Frank Sanello

Offers a portrait of the private life of the beloved American film star, following Stewart from his small-town Pennsylvania youth, to the heights of Hollywood stardom, to his distinguished military service, and his family life.

"Frank Sanello interviews more than 40 drug counselors about treatment options, talks to experts on gay life about meth's effect on rapidly rising HIV rates, and provides extensive resources, including ways to get help."--Jacket.

"The history of the Knights Templars, the medieval order of warrior monks who fought in the Crusades, is a centuries-spanning epic that encompasses such conflicting elements as idealism and cynicism, valor and cowardice, piety and depravity." "Officially, they were The Order of the Poor Knights of Christ, and their mission was to create a safe passage for pilgrims visiting war-torn Jerusalem in the early twelfth century. Despite their vows of poverty, the Templars turned out to be brilliant businessmen, renowned for their honesty. Their monasteries served as "banks" in which Europe's rulers and nobles felt safe enough to deposit their money. The Templars also operated highly regarded medical schools, invented cashier's checks, and commanded a naval fleet that allowed them to engage in trade throughout the Atlantic and Mediterranean." "But the Templars' wealth and influence provoked jealousy and resentment, as their detractors accused them of betraying their original role as poor men of God. In the early fourteenth century, King Philip the Fair had all the Templars in France arrested on trumped-up charges of heresy, witchcraft, and homosexuality. Condemned by a series of kangaroo courts and subjected to years of imprisonment and torture (history has since acquitted the Templars of almost all charges), all but two Templars (including the Grand Master of the order, Jacques de Molay) ultimately confessed to crimes they didn't commit, accepted offers of clemency, and retired to monasteries. In 1314 A.D., de Molay and his fellow unrepentant monk were burned at the stake in the Parisian garden of the French king." "The monastic order was outlawed everywhere in Europe, but the Templars have survived in myth and legend until the present day; fringe historians and conspiracy buffs claim they still exist as secret members of the order of Freemasons and even the Shriners!"--Jacket.

According to the author, a more accurate subtitle for Reel v. Real would be How Hollywood INACCURATELY Turns Fact into Fiction. In order to tell a good story rather than make a documentary, fiction filmmakers, directors and writers, often play fast and loose with the historical record. Sometimes current mores require changes. What was accepted in the past, like child brides, would be unthinkable today in the wake of ongoing crimes committed by child predators/molesters. Most often, however, box-office considerations determine what accurate historical information ends up on the cutting room floor. Just one of the many historical bloopers Frank Sanello reveals in Reel v. Real: In Mel Gibson's Celts in Kilts epic, Braveheart, a major plot point involves his affair with the Princess of Wales, who bears his baby because her husband, the future Edward II, was exclusively homosexual and ignored his wife. In reality, the Princess of Wales, sister of the king of France, was only six years old at the time the actual story takes place. Deceptive but it allowed the screenwriter to create a scene where the princess tells her sadistic father-in-law, King Edward I, who is paralyzed by a stroke and can't speak, that the child she is carrying is Mel Gibson's William Wallace's, not his son's. The king twitches violently when the princess whispers in his ear, "It is Wallace's child who will bear your name and inherit your crown!" The best scene in the movie and made entirely out of unholy cloth. But as many directors of historical films plead the 11th Amendment: "We're not making a documentary here!" Frank Sanello, author

It is about his life growing up going to prison and getting out and making a good life out of his self because of the childhood mistakes he had made it had taken him a while to figure out what to do but than he got a role in a movie and ever since that day he has been acting and loving every minet of it

Former entertainment journalist and film critic Frank Sanello's biography of the filmmaker explores the career of the director of Jaws and Lincoln and explores his personal life as reflected in the evolution of his choice of film projects. Sanello, the author of biographies of Tom Cruise, Jimmy Stewart, Eddie Murphy, Sharon Stone, Sylvester Stallone, Will Smith, Halle Berry and Mark Wahlberg, connects events in Spielberg's formative years as he ascends, "Moses-like," per a review of emphasized textSpielberg: The Man, the Movies, the Mythology in the Jerusalem Post, to the peak of the entertainment heap, . [link text]

Journalist and historian Sanello draws back the curtain that Tom Cruise has pulled over his life to expose the man, not the manufactured image. Based on exhaustive research and interviews with Cruise's closest associates--and a personal interview with Cruise--this biography explores the painful and dramatic events that propelled a lonely child into a star, and provides behind-the-scenes details about his movies and his two marriages. Photos. Bibliography. Filmography

In his metafictional novel, Frank Sanello vividly recreates the Third Reich and World War II as seen through the eyes and daily diary of Hitler's imaginary wife, Countess Christina Bernadotte (1916-1948). The granddaughter of the king of Sweden, the countess is forced at the age of 16 to marry the 43-year-old Nazi dictator by her socially ambitious and abusive mother, an heiress to the Vanderbilt fortune. Her husband, strung out on morphine and cocaine, makes revolting sexual demands on his virginal wife involving coprophilia, a fetish that eroticizes feces. Lonely and isolated, Frau Hitler throws herself into a series of transient love affairs with the Third Reich’s handsome foreign minister, the corrupt Joachim von Ribbentrop, Cary Grant, and Ernst Röhm, leader of the SA (Storm Troopers). Because of her many romantic liaisons, she doesn’t know the identity of the father of her son, Folke, except that he’s not her husband’s. As the Holocaust claims more victims, Christina begins smuggling Jews out of Germany right under her drug-addled husband’s nose. During the war, she travels to Auschwitz to rescue Jewish friends and bribes the Gestapo to allow other Jews to flee Nazi Germany. With her uncle, Count Folke Bernadotte, she helps organize the White Buses operation, a dangerous mission that transports 30,000 Jews and POWs to safety in Sweden aboard Red Cross buses painted white to avoid bombing the Allies or the Luftwaffe. As First Lady of the Reich, she meets or corresponds with various historical figures such as Sigmund Freud, Pope Pius XII and MGM chief Louis B. Mayer. Toward the end of the war, as she tries to flee home to Sweden with her son and adopted daughter, her arch-nemesis, Hermann Göring, Hitler’s second in command and pedophile, forces her to choose one of her children to leave behind with him. The choice haunts the countess until tragedy intervenes during her work as UN mediator between warring Palestinian Jews and Arabs in 1948. These dramatic events are recorded in her daily diary, which her grandson finds hidden in a Holocaust memorial library and publishes as emphasized textThe Autobiography of Frau Adolf Hitler.