Awesome Stardom Album and Music Offers

Pure Dynamite is a blow by blow account of the career of Tom Billington, who wrestled solo as The Dynamite Kid, and with Davey Boy Smith as half of the British Bulldogs tag team. Twice world champion, Billington was featured in the pages of Playboy magazine and was an international celebrity. Although he should have been a millionaire when he retired in 1993, after 16 years of professional wrestling, he had little but memories are scar tissue to show for it.

As one of the first bona fide superstars in the World Wrestling Federation, Billington's career parallels the development of the WWF, from the early days to the decade following the first Wrestlemaina event at Madison Square Gardens in 1985. He worked with every major promoter, and wrestled with some of the biggest names in the sport. His story is a candid expose of the highs and lows of a cultural phenomenon that is still growing today.

Now confined to a wheelchair as a result of serious damage to his back and legs, his years of steroid use have also damages Billington's heart and personal life. Pure Dynamite is as much a cautionary tale as it is a glimpse into the world of a wrestling legend..
Price: $9.95 [Notify me when price goes down.]

This user-friendly workbook, including a two hour DVD, features the best practical information on making it in the entertainment business from Christina Ferra-Gilmore, the founder of one of Hollywood's leading acting schools, and produced by Wink Martindale, the legendary host of 19 TV game shows. Included is vital information on: * How to network * Finding an agent and avoiding scams * Making a living while looking for acting jobs and creating a budget * Taking appropriate headshot photos, with examples of good and bad * Writing an actor's resume * The business side of acting * Developing your skills..
Price: $11.91 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Who was Rita Hayworth? Born Margarita Carmen Cansino, she spent her life subjected to others' definitions of her, no matter how hard she worked to claim her own identity Although there have been many "revelations" about her life and career, Adrienne McLean's book aims to show that such disclosures were part of a constructed image from the outset. McLean explores Hayworth's participation in the creation of her star persona, particularly through her work as a dancer. The passive love goddess, as it turns out, had a unique appeal to other women who, like her, found it extraordinarily difficult to negotiate the competing demands of family, domesticity and professional work outside the home. The book also considers the ways in which the actress has been treated by film scholarship over the years to accomplish its own goals, sometimes at her expense. several of Hayworth's best-known star vehicles - among them "Gilda" (1946), "Down to Earth" (1947), "The Lady from Shanghai" (1948) and "Affair in Trinidad" (1952) are discussed in depth..
Price: $20.96 [Notify me when price goes down.]

From Annette Tapert, the coauthor of the popular The Power of Style, comes a book that is just as beautiful and entertaining but that redefines an attribute even more intangible. In word and image, it evokes a unique Hollywood era and eleven of its goddesses who lived, and left as their legacy, the Power of Glamour.
        
When the Glamour Era met the Golden Age of cinema, it cast a spell on a public beaten by the Depression and the threat of war. But the key ingredient in 1930s glamour was personality. Annette Tapert's movie-queen profiles, rich with fresh insights, reach beyond the star-making machinery, fan magazines, fashions, and cosmetics to the essence of each women: the carefully molded image of Gloria Swanson, who started it all . . . Marlene Dietrich's siren persona on and off screen . . . the "reverse glamour" of Katharine Hepburn and Greta Garbo. Their power--and that of Joan Crawford, Carole Lombard, Norma Shearer, Claudette Colbert, and the long-neglected Kay Francis, Dolores Del Rio, and Constance Bennett--lay in using style, wit, and guile to outsmart the studio system and enchant the world. In these pages we see how, veiled in intrigue and mystery, they brought glamour very close to its original meaning: witchcraft..
Price: $15.00 [Notify me when price goes down.]

Essential vocal instruction for the pop singer, with a terrific companion CD of a dozen warm-up exercises specific to men and women. Each exercise begins with a sung example, then the piano plays the exercise for you to sing. The exercises address: warming up your lower and upper voice, connecting the two voices, loosening the throat, placing the sound forward, relaxing the tongue, breath and volume control, increasing your range, pitch accuracy, stabilizing the tone, and more. The book shows the practical objectives of each exercise and gives helpful pointers for success. Ideal for singers who aspire to American Idol!.
Price: $8.68 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $11.25 [Notify me when price goes down.]

While the actor Sessue Hayakawa (1886–1973) is perhaps best known today for his Oscar-nominated turn as a Japanese military officer in The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), in the early twentieth century he was an internationally renowned silent film star, as recognizable as Charlie Chaplin or Douglas Fairbanks. In this critical study of Hayakawa’s stardom, Daisuke Miyao reconstructs the Japanese actor’s remarkable career, from the films that preceded his meteoric rise to fame as the star of Cecil B. DeMille’s The Cheat (1915) through his reign as a matinee idol and the subsequent decline and resurrection of his Hollywood fortunes.

Drawing on early-twentieth-century sources in both English and Japanese, including Japanese-language newspapers in the United States, Miyao illuminates the construction and reception of Hayakawa’s stardom as an ongoing process of cross-cultural negotiation. Hayakawa’s early work included short films about Japan that were popular with American audiences as well as spy films that played upon anxieties about Japanese nationalism. The Jesse L. Lasky production company sought to shape Hayakawa’s image by emphasizing the actor’s Japanese traits while portraying him as safely assimilated into U.S. culture. Hayakawa himself struggled to maintain his sympathetic persona while creating more complex Japanese characters that would appeal to both American and Japanese audiences. The star’s initial success with U.S. audiences created ambivalence in Japan, where some described him as traitorously Americanized and others as a positive icon of modernized Japan. This unique history of transnational silent-film stardom focuses attention on the ways that race, ethnicity, and nationality influenced the early development of the global film industry..
Price: $22.44 [Notify me when price goes down.]

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Price: $57.56 [Notify me when price goes down.]