"Cuba’s own Elvis"—that’s what Dan Rather calls him. Funny name for a man who has threatened the United States with nuclear war, who has made common cause with Islamic terrorists against the United States, and whose people risk death to escape him. But there’s a lot that Hollywood liberals and other Fidel Castro admirers would rather you didn’t know about the dictator of Cuba—like how he imprisoned more people as a percentage of population than Hitler or Stalin; how Fidel’s firing squads killed thousands of Cubans; how Fidel’s subjects would rather inject themselves with AIDS than live under his tyranny.

Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film."

The legendary actor and bestselling author of Pieces of My Heart offers a nostalgic look at Hollywood’s golden age. For millions of movie lovers, no era in the history of Hollywood is more beloved than the period from the 1930s through the 1950s, the golden age of the studio system. Not only did it produce many of the greatest films of the American cinema, but it was then that Hollywood itself became firmly established as the nation’s ultimate symbol of glamour and style, its stars almost godlike figures whose dazzling lives were chronicled in countless features in magzazines like Photoplay and Modern Screen.

American presidents and Hollywood have interacted since the 1920s. This relationship has made our entertainment more political and our political leadership more aligned with the world of movies and movie stars.

"Hollywood is a place where they'll pay you a thousand dollars for a kiss and fifty cents for your soul." – Marilyn Monroe. In 2015, it’ll be 100 years since Hollywood became the centre of American cinema and, while it has always presented itself as a place of glamour and home to the beautiful and talented, from its very creation there was a darker side to Tinseltown. Film-makers didn’t just move to southern California for its sunny weather, they went West to evade the patent laws restricting the use of movie cameras.