Classic film book reviews including my entries in the three past Summer Classic Film Reading Challenges hosted by the Out of the Past blog.
Since warm weather has arrived, now is the perfect time to venture outside with a classic film book to get our day’s Vitamin D before heading back inside to catch TCM’s primetime showing of the day. For my third time participating in Raquel Stecher’s Summer …
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During the peak of her popularity, Clara Bow was Hollywood’s biggest box office star and a worldwide 1920s cultural phenomenon. Only working in pictures for a decade before an early retirement and retreat from public life in her late 20s, Clara won over the hearts …
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Over the past twenty years, there has been a heightened interest in the hundreds of women who worked in the silent era and helped build the film industry into the global entertainment force it is today. Karen Ward Mahar’s Women Filmmakers in Early Hollywood tells …
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Ohio-born author Zane Grey, originally a dentist and minor league baseball player before trying his hand at writing, was instrumental in solidifying the major themes, characters, and tropes of the American Western genre. Writing dozens of novels and short stories from the first decade of …
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Ever since the silent era, Hollywood filmmakers have traveled all around the world seeking realistic and exotic locations to shoot their films. During the classic era, Utah became one of the more frequent locals outside of California that Hollywood films used. Boasting desert locals in …
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Film censorship is almost as old as film itself. By the 1910s in America, several states had stringent film censorship boards that would review films and cut out parts deemed to be immoral. After a litany of Hollywood scandals in the early 1920s, calls for …
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