David Robinson

Offers profiles of important actors, actresses, directors, and producers of the forties, highlights influential films, and discusses documentaries, blacklisting, and popular film genres

Scepter Rand is a beautiful psychic who heads up “The Spookies,” a paranormal investigation team with a truckload of modern ghost-hunting equipment. Assisted by the spirit of her late butler, Fishwick, Spector and her two partners, ex-police officer Pete Brennan and wheeler-dealer Kevin Keeley, are hot on the trail of a dangerous poltergeist. Their investigation leads them to the northern moors of England and Melmerby Manor, a brooding 18th century estate overflowing with pirated DVDs. When the DVDs are swapped for a dead body, The Spookies team is fingered for the crime. Now they must race against time to prove their innocence by trying to make sense of ghostly text messages, crazed drivers determined to run them off the road and an enraged spirit seeking revenge for his untimely death. Their investigation draws them into a world of seedy mobsters, millionaire pirated movie producers, a gutter journalist looking for a story at any cost, and the grumbling spirits of an English stately home. But it’s all just another night’s work for The Spookies team in this supernatural mystery that will tickle your funnybone while doling out a healthy measure of goosebumps.*The DVD is not included with the digital version of this book.

From Peep Show to Palace recounts the enchanting early years of film, beginning with the primitive motion of the "magic lantern" in the fifteenth century and continuing, most significantly, with the explosion of research from 1893 to 1913, when the modern motion picture was born. Respected film critic David Robinson offers this vivid account of the haphazard process, "like the assembly of the pieces of a puzzle," which was the birth of American film.

A biography that contains a chronology, filmography, theatre tours, important people in Chaplin's life, index, and bibliography.