East End Books Ptown Presents: Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears: Michael Schulman in Conversation w/ Filmmaker & Bookseller Jeff Peters 6/17 @ 3pm
(***Please note the earlier start time for this book event. The event is at 3pm to accommodate events happening during the 25th Anniversary of the Provincetown International Film Festival.)
Get Your Tickets Here: Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood ... Michael Schulman w/Jeff Peters Tickets, Sat, Jun 17, 2023 at 3:00 PM | Eventbrite
Michael Schulman
Michael Schulman is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where he has contributed since 2006. His Profile subjects have included the comedian Bo Burnham, the talk-show host Wendy Williams, and the actors Adam Driver, Elisabeth Moss, and Jeremy Strong. He has written more than a hundred Talk of the Town pieces and contributed long-form interviews with such subjects as Linda Ronstadt, Robert De Niro, Fran Lebowitz, Anthony Hopkins, and Mel Brooks. His work has also appeared in the New York Times, Vanity Fair, The Believer, Aperture, and other publications. He is the author of “Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep,” a Times best-seller about the actress’s artistic coming-of-age in the 1970s.
Jeff G. Peters
Jeff is an award-winning Film Producer “Run Across Cuba” “Dead Buffalo” & “God’s Cartoonist: The Comic Crusade of Jack Chick.” Jeff has served on the Board of several Film Festivals in the USA including the Provincetown International Film Festival & The Tallahassee Film Festival and served as Curator of the LGBTQ & Friends Film Series in Tallahassee, FL. Jeff is a former Co-Owner at Achingly Beautiful Film Company. Jeff is a Book Publisher & Indie Bookstore Owner (East End Books Ptown; East End Books @Fine Arts Work center & East End Books Boston Seaport).
Book Details:
America does not have royalty. It has the Academy Awards. For nine decades, perfectly coiffed starlets, debonair leading men, and producers with gold in their eyes have chased the elusive Oscar. What began as an industry banquet in 1929 has now exploded into a hallowed ceremony, complete with red carpets, envelopes, and little gold men. But don't be fooled by the pomp: the Oscars, more than anything, are a battlefield, where the history of Hollywood--and of America itself--unfolds in dramas large and small. The road to the Oscars may be golden, but it's paved in blood, sweat, and broken hearts.
In Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman chronicles the remarkable, sprawling history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas--some iconic, others never-before-revealed--that have played out on the stage and off camera. Unlike other books on the subject, each chapter takes a deep dive into a particular year, conflict, or even category that tells a larger story of cultural change, from Louis B. Mayer to Moonlight. Schulman examines how the red carpet runs through contested turf, and the victors aren't always as clear as the names drawn from envelopes. Caught in the crossfire are people: their thwarted ambitions, their artistic epiphanies, their messy collaborations, their dreams fulfilled or dashed.
Featuring a star-studded cast of some of the most powerful Hollywood players of today and yesterday, as well as outsiders who stormed the palace gates, this captivating history is a collection of revelatory tales, each representing a turning point for the Academy, for the movies, or for the culture at large.
Just in time for Oscar season, one of our best writers on Hollywood (and author of the bestselling Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep) delivers a page-turning, deeply informative guide to America’s favorite award show.
While many other Oscar books act as yearbooks, with encyclopedic coverage of every Oscar year, OSCAR WARS: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears (Harper; On Sale: Feb. 21, 2023; Hardcover) by The New Yorker’s Michael Schulman is narrative-driven and selective, going deep on those banner years that tell a larger story. Each of OSCAR WARS’s eleven chapters takes a deep dive into a particular year, category, or conflict that represented a turning point for the Oscars, for Hollywood, or for the culture at large.
For instance, one chapter traces the remarkable Best Actress race of 1951, which included Bette Davis and Anne Baxter of All About Eve, Gloria Swanson of Sunset Boulevard, and Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. Another follows the Best Picture race of 1976, which pitted four antiauthoritarian masterpieces of the New Hollywood—One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Nashville, Barry Lyndon, and Dog Day Afternoon—against the first summer blockbuster, Jaws.
There's also a chapter on three writers who wrote Oscar-winning screenplays under cover during the blacklist, for movies like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Roman Holiday. This book features some of the biggest Hollywood players of the last century, including Bette Davis, Steven Spielberg and Louis B. Mayer, while also examining some of the Oscar's most (in)famous moments, including Shakespeare in Love vs. Saving Private Ryan, the plot against Citizen Kane, the Hollywood blacklist, #OscarsSoWhite and “the Slap.”
