hollywood

Former “Los Angeles Times” Film Critic Kenneth Turan will be at Yiddish Book Center in Amherst, MA to discuss his new book “Louis B. Mayer and Irving Thalberg: The Whole Equation.” The event is on Sunday, May 11th at 2:00 pm.

For the past seven decades, Tim Matheson has been an on-screen favorite in Hollywood. In his new memoir, "Damn Glad to Meet You," Matheson looks at his illustrious career, and reveals what it was like to learn from and work alongside the greats, including Lucille Ball, Dick Van Dyke, Steven Spielberg, and Aaron Sorkin.

Magazine writer and biographer, Bill Zehme had been on the Johnny Carson beat for decades. He was a fan and looked at Carson as the great American Sphinx. Finally, he landed a prized interview for Esquire Magazine in 2002 - a decade after Johnny left the airwaves. When Carson died in 2005, Zehme signed a contract to do an expansive biography on the "King of Late Night.He worked on the book for more than a decade and then a cancer diagnosis and ongoing treatments halted his progress. Zehme died in 2023. The New York Times called it "one of the great unfinished biographies." Enter: Mike Thomas, Zehme's former research assistant, who took the notes and the finished chapters and completed the project which became the book "Carson: The Magnificent."

“Colored Television” by Danzy Senna is a take on love and ambition, failure and reinvention, and the racial-identity-industrial complex. The book follows Jane, a novelist, as she struggles to create a picture-perfect life with her husband and kids. Jane learns being a writer is hard and working in Hollywood is even harder.

In January 2022, television writer and New Yorker cartoonist Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad, which eventually became "They Went Another Way: A Hollywood Memoir."

“The Friday Afternoon Club” by actor Griffin Dunne is a memoir of growing up among larger-than-life characters in Hollywood and Manhattan. The book finds wicked humor and glimmers of light in even the most painful of circumstances.

In the new book "Oscar Wars," Michael Schulman chronicles the history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas - some iconic, others never-before-revealed - that have played out on the stage and off camera.

Writer, journalist, and media critic Ken Auletta reported on Harvey Weinstein 20 years ago.But the story continued to nag at him. What was at the root of Weinstein’s monstrousness? How, and why, was it never checked? Why the silence? How does a man run the day-to-day operations of a company with hundreds of employees and revenues in the hundreds of millions of dollars, and at the same time live a shadow life of sexual predation without ever being caught? How much is this an account of Harvey Weinstein, and how much is this a report about Hollywood and power?He never stopped working on the story. He continued to communicate with Harvey, even in prison, to go deeper to embed Harvey’s narrative within the context of his childhood, his relationships, and the movie business. Film stars, Miramax employees, old friends, and family all talked to Ken at length. The result is the biography, "Hollywood Ending: Harvey Weinstein and the Culture of Silence."

Erich Schwartzel has reported on the film industry for The Wall Street Journal since 2013. His new book "Red Carpet: Hollywood, China, and the Global Battle for Cultural Supremacy" is an eye-opening and deeply reported narrative that details the surprising role of the movie business in the high-stakes contest between the U.S. and China.

Legendary director, actor and screenwriter Peter Bogdanovich has died at age 82. He shot to fame with “The Last Picture Show” in 1971, earning an Academy Award nomination in his early 30s. Other films included “Paper Moon,” “Mask,” “Saint Jack” and a long-running project to finish Orson Welles’ “The Other Side of the Wind” in 2019. A tabloid fixture throughout his life, Bogdanovich was introduced to a new generation with a recurring role on “The Sopranos.” He spoke with WAMC in 2011 when he was attending a screening of his film "Daisy Miller" at The Linda.