Coming: ‘Party Animals’
I was up late the last two nights reading an advance copy of Variety senior editor Robert Hofler’s juicy biography of film and stage producer Allan Carr — “Party Animals” — which is set for publication...
View Article‘The Power Trip’ or: Jackie Collins, escape artist
Jackie Collins is one of those master popular entertainers whose worst critics have never read her. A great storyteller who really knows the world she writes about, Collins has been spinning...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: 1960s soap ‘Where Love Has Gone’
“50 Shades of Grey” author E.L. James has nothing on the late great Harold Robbins when it comes to bestselling smut. Robbins too was accused of peddling porn disguised as popular fiction and had his...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘Youngblood Hawke’
The sexual revolution of the late 1960s put an end to one of my favorite Hollywood genres — the lurid potboilers adapted from the naughty novels of hugely popular (and now forgotten) writers such as...
View Article‘Kid’: classic Robert Evans Hollywood memoir back in print
September will bring us a new book by Hollywood legend Robert Evans — “The Fat Lady Sang” — and to whet our whistles, the itbooks division of HarperCollins has reissued the producer’s peerless 1994...
View Article‘The Adventurers’: when a trashy movie isn’t fun
On paper, the new Warner Archive release “The Adventurers” sounds like it should be a lot of good bad-movie fun. After all, it’s a big budget 1970 Paramount production based on a novel by Harold...
View ArticleBad Movies We Love: ‘The Carpetbaggers’
Harold Robbins’ novel “The Carpetbaggers” was considered so shocking when it was published in 1961 that it even prompted a New York Times reviewer to foam at the mouth. “It was not quite proper to have...
View Article‘Johnny Carson’ – Who says you can’t libel the dead?
The memoir by Henry Bushkin, “Johnny Carson” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), is an instant best-seller, but you have to wonder how many people will enjoy this depressing, mean-spirited look back at the...
View Article‘Santangelos’: ballsy women & the men who love them
500 million books sold and counting, Jackie Collins could have rested on her laurels — and her royalty statements — a long time ago. But, clearly she still has lots of stories to tell about the rich...
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