. This book recounts Herbert Sussan's experiences (drawn directly from an oral history he left behind), his daughter's quest to understand what he saw in Japan, and the stories of some of the survivors with whose lives both father and daughter intersected. This nuclear legacy captures the ripples of the atomic bombing down through decades and generations. The braided tale brings human scale and understanding to the horrors of nuclear war and the ongoing need for healing and peacemaking.

A beautiful, vibrant memoir about growing up motherless in 1970s and ’80s San Francisco with an openly gay father. After his wife dies in a car accident, bisexual writer and activist Steve Abbott moves with his two-year-old daughter to San Francisco. There they discover a city in the midst of revolution, bustling with gay men in search of liberation—few of whom are raising a child. Steve throws himself into San Francisco’s vibrant cultural scene. He takes Alysia to raucous parties, pushes her in front of the microphone at poetry readings, and introduces her to a world of artists, thinkers, and writers. But the pair live like nomads, moving from apartment to apartment, with a revolving cast of roommates and little structure. As a child Alysia views her father as a loving playmate who can transform the ordinary into magic, but as she gets older Alysia wants more than anything to fit in. The world, she learns, is hostile to difference. In Alysia’s teens, Steve’s friends—several of whom she has befriended—fall ill as AIDS starts its rampage through their community. While Alysia is studying in New York and then in France, her father tells her it’s time to come home; he’s sick with AIDS. Alysia must choose whether to take on the responsibility of caring for her father or continue the independent life she has worked so hard to create. Reconstructing their life together from a remarkable cache of her father’s journals, letters, and writings, Alysia Abbott gives us an unforgettable portrait of a tumultuous, historic time in San Francisco as well as an exquisitely moving account of a father’s legacy and a daughter’s love.

Ince turned movie-making into a business enterprise. Progressing from actor to director and screenwriter, he revolutionized the motion picture industry through developing the role of the producer. Taves chronicles Ince's life from the stage to his sudden death as he was about to join forces with media tycoon William Randolph Hearst. He explores Ince's impact on Hollywood's production system, the Western, his creation of the first American movies starring Asian performers, and his cinematic exploration of the status of women in society.