Delmer Daves (1904-1977) was an American screenwriter, director, and producer known for his dramas and Western adventures, most notably Broken Arrow and 3:10 to Yuma. Despite the popularity of his films, there has been little serious examination of Daves's work. Filmmaker Bertrand Tavernier has called Daves the most forgotten of American directors, and to date no scholarly monograph has focused on his work. In The Films of Delmer Daves: Visions of Progress in Mid-Twentieth-Century America, author Douglas Horlock contends that the director's work warrants sustained scholarly attention. Examining all of Daves's films, as well as his screenplays, scripts that were not filmed, and personal papers, Horlock argues that Daves was a serious, distinctive, and enlightened filmmaker whose work confronts the general conservatism of Hollywood in the mid-twentieth century. Horlock considers Daves's films through the lenses of political and social values, race and civil rights, and gender and sexuality. Ultimately, Horlock suggests that Daves's work-through its examination of bigotry and irrational fear and depiction of institutional and personal morality and freedom-presents a consistent, innovative, and progressive vision of America.

In 1749, a newspaper advertisement appeared declaring that a man would climb inside a bottle on the stage of a London theatre. Although the crowds turned up in their hundreds to witness the trick, the performer didn't. Over the following decades, elaborate jokes and fanciful tales would continue to bamboozle people across England. In The Century of Deception, magician and historian Ian Keable tells the engrossing stories of these eighteenth-century hoaxes and those who were duped by them. The English public were hoodwinked time and time again, swallowing whole tales of rapping ghosts, a woman who gave birth to rabbits, a levitating Frenchman in a Chinese Temple and outrageous astrological predictions. Not only were the hoaxes widely influential, drawing in celebrities such as Samuel Johnson, Benjamin Franklin and Jonathan Swift, they also inflamed concerns about 'English credulity'. 'Fake news', 'going viral' and 'social media' may be modern terms, but as this entertaining, eye-opening book shows, these concepts have been with us for centuries.

You had to decide to let yourself be turned upside down, you had to accept to see the idea you had forged about yourself progressively shatter. In the summer of 1969, at 19 years old, Didier Mouturat gave up on college, shattering his parents hopes that he follow a safe and conventional course. Fresh from the wild Parisian student revolt of 1968, with its street battles and slogans, he set out to find a life that would be truly alive, deciding to be a classical actor. When he met Cyrille Dives, however, the universe of masks quietly turned his world upside down. This book describes Mouturats apprenticeship to a unique theater artist. In the 1970s and early 80s, Dives created a theater of masks, a Western parallel to Japanese Noh. Dives was a true bohemian artist, a sculptor of masks, a painter and theatrical director. Cyrille Dives was also a spiritual master. Mouturats apprenticeship encompassed everything from walking in a way that brings a mask to life to cultivating a beginners mind. Slowly and subtly, the theater apprenticeship became an encounter with the deeper truth of his own being. I am speaking of an intimate, progressive discovery that we are not masters of our own being that it is only the result of a system of reactions that tyrannize us. Mouturat becomes Divess right-hand man, helping establish a theater and a school of masks. That work is evident here in enchanting illustrations, as well as words. Yet as translated by the scholar and author Roger Lipsey, Mouturat also offers a pithy chronicle of a search for meaning and inner being.

Before there was "Glee "or "American Idol, "there was Stagedoor Manor, a theater camp in the Catskills where big-time Hollywood casting directors came to find the next generation of stars. It's where Natalie Portman, Robert Downey, Jr., Zach Braff, Mandy Moore, Lea Michele, and many others got their start as kids. At age thirty-one, Mickey Rapkin, a senior editor at "GQ "and self-proclaimed theater geek, was lucky enough to go, too, when he followed three determined teen actors through the rivalries, heartbreak, and triumphs of a summer at Stagedoor Manor.
Every summer since 1975, a new crop of campers has entered Stagedoor Manor to begin an intense, often wrenching introduction to professional theater. The offspring of Hollywood players like Ron Howard, Nora Ephron, and Bruce Willis work alongside kids on scholarship. Some campers have agents, others are just beginning. The faculty--all seasoned professionals--demand adult-size dedication and performances from the kids. Add in talent scouts from Disney and Paradigm and you have an intense, exciting environment where some thrive and others fail. Eye-opening, funny, and full of drama and heart, "Theater Geek "offers an illuminating romp through the world of serious child actors.