Forgotten Hollywood

Forgotten Hollywood welcomes the authors of the new book, Finding Wonderful: Hopeful Lessons from Jimmy Stewart and It’s a Wonderful Life, Matt Mikalatos and Aaron Burns. Aaron is also the director of the new film: Jimmy (Out in theaters Nov 6th). Doug Hess is the Host! Book is out on Amazon and other retailers Forgotten Hollywood is on Facebook!

The untold story of the extraordinary people who inspired Christopher Isherwood's characters in Cabaret, the landmark Broadway musical and Oscar-winning film, and the vibrant Bohemia that escaped from Berlin or endured under the Nazi regime.Even diehard fans of Cabaret remain unaware that Isherwood's Berlin Stories, celebrated as one of the best novels of the 20th Century, is based on a true story―and real people, from the larger-than-life landlady to the immortal, flighty, fantastical Sally Bowles, whose escapades in 1930s Weimar Berlin were comically exaggerated in one of the most memorable characters in Broadway history.In a novelistic style that captures the joyful art-making and wild final parties of a democratic Germany before Hitler, Life is a Cabaret is a group biography of these enigmatic and provocative muses. Thanks to exhaustive research, investigative reporter Brian Fairbanks recounts the weird and wondrous lives of Jean Ross (the real Sally, a brilliant writer, free-loving film critic secretly working for Stalin's communists), Wilfrid Israel (who saved more Jews than Oskar Schindler), Gerald Hamilton (a gay conman with questionable Nazi ties), and all of the others immortalized in the iconic, eternal Berlin Stories. Fairbanks unearths belief-defying details of survival, tragedy, sex, and brilliant art from these people and the world they inhabited―a world with illuminating, and at times disturbing, parallels to the one we live in today.
Doug Hess is the host. 
Forgotten Hollywood is on Facebook!

Doug Hess spoke with the Author of the book: The Secret Hitchcock: How Hollywood's Legendary Director Lived through Cary Grant and James Stewart (Screen Classics)Cary Grant and James Stewart were everything Alfred Hitchcock was not. Grant radiated charm and sophistication. Stewart embodied resilience and depth. Hitchcock—a meticulous, private man ruled by fear—found the freedom to express himself through their performances. Between 1941 and 1959, Hitchcock made eight unforgettable films with these two stars: four with Stewart—Rope (1948), Rear Window (1954), The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956), and Vertigo (1958)—and four with Grant—Suspicion (1941), Notorious (1946), To Catch a Thief (1955), and North by Northwest (1959). In those eighteen years, Grant shed his comedic persona to become a hero, Stewart transformed from boy next door to a war-hardened everyman, and Hitchcock reached the pinnacle of his craft—living his most daring, mysterious self through their performances. These relationships are key to understanding Hitchcock's creative process and the deeper layers of meaning in his iconic films.
Forgotten Hollywood is on Facebook!

Doug Hess talks with the author!
James Mason (1909–1984) was born to be an actor. He just didn’t know it. A Cambridge graduate with a degree in architecture, he arrived in London at a time when nothing was being built. With few prospects, he turned to the stage, where his modest experience proved enough to land him a spot in repertory theater. Those early performances led to film roles in which he was initially deemed “adequate” before finding his niche as a brooding, sophisticated villain―an identity that made him a star in British cinema.
Out on Amazon!
Forgotten Hollywood is on Facebook!

From the author of the beloved Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye comes the definitive account of one of the quintessential American artists, Frank Capra, visionary behind the iconic and timeless It’s a Wonderful Life.Frank Capra, the director of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, It Happened One Night, and, supremely, It’s a Wonderful Life remains one of the great chroniclers of the American heart, how we love, lead, dream, hope, and fight for our individuality. But Frank Capra was a more complex artist than is usually reckoned and a more complicated man than anyone knows. As his most famous collaborator Jimmy Stewart put it, “the best Frank Capra story is the story of his own life. It’s got more highs and lows than a roller coaster. It’s heartwarming. It’s kind of hard to believe, really. And it could only happen in America.”Like many great American stories, this story begins in Ellis Island where a penniless family of Sicilian immigrants arrives in 1903. Frank Capra’s life goes on to take in the explosive growth of Southern California and the film industry, the depths of the Depression, the enormity of the Second World War, and America’s uneasy post-war as an empire riven by a loss of unity. It is a life as shot through with both “moonbeams” and melancholy as that of his greatest creation, George Bailey. Capra is both the exemplar of American ideals, as in his truly vital work for Roosevelt’s war effort, and of American failings, as in his informing during the McCarthy period.This extraordinary book, making full use for the first time of Capra’s own archives, including deeply personal writings from his later years, has brought this seminal artist into urgent life. At the same time, in its epic richness, it offers a dazzling portrait of both a lost America and an enduring one.
Doug Hess is the host.