The Internship (2013)
Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson star as two former salesmen who, never having managed to come to grips with the digital age, are left high and dry when their employer suddenly decides to call it a day. Staking everything on one last throw of the dice, the pair, defying all the odds, somehow manage to get themselves accepted onto a coveted internship at tech giants Google. But will they be able to keep up the facade once they take up their positions?

The Watch (2012)
Ben Stiller, Vince Vaughn, Jonah Hill and Richard Ayoade star as a group of friends who form a neighbourhood watch group. While Evan Trautwig, a newcomer to the suburban neighbourhood, may have a legitimate reason for forming a crime watch group following the recent murder of a friend, it is clear that for most of the men ulterior motives are at work. Indeed, Bob Finnerty seems to spend a lot more time examining the dating habits of his daughter, Chelsea, than he does looking for threats. However, when the men stumble across what appears to be an alien plan to destroy humankind, they understand where their responsibilities lie and set out to counter the threat.

At one gilded moment in history, his fame was so great that he was known the world over by his nickname alone: Rubi. Pop songs were written about him. Women whom he had never met offered to leave their husbands for him. He had an eye for feminine beauty, particularly when it came with great wealth: Barbara Hutton, Doris Duke, Eva Peron, and Zsa Zsa Gabor. But he was a man's man as well, polo player and race-car driver, chumming around with the likes of Joe Kennedy, Frank Sinatra, Oleg Cassini, Aly Khan, and King Farouk. He was also a jewel thief, and an intimate of one of the world's most bloodthirsty dictators. And when he died at the age of fifty-six--wrapping his sports car around a tree in the Bois de Boulogne--a glamorous era of white dinner jackets at El Morocco and celebrity for its own sake died along with him.

He was one of a kind, the last of his breed. And in The Last Playboy, author Shawn Levy brings the giddy, hedonistic, and utterly remarkable story of Porfirio Rubirosa to glorious Technicolor life.

Steve Carell and Jennifer Garner star in this family comedy based on the children's book by Judith Viorst. Eleven-year-old Alexander Cooper (Ed Oxenbould) has the worst day ever, experiencing one mishap after the other. His dad Ben (Carell), mum Kelly (Garner) and older siblings Anthony (Dylan Minnette) and Emily (Kerris Dorsey) always seem to have sunny dispositions and fail to empathise with his misery. However, when his family find themselves in terrible situations of their own, Alexander begins to understand that to have good days you must also have bad ones. The film co-stars Bella Thorne, Jennifer Coolidge, Megan Mullally and Donald Glover.

For nearly ninety years, Hollywood's brightest stars have favoured the Chateau Marmont as a home away from home. Filled with deep secrets but hidden in plain sight, its evolution parallels the growth of Hollywood itself. Perched above the Sunset Strip like a fairy-tale castle, the Chateau seems to come from another world entirely. An apartment-house-turned-hotel, it has been the backdrop for generations of gossip and folklore: 1930s bombshell Jean Harlow took lovers during her third honeymoon there; director Nicholas Ray slept with his sixteen-year-old Rebel Without a Cause star Natalie Wood; Anthony Perkins and Tab Hunter met poolside and began a secret affair; Jim Morrison swung from the balconies, once nearly falling to his death; John Belushi suffered a fatal overdose in a private bungalow; Lindsay Lohan got the boot after racking up nearly $50,000 in charges in less than two months. Much of what's happened inside the Chateau's walls has eluded the public eye - until now. With wit and prowess, Shawn Levy recounts the wild parties and scandalous liaisons, creative breakthroughs and marital breakdowns, births and untimely deaths that the Chateau Marmont has given rise to. Vivid, salacious and richly informed, the book is a glittering tribute to Hollywood as seen from the suites and bungalows of its most hallowed hotel.

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson star in this comedy about two former salesmen blagging their way onto an internship at Google. Never having managed to come to grips with the digital age, old-school salesmen Billy and Nick (Vaughn and Wilson) are left high and dry when their employer suddenly decides to call it a day. Staking everything on one last throw of the dice, the pair, defying all the odds, somehow manage to get themselves accepted onto a coveted internship at tech giants Google. But just when they think that they've finally cracked it, the cerebrally-challenged duo realise that in order to land the job of their dreams, they're going to have to use every trick in the book to triumph in a winner-takes-all battle against the country's smartest kids.

Adventure comedy sequel starring Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Amy Adams, Owen Wilson, Hank Azaria, Bill Hader, Ricky Gervais and Steve Coogan. Stiller reprises his role as Larry Daley, the hapless security guard who encounters living and breathing museum exhibits. This time round, the Museum of Natural History has been closed for renovations, and the museum pieces moved into federal storage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where the collection includes artefacts associated with many of the great figures of American history including Theodore Roosevelt (Williams), Amelia Earhart (Adams), General Custer (Hader) and Al Capone (Jon Bernthal). Larry must infiltrate the museum's tight security to rescue Jedediah (Wilson) and Octavius (Coogan), who have been shipped there by mistake.

For a few years in the 1960s, London was the coolest city on earth: a spontaneous, dizzying stew of pop music, fashion, film, scandal, drugs & sex, crime, the avant garde underground and the tabloid obsession with fame. The rest of the world watched in awe.

Snaking through it are such eminent swinging Londoners as The Dreamer (actor Terence Stamp), The Chameleon (Rolling Stone Mick Jagger), The Loner (Beatles manager Brian Epstein), The Snapper (photographer David Bailey) and The Blue Blood (art dealer Robert Fraser), as well as such figures as comedian Peter Cook; hairdresser Vidal Sassoon; singer Marianne Faithfull; fashion designer Mary Quant; supermodels Jean Shrimpton and Twiggy; gangsters Ron and Reggie Kray; actor Michael Caine; actresses Catherine Deneuve, Lynn Redgrave and Julie Christie; pop groups The Beatles, The Who and The Kinks; filmmakers Roman Polanski, Richard Lester and Michelangelo Antonioni; as well as the various participants in the Profumo scandal, the Great Train Robbery, the rise of LSD, the radical underground, the heyday of the gambling club and the fashion boutique and various and sundry scandals, scenes and sensations.

Due to a combination of massive talent and sheer luck, they dominated the world scene. But the party was to end ? after seven short years it seemed that everyone was now a Swinging Londoner and the same vibe was found in Paris, New York and San Francisco.

Ready, Steady, Go recreates the whole show and contrasts a series of emblematic lives with the great events that shaped the time. Through these stories, Shawn Levy, author of Rat Pack Confidential, shows how the city re-invented cool and then seemed to lose it's swing altogether.

A scandalous story of money, drugs, fast cars, high politics, lowly crime, hundreds of beautiful woman and one man, Porfirio Rubirosa from the celebrated author of RAT PACK CONFIDENTIAL. The Dominican playboy Porfirio Rubirosa died at 8:00 am on July 5, 1965, when he smashed his Ferrari into a tree in Paris. He was 56 years old and on his way home to his 28-year-old fifth wife, Odile Rodin, after a night's debauch in celebration of a victorious polo match. In the previous four decades, Rubirosa had on four separate occasions married one of the wealthiest women in the world, and had slept with hundreds of other women including Marilyn Monroe, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Ava Gardner, and Eva Peron. He had worked as aide-de-camp to one of the most vicious fascists the century ever knew. He had served as an ambassador to France, Germany, Belgium, Italy, Argentina and Vichy. He had been a jewel thief, a forger, a shipping magnate, a treasure hunter. He had held his own with the world's most powerful and notorious men including John F. Kennedy, Josef Goebbels and Juan Peron. He ran comfortably celebrity circles, counting among his friends Frank Sinatra, Ted Kennedy, David Niven, Sammy Davis Jr., and fellow playboy Aly Khan. He lived for the moment and, at his death, faded without a legacy: no children, no fortune, no entity - financial, cultural, even architectural - that bore his name. There will never be anyone else like Porfiro Rubirosa. Indeed, the really amazing thing is that there ever was. Shawn Levy - celebrated author of RAT PACK CONFIDENTIAL, and READY, STEADY, GO - has been given unique access to primary material including FBI and CIA files in his search for the last playboy.

They alit in Las Vegas for a month to make a movie and play a historic nightclub gig they called the Summit; they hit Miami, the Utah desert, Palm Springs, Chicago, Atlantic City, Beverly Hills, Hollywood back lots, illegal gambling dens, saloons, yachts, private jets, the White House itself.

It was sauce and vinegar and eau de cologne and sour mash whiskey and gin and smoke and perfume and silk and neon and skinny lapels and tail fins and rockets to the sky.

It was swinging and sighing and being a sharpie, it was cutting a figure and digging a scene.

It was Frank and Sammy Davis Jr. and Dean Martin and Peter Lawford for a while and Joey Bishop when they asked him and Jack Kennedy and Sam Giancana and tables full of cronies and who knew how many broads.

It was the ultimate spasm of traditional showbiz – both the last and the most of its kind.

It was the Rat Pack.

It was beautiful.

Rat Pack Confidential – you’re never far from a cocktail, a swingin’ affair and a fist-fight.

Comedy starring Ben Stiller, Robin Williams, Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke. Larry Daley (Stiller) is a kind-hearted dreamer who always knew that he was destined for greatness, he just never quite knew how. None of his ideas or inventions have panned out so, with a heavy heart, he takes a regular job as a lowly graveyard-shift security guard at the Museum of Natural History in order to provide a more stable life for himself and his ten-year-old son, Nick (Jake Cherry). On his first night on the job, however, he finds that guardianship of the museum is far from stable. At nightfall an Egyptian spell brings the artifacts and wax figures to life. With Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher) charging to war through the hallways, the diorama miniatures embroiled in a deadly feud, and a two-ton Tyrannosaurus Rex nagging to play fetch, Larry turns to a wax replica of President Roosevelt (Williams) for a little advice on keeping things intact.

There’s little debate that Robert De Niro is one of the greatest screen actors of his generation, perhaps of all time--if not, in fact, the greatest. His work, particularly in the first 20 years of his career, is unparalleled. Mean Streets, the Godfather Part II, Taxi Driver, the Deer Hunter, and Raging Bull all dazzled moviegoers and critics alike, displaying a talent the likes of which had rarely--if ever--been seen. De Niro became known for his deep involvement in his characters, assuming that role completely into his own life, resulting in extraordinary, chameleonic performances.

Yet little is known about the off-screen De Niro--he is an intensely private man, whose rare public appearances are often marked by inarticulateness and palpable awkwardness. It can be almost painful to watch at times, in powerful contrast to his confident movie personae. In this elegant and compelling biography, bestselling writer Shawn Levy writes of these many De Niros--the characters and the man--seeking to understand the evolution of an actor who once dove deeply into his roles as if to hide his inner nature, and who now seemingly avoids acting challenges, taking roles which make few apparent demands on his overwhelming talent. Following De Niro's roots as the child of artists (his father, the abstract painter Robert De Niro Sr., was widely celebrated) who encouraged him from an early age to be independent of vision and spirit, to his intense schooling as an actor, the rise of his career, his marriages, his life as a father, restauranteur, and businessman, and, of course, his current movie career, Levy has written a biography that reads like a novel about a character whose inner turmoil takes him to heights of artistry. His many friendships with the likes of Martin Scorsese, Meryl Streep, Harvey Keitel, Shelley Winters, Francis Ford Coppola, among many others, are woven into this extraordinary portrait of DeNiro the man and the artist, also adding a depth of understanding not before seen.

Levy has had unprecedented access to De Niro's personal research and production materials, creating a new impression of the effort that went into the actor's legendary performances. The insights gained from DeNiro’s intense working habits shed new perspective on DeNiro’s thinking and portrayals and are wonderful to read. Levy also spoke to De Niro's collaborators and friends to depict De Niro's transition from an ambitious young man to a transfixing and enigmatic artist and cultural figure.

Shawn Levy has written a truly engaging, insightful, and entertaining portrait of one of the most wonderful film artists of our time, a book that is worthy of such a great talent.

Frank Sinatra, Dean Martin, Sammy Davis Jr, Peter Lawford and Joey Bishop. They were the most famous entertainers on the planet and they made the rules. Their world was full of charisma, talent and charm, gambling, private jets, drink, drugs and girls to excess. This was vintage Hollywood This was showbiz This was the Rat Pack Shawn Levy's compelling and atmospheric bestseller has been adapted for the stage for Nottingham Playhouse, in co-production with The Octagon Theatre, Bolton. Opens on September 6th 2002, tours to Bolton and Ipswich. Further UK tour planned for 2003.

It’s the summer of 1966... The fundamental old ways: chastity, rationality, harmony, sobriety, even democracy: blasted to nothing or crumbling under siege. The city glows. It echoes. It pulses. It bleeds pastel and fuzzy, spicy, paisley and soft. This is how it's always going to be: smashing clothes, brilliant music, easy sex, eternal youth, the eyes of everybody, everyone's first thought, the top of the world, right here, right now: Swinging London.

Shawn Levy has a genius for unearthing the secret history of popular culture. The Los Angeles Times called King of Comedy, his biography of Jerry Lewis, "a model of what a celebrity bio ought to be–smart, knowing, insightful, often funny, full of fascinating insiders' stories," and the Boston Globe declared that Rat Pack Confidential "evokes the time in question with the power of a novel, as well as James Ellroy's American Tabloid and better by far than Don DeLillo's Underworld."

In Ready, Steady, Go! Levy captures the spirit of the sixties in all its exuberance. A portrait of London from roughly 1961 to 1969, it chronicles the explosion of creativity–in art, music and fashion–and the revolutions–sexual, social and political–that reshaped the world. Levy deftly blends the enthusiasm of a fan, the discerning eye of a social critic and a historian's objectivity as he re-creates the hectic pace and daring experimentation of the times–from the utter transformation of rock 'n' roll by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones to the new aesthetics introduced by fashion designers like Mary Quant, haircutters like Vidal Sassoon, photographers like David Bailey, actors like Michael Caine and Terence Stamp and filmmakers like Richard Lester and Nicolas Roeg to the wild clothing shops and cutting-edge clubs that made Carnaby Street and King's Road the hippest thoroughfares in the world.

Spiced with the reminiscences of some of the leading icons of that period, their fans and followers, and featuring a photographic gallery of well-known faces and far-out fashions, Ready, Steady, Go! is an irresistible re-creation of a time and place that seemed almost impossibly fun.


From the Hardcover edition.

SUNDAY TIMES FILM BOOK OF THE YEAR 'Uproariously readable ... Levy is a master of the group biography' Sunday Times 'Teeming with satisfying gossipy details' Guardian 'Exalts the intoxicating, beguiling dreaminess of Rome in its celluloid heyday' TLS 1950s Rome. From the ashes of war, the Eternal City is reborn as the epicentre of film, style, boldfaced libertinism and titillating journalism. It's the heyday of fashion icons such as Pucci and Brioni, and the height of 'Hollywood on the Tiber', when a dizzying array of stars flock to Cinecitta, the huge movie studio on the outskirts of Rome. At the bars on Via Veneto the likes of Ingrid Bergman, Audrey Hepburn and Elizabeth Taylor mix with blue bloods and bohemians, while behind them trail street photographers in pursuit of the most unflattering and dramatic portraits of fame. In a fast-paced, kaleidoscopic narrative, Shawn Levy shows how all roads lead to Federico Fellini's world-conquering movie La Dolce Vita, starring Marcello Mastroianni and the Swedish bombshell Anita Ekberg. He recreates Rome's stunning ascent with vivid and compelling tales of its glitterati and artists, down to every last outrageous detail of the city's magnificent transformation.

Mrs. Doubtfire (1993)
Robin Williams stars as difficult actor and husband Daniel Hillard who separates acrimoniously from his wife (Sally Field) and receives a court order limiting his visits to his children. As a result he dresses up as a Scottish nanny and gets employment with his ex-wife looking after his own kids.

Toys (1992)
When a benevolent toymaker dies, he leaves his factory in the care of his army general brother (Michael Gambon), until his son Leslie (Robin Williams) is mature enough to assume control. The General, however, re-structures the factory, and in a break with tradition begins to manufacture war toys, many of which, Leslie discovers, are more than playthings.

Night at the Museum (2006)
Robin Williams appears alongside Ben Stiller, Mickey Rooney and Dick Van Dyke. Larry Daley (Stiller) is a kind-hearted dreamer who always knew that he was destined for greatness; he just never quite knew how. None of his ideas or inventions have panned out so, with a heavy heart, he takes a regular job as a lowly graveyard-shift security guard at the Museum of Natural History in order to provide a more stable life for himself and his ten-year-old son, Nick (Jake Cherry). On his first night on the job, however, he finds that guardianship of the museum is far from stable. At nightfall an Egyptian spell brings the artefacts and wax figures to life and with Attila the Hun (Patrick Gallagher) declaring war through the hallways, Larry turns to a wax replica of President Roosevelt (Williams) for a little advice on keeping things in order.

Night at the Museum 2 (2009)
Stiller reprises his role as Larry Daley, the hapless security guard who encounters living and breathing museum exhibits. This time round, the Museum of Natural History has been closed for renovations, and the museum pieces moved into federal storage at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where the collection includes artefacts associated with many of the great figures of American history including Theodore Roosevelt (Williams), Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams), General Custer (Bill Hader) and Al Capone (Jon Bernthal). Larry must infiltrate the museum's tight security to rescue Jedediah (Owen Wilson) and Octavius (Steve Coogan) who have been shipped there by mistake.