The real-life scandals of Hollywood's personalities rival any drama they bring to life on the silver screen. The Hollywood Scandal Almanac provides daily doses of high and low crimes, fraud and deceit, culled from Tinseltown's checkered past. The exploits of silent-era stars Charlie Chaplin and Fatty Arbuckle are recounted, along with the midcentury misdeeds of Frank Sinatra and Marilyn Monroe and the modern excesses of Charlie Sheen and Lindsay Lohan. This calendar of Hollywood transgressions has a sensational true tale for every day of the year. Join author Jerry Roberts on a tongue-in-cheek trip down a stormy memory lane filled with sneaky affairs, box-office bombs and careers cut short--sometimes by murder. It's a collection that proves the drama doesn't end when the credits roll.

Big television contracts in the 1960s created the Super Bowl, as well as the 1970 merger of the National Football League with the pass-oriented American Football League. Since then, professional football has been America's most popular televised team sport, developing into a wide-open passing game by the 21st century. Handling the completion side of the aerial game, receivers are not often as celebrated as quarterbacks or coaches, even in the era of San Francisco 49er Jerry Rice's supremacy. This book provides a history of pro pass receiving and its influence on the game prior to the televised era. The author studies pro football's formative and mid-20th century years, highlighting the players who pulled pigskins from flight, like the legendary Don Hutson, Gibby Welch, Johnny Blood, Ray Flaherty, Crazy Legs Hirsch, Mac Speedie, Choo Choo Roberts and many others.

The Great American Playwrights on the Screen is a complete, up-to-date record of movie and television productions of classic and contemporary works of the great playwrights. Rich in historical value and detail, this reference book not only tracks Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize winners, but also unearths unheralded treasures and forgotten performances by great actors and the great directors they served. To show the ongoing influences and legacies of the great plays, Roberts compares and contrasts the adapted versions, and includes colorful reviews by prominent critics of tv and film (beginning with those of the silent era). The profound expansion of television into American homes in the 1950s brought a flood of adapted plays to the small screen, and resulted in the rebirth of the careers of many significant playwrights. The Great American Playwrights on the Screen provides fans with a video and DVD guide to the adapted works of the playwrights, and shows which versions are available for home viewing and in which media (VHS, Beta, Laser, DVD, Letterbox). Simultaneously, this book is a unique, one-stop source for academics, students of the theatre arts, actors, directors and producers. Organized in an easy-to-use A-Z format, the book features over 200 playwrights including Arthur Miller, Marsha Norman, Eugene O'Neill, Aaron Sorkin, Neil Simon, Wendy Wasserstein, and Tennessee Williams. In addition, The Great American Playwrights on the Screen resurrects the memories of television productions of plays at a critical time, when many of them - including Emmy Award winners and nominees - are deteriorating in vaults.

Robert Mitchum's bad boy reputation that colors his public profile has been both earned and undeserved. Jerry Roberts discusses the actor's career, his cult status, his under-appreciated talent, his forgotten films, and his nonchalance.This book catalogues previously published information on Mitchum, taking a full measure of the actor and describing the events that occasionally brought him more notoriety than his movies. The book's biographical essay and annotated filmography scrutinize his performing style. Many yarns about Mitchum have been repeated and modified into legend. But much of the Mitchum myth has been just that: myth. The final word here on various rumors and stories comes from the confirmations, clarifications and corrections made by Robert Mitchum during an interview with the author and in correspondence with several members of the Mitchum family. As with the other Bio-Bibliographies in the Performing Arts, this biographical essay is followed by a chronology, annotated filmography, television, stage, recording and writing credits, list of awards, annotated bibliography listing 1,300 entries and a comprehensive index.

The breaking of the Enigma machine is one of the most heroic stories of the Second World War. But there was another German cipher machine, used by Hitler himself to convey messages to his top generals in the field. A machine more complex and secure than Enigma. A machine that could never be broken. For sixty years, no one knew about about Lorenz or 'Tunny', or the determined group of men who finally broke the code and thus changed the course of the war. Many of them went to their deaths without anyone knowing of their achievements. Here, for the first time, codebreaker. Captain Jerry Roberts tells the complete story of this extraordinary feat of intellect and of his struggle to get his wartime colleagues the recognition they deserve. The work they carried out at Bletchley Park was groundbreaking and is recognised as having kick-started the modern computer age.

This is the dynamic account of one of the most destructive maritime actions to take place in Connecticut history: the 1814 British attack on the privateers of Pettipaug, known today as the British Raid on Essex. During the height of the War of 1812, 136 Royal marines and sailors made their way up the Connecticut River from warships anchored in Long Island Sound. Guided by a well-paid American traitor the British navigated the Saybrook shoals and advanced up the river under cover of darkness. By the time it was over, the British had burned twenty-seven American vessels, including six newly built privateers. It was the largest single maritime loss of the war. Yet this story has been virtually left out of the history books-the forgotten battle of the forgotten war. This new account from author and historian Jerry Roberts is the definitive overview of this event and includes a wealth of new information drawn from recent research and archaeological finds. Lavish illustrations and detailed maps bring the battle to life.

"Mitchum's tales include beatings, hanging producers by their shoelaces, killings in Mexican bars and slapping Teutonic helmer Otto Preminger. And there are classic observations, such as his quip to Variety that 'the best producer is an absent one.' Mitchum editor Jerry Roberts...conducted one of the interviews, and has done a terrific job piecing together vintage conversations with David Frost, Dick Lochte, Richard Schickel and Charles Champlin, as well as collecting a wonderful array of prize quotes by and about Mitchum." -Steven Gaydos, Variety