Confessions of a Hollywood director

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Robert J. Emery

"This third installment of The Directors, a companion to the Silver Plaque-winning Starz/Encore documentary series, offers in-depth interviews with ten of Hollywood's most acclaimed film directors. Offering a unique glimpse at the craft of directing, as well as reminiscences of on-the-set pranks, these savvy Hollywood figures provide rich detail on the making of a wide and colorful variety of films, including Nashville, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Rain Man, Raging Bull, Pee-wee's Big Adventure, and Schindler's List.". "Readers will learn how directors first reacted to scripts that became film classics, how famous scenes were staged and shot, how underdog actors landed the roles that made them superstars, and much, much more."--BOOK JACKET.

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Philip Carlo

Anthony "Gaspipe" Casso is currently serving thirteen consecutive life sentences plus 455 years at a federal prison in Colorado. Now, for the first time, the head of a mob family has granted complete and total access to a journalist. Casso has given New York Times bestselling author Philip Carlo the most intimate, personal look into the world of La Cosa Nostra ever seen. This is his shocking story.From birth, Anthony Casso's mob life was preordained. Michael Casso introduced his young son around South Brooklyn's social clubs, where "men of honor" did business by shaking pinkie-ringed hands—hands equally at home pilfering stolen goods from the Brooklyn docks or gripping the cold steel of a silenced pistol. Young Anthony watched and listened and decided that he would devote his life to crime.Casso would prove his talent for "earning," concocting ingenious schemes to hijack trucks, rob banks, and bring into New York vast quantities of cocaine, marijuana, and heroin. Casso also had an uncanny ability to work with the other Mafia families, and he forged unusually strong ties with the Russian mob. By the time Casso took the reins of the Lucchese family, he was a seasoned boss, a very dangerous man.It was a great life—Casso and his beautiful wife, Lillian, had money to burn; Casso and his crew brought in so much cash that he had dozens of large safe-deposit boxes filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. But the law finally caught up with him in his New Jersey safe house in 1994. Rather than stoically face the music like the old-time mafiosi he revered, Casso became the thing he most hated—a rat. It broke his family's heart and made the once feared and revered mobster an object of scorn and disgust among his former friends. For it turned out that a lifetime of street smarts completely failed him in dealing with a group even more cunning and ruthless than the Mafia—the U.S. government.Detailing Casso's feud with John Gotti and their attempts to kill each other, the "Windows Case" that led to the beginning of the end for the mob in New York, and Casso's dealings with decorated NYPD officers Lou Eppolito and Stephen Caracappa—the "Mafia cops"—Gaspipe is the inside story of one man's rise and fall, mirroring the rise and fall of a way of life, a roller-coaster ride into a netherworld few outsiders have ever dared to enter.

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Anjelica Huston

"Picking up where A Story Lately Told leaves off, when Anjelica Huston is 22 years old, Watch Me is a chronicle of her glamorous and eventful Hollywood years. She writes about falling in love with Jack Nicholson and her adventurous, turbulent, high-profile, spirited 17-year relationship with him and his intoxicating circle of friends. She writes about learning how to act, about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of "Maerose Prizzi" in Prizzi's Honor, about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and Stephen Frears. She movingly and beautifully writes about the death of her father John Huston and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham. She is candid, mischievous, warm, passionate, funny, and a fabulous story teller"--

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Bob Biderman

From the Beatnik cafes of San Francisco, hanging out with the likes of Ginsberg, to an Army boot camp in Georgia, this novel explores America's entry into Vietnam seen through the eyes of a young man caught up in the madness. “Other wars have inspired not only best selling tales of heroic but also biting satires. Vietnam did not. Not, that is, until Bob Biderman gave us his superb Letters to Nanette…” About Books, American Library Association “Set in 1963, this wonderfully warm novel imaginatively recaptures the American atmosphere at the beginning of the Vietnam War and depicts one man’s resolve to meet manhood on his own terms. Letters to Nanette is really one long, open letter to a young nation that refuses to throw off its own adolescent misconceptions of growing up. ALA Booklist