"The story of the epic friendship between John Belushi and Dan Aykroyd, the golden era of improv, and the making of a comedic film classic that helped shape our popular culture. "They're not going to catch us," Dan Aykroyd, as Elwood Blues, tells his brother Jake, played by John Belushi. "We're on a mission from God." So opens the musical action comedy The Blues Brothers, which hit theaters on June 20, 1980. Their scripted mission was to save a local...

July, 1922. Newly-appointed 'movie czar' William H. Hays is about to arrive in town on a single-minded mission to clean up Hollywood. He is said to be compiling a list of 'undesirables' whom he plans to bar from screen work. They call it the Doom List. With the industry in the grip of fear and paranoia, Hollywood's hottest young director Rex Ingram is determined that no hint of scandal should mar the premiere of his new movie, The Prisoner of Zenda,...

"Hollywood in the 1950s was a period when the film industry both set conventions and broke norms and traditions-from Cinerama, CinemaScope, and VistaVision to the epic film and lavish musical. It was a decade that saw the rise of the anti-hero; the smoldering, the hidden, and the unspoken; teenagers gone wild in the streets; the sacred and the profane; the revolution of the Method; the socially conscious; the implosion of the studios; the end of the...

"John Connolly recreates the golden age of Hollywood for an intensely compassionate study of the tension among the commercial demands, artistic integrity, and the human frailties behind even the greatest of artists"-- Awed like everyone else by Chaplin's genius (and ambition and cruelty), Stan Laurel despaired of ever finding his own path to success or happiness. When impresario Hal Roach put him and Oliver Hardy, affectionately known as Babe, together...

"For a brief period of about five years in the early 1940s, Preston Sturges sat on the top of Hollywood. At the time, he was one of the few people, along with Orson Welles and Frank Capra, who both wrote and directed his films. Sturges's films including The Great McGinty (1940), Sullivan's Travels (1941), The Palm Beach Story (1942), The Miracle of Morgan Creek (1942), and Hail the Conquering Hero (1944) have become classics of American comedy and...

The films, the stars, the filmmakers-all get their due in Hollywood Black , a sweeping overview of black people in film from the silent era through Black Panther, with striking photos and history.

"In the summer of 1982, eight science fiction films were released within six weeks of one another. E.T., Tron, Star Trek: Wrath of Khan, Conan the Barbarian, Blade Runner, Poltergeist, The Thing, and Mad Max: The Road Warrior changed the careers of some of Hollywood's now biggest names -- altering the art of movie-making to this day. In The Future Was Now, Chris Nashawaty recounts the riotous genesis of these films, featuring an all-star cast of Hollywood...