The cinephile community knows Abbas Kiarostami (1940-2016) as one of the most important filmmakers of the previous decades. This volume illustrates why the Iranian filmmaker achieved critical acclaim around the globe and details his many contributions to the art of filmmaking. Kiarostami began his illustrious career in his native Iran in the 1970s, although European and American audiences did not begin to take notice until he released his 1987 feature Where's the Friend's House? His films defy established conventions, placing audiences as active viewers who must make decisions about actions and characters while watching the narratives unfold. He asks viewers to question the genre construct (Close-Up) and challenges them to determine how to watch and imagine a narrative (Ten and Shirin). In recognition for his approach to the craft, Kiarostami was awarded many honors during his lifetime, including the top prize at the Cannes Film Festival in 1997 for Taste of Cherry. In Abbas Kiarostami: Interviews, editor Monika Raesch collects eighteen interviews (several translated into English for the first time), lectures, and other materials that span Kiarostami's career in the film industry. In addition to exploring his expertise, the texts provide insight into his life philosophy. This volume offers a well-rounded picture of the filmmaker through his conversations with journalists, film scholars, critics, students, and audience members.

In But Enough About Me, legendary film actor and Hollywood superstar Burt Reynolds recalls the people who shaped his life and career, for better or for worse. From Robert Altman, Cary Grant, Clint Eastwood and Robert Mitchum to Bette Davis, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen and Kirsty Alley, Burt pays homage to those he loves and respected, acknowledges those who've stayed loyal, and calls out the assholes he can't forgive. Recalling his life and career spanning over 50 glorious years, the legendary actor gives special attention to the two great loves of his life, Dinah Shore and Sally Field, his son, Quinton, as well as to the countless people who got in his way on his journey to Hollywood domination. With chapters on his early childhood, how he discovered acting, played poker with Frank Sinatra, received directing advice from Orson Welles, his golden years in Hollywood, his comeback in the late 1990s, and how his life and art led him to found the Burt Reynolds Institute for Film and Theatre, But Enough About Me is a gripping and eye-opening story of one of cinema's true greats.

Bruce Kimmel has managed to eke out a career in one form of show business or another for over forty years. A successful Grammy-nominated record producer, Kimmel began his show business journey as an actor, in a time when being a young up-and-coming thespian was fun, thrilling, and when anything seemed possible. It was a different world for a young actor in the 1970s, and Kimmel's journey is paved with laughs, tears, success, and an amazing cast of players. At twenty-seven, he wrote, co-directed, and starred in a film that would become a major cult success, The First Nudie Musical. He did TV pilots, guest shots, series, plays. He met and worked with incredible people. It was the kind of time we will never see again. And then things changed. The nature of the business changed. And the path to dealing with those changes-getting older, trying to survive in an ever increasingly negative and cutthroat world-becomes a story of reinvention and rebirth. Through it all, Kimmel tells his tale with wit, candor, affection, and self-effacing honesty. Enjoy being the fly on the wall as Kimmel hangs out with Elsa Lanchester, Christopher Isherwood and Don Bachardy; goes to Groucho's house and plays the piano for him; works with Shirley Jones, David Cassidy, Susan Dey on The Partridge Family. We observe his long friendship with Cindy Williams, watch as he works with screen legends Patricia Neal, Jean Simmons, Leslie Nielsen, Patrick Macnee, Bud Cort, and Geraldine Fitzgerald, and as he hangs out with Hugh Hefner at the Playboy mansion., Bruce Kimmel's showbiz tales are loaded with laughs, wide-eyed wonder, and heart.

Many stars from China, Japan and Korea are the most popular and instantly recognizable in the world. East Asian Film Stars brings together some of the world's leading cinema scholars to offer their insights into the work of regional and transnational screen legends, contemporary superstars and mysterious cult personas.

Audrey Hepburn once said "I never thought I'd land in pictures with a face like mine." Nothing could be further from the truth. As one of the 20th century's most loved icons, her face is instantly recognisable the world over. Here, for the first time, ACC Art Books and Iconic Images proudly present the work of six wonderful photographers - Norman Parkinson, Milton H. Greene, Douglas Kirkland, Lawrence Fried, Terry O'Neill and Eva Sereny - who were fortunate enough to capture the star at different moments of her life. In addition, former Curator of Photographs for the National Portrait Gallery and co-curator of the Audrey Hepburn: Portraits of an Icon exhibition, Terence Pepper, opens up his personal archive of vintage press prints, making this ode to Hepburn truly unique. Throughout the book, Douglas Kirkland, Terry O'Neill and Eva Sereny share their memories of working with the icon. They present a wonderful mix of on-set, fashion, portrait and behind-the-scenes photographs, including contact sheets and never-before-seen images. With an introduction by Terence Pepper, Always Audrey is sure to delight any Hepburn fan.

"Cracked Shell Whole Yolk" is a collection of life events from the mind of a woman who survives domestic violence. Margo Viola escapes her abuser through the only avenue available "Death." After cheating death herself, she in turn had crossed the line and committed the sin of having another person's life taken. Cracked Shell Whole Yolk depicts the trials and tribulations of Margo's entire life path, coupled with her overwhelming desire to make right what she had wronged. Margo shows an innate ability to overcome adversity. Margo's life story proves that there are desperate changes needed in our Judicial System to narrow the brood spectrum of disparity, while handling Domestic Violence cases. Margo uses her bitter life experience as a tool for self-betterement and a guide to help others. She displays how one woman picked up her life, with heightened clarity and determination. Her strives marked the truth by living proof, of how one individual can make a difference. Margo's Memoir prompts society to take a cold hard look at the true dynamics of Domestic Violence, and how it plagues our community, thus erodes our family core. Cracked Shell/Whole Yolk is a thrilling adventure of a woman's life that soars at each turn of the page. Her experience touches all of us as a collective whole. Margo truly emerges from a "Cracked Shell" into a fully rounded "Whole Yolk"

In Elizabeth Taylor: Icon of American Empire, Gloria Shin contends that the titular movie star is a model of postcolonial whiteness as her tenure as the most beautiful woman in the world coincides with the era of postcolonialism in the 1950s and 1960s. Taylor is examined through a series of overlapping readings: as the Mistress in a cycle of Hollywood plantation, via her extra-cinematic image as a jet-setting wanton seductress and oriental in whiteface in the early 1960, through her repatriation to the U.S. in the 1970s via her marriage to and the election of her pro-military husband John Warner to the U.S. Senate, and her evolution as a relentless AIDS activist in the 1980s. Across these interpretative frames, Taylor emerges as the figuration who performs the vast possibilities open to postcolonial whites for mobility, pleasure, and political agency while operating without the burdens of race that allows her stardom to be symbolic of American Empire at the apex of its power.

Martha Ullman West illustrates how American ballet developed over the course of the twentieth century from an aesthetic originating in the courts of Europe into a stylistically diverse expression of a democratic culture. West places at center stage two artists who were instrumental to this story: Todd Bolender and Janet Reed.Lifelong friends, Bolender (1914-2006) and Reed (1916-2000) were part of a generation of dancers who navigated the Great Depression, World War II, and the vibrant cultural scene of postwar New York City. They danced in the works of choreographers Lew and Willam Christensen, Eugene Loring, Agnes de Mille, Catherine Littlefield, Ruthanna Boris, and others who West argues were just as responsible for the direction of American ballet as the legendary George Balanchine and Jerome Robbins. The stories of Bolender, Reed, and their contemporaries also demonstrate that the flowering of American ballet was not simply a New York phenomenon. West includes little-known details about how Bolender and Reed laid the foundations for Seattle's Pacific Northwest Ballet in the 1970s and how Bolender transformed the Kansas City Ballet into a highly respected professional company soon after. Passionate in their desire to dance and create dances, Bolender and Reed committed their lives to passing along their hard-won knowledge, training, and work. This book celebrates two unsung trailblazers who were pivotal to the establishment of ballet in America from one coast to the other.

The book is about Heaven, but does not include any near death experience for sensationalism. The author shares many miracles so that the reader may understand that this is a bona fide account of Heaven because God does not back what is not true, the miracles being His backing. There is a section on how the devil became the devil so that the reader may understand matters in Heaven and on earth. The underlying truth always is that whatever is good on earth is automatically in Heaven. Also whatever was good and fantastic on earth first appeared in Heaven; that is why it is called an invention and not a creation.

On 29 September 1981, Peter Turner received a phone call that would change his life. His former lover, Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, had collapsed in a Lancaster hotel and was refusing medical attention. He had no choice but to take her into his chaotic and often eccentric family's home in Liverpool. Liverpool born and bred, Turner had first set eyes on Grahame when he was a young actor, living in London. Best known for her portrayal of irresistible femme fatales in films such as The Big Heat, Oklahoma and The Bad and the Beautiful, for which she won an Oscar, Grahame electrified audiences with her steely expressions and heavy lidded eyes and the heroines she bought to life were often dark and dangerous. Turner and Grahame became firm friends and remained so ever after their love affair had ended. And it was to him she turned in her final hour of need. Film Stars Don't Die in Liverpool is an affectionate, moving and wryly humorous memoir of friendship, love and stardom.