UNITED STATES AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY
Neal Gabler
American journalist
ALMOST FROM the beginning, something was wrong with America.
— from Life the movie
Most acclaimed
Walt Disney
Everyone remembers him as the creator of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Bambi, Dumbo, Cinderella, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Fantasia. His films and characters inspired the great Disney theme parks. A creative genius, Walt Disney brought love and laughter to children everywhere. Now for the first time, Marc Eliot presents the real Walt Disney. The author reveals Walt Disney's twenty-five-year association with J. Edgar Hoover's FBI, serving as a Hollywood-based. Official informant before being promoted to the rank of Special Agent in Charge, rooting out Communists, subversives, and Jews. A lifelong anti-Semite, he absorbed his prejudice from his father, a strict fundamentalist who believed in corporal punishment and forced child labor. Walt Disney's phobic behavior is examined in detail, as is his obsessive hand-washing, heavy drinking, and sexual inadequacies. Unwilling to accept his father's violence as a form of love, and. Unwilling to "prove" his own identity, he feared he had actually been adopted in infancy and was illegitimate. He spent a lifetime searching for his real mother. Marc Eliot shows how these psycho-sexual conflicts drove Walt to the depths of lifelong despair and how they found expression in his "classic" animated characters and films, now so deeply embedded in American culture. In fact, they were created by a man who used the wealth and prestige they gave him to mold a. Nightmare empire of vengeance and power. Told against a panoramic view of Hollywood's golden age of glamour and backdoor politics, Walt Disney: Hollywood's Dark Prince is a fascinating work that concludes with a look into the Disney empire as it exists today.
An Empire of Their Own
1988
"From noted film critic Neal Gabler comes a provocative, original, and richly entertaining group biography of the Jewish immigrants who founded and came to dominate the American film industry. These men--Adolph_Zukor, Carl Laemmle, Louis B. Mayer, the Warner brothers, Harry Cohn--created an image of America out of their own idealism, a vision that proved so powerful that it ultimately came to shape the myths, values, traditions, and archetypes of America itself. This spellbinding social history of Hollywood reaches beyond the commonplace stereotypes to examine the psychology of the movie moguls, and the political, religious, and economic milieu of the town and industry they built. For these men, prevented from entering the real corridors of gentility and power in America, cut their lives to the pattern of American respectability as they interpreted it. In the process they created a new country, an 'empire of their own,' and colonized the American imagination to such an extent that this country came to be largely defined by its movies. In prose as vivid as Tinseltown itself, Neal Gabler paints a mesmerizing portrait of the human face of Hollywood. Richly entertaining, dramatic, and impeccably researched, An Empire of Their Own is, finally, the powerful story of the men who gave us America and wound up losing themselves."--Dust jacket.
Life the movie
Neal Gabler shows us today's astonishing conversion of life itself into Entertainment - Life the Movie. Revealing what now unites phenomena as diverse as modern art, President Clinton versus Kenneth Starr, the O. J. Simpson trial, the Unabomber murders, and Elizabeth Taylor's marriages, Gabler demonstrates how our hunger for entertainment and the massive exploitation of that hunger have combined to make everything from religion to politics to painting to the news into branches of show business; how Life the Movie has generated and popularized its own stars - the rich and famous; and how all of us are not only an audience for the life spectacular, but also performance artists acting out our own dramas within it. Gabler traces the phenomenal rise of Entertainment as it challenges high culture. He also shows how entertainment, most notably with the arrival of the movies, comes to dominate the national consciousness by introducing a new way of seeing, until it seems that every endeavor and idea must become part of the grand, ever-growing, ongoing Big Show or risk invisibility.