Portfolio Categories: Book Design

Popularly known today as a radio and television quiz program designed to humiliate its contestants through practical jokes, Truth or Consequences inspired imitators by raising the bar for audience participation. Created by Ralph Edwards, the program quickly became known for contestants facing off against custard pies and seltzer bottles, all while it attained a success with charitable contributions which remains unparalleled in the history of broadcasting entertainment. Along with raising millions of dollars for various health agencies and wartime projects, a half-billion dollars in “E” Bonds were sold through the Truth or Consequences broadcasts.

Over the years, Truth or Consequences was instrumental in establishing both The Jimmy Fund and the American Heart Association, while the American Cancer Society and the March of Dimes benefited financially through a series of ongoing contests. Following the Second World War, the series served as a public service message for rehabilitating war veterans, setting the stage for another successful Edwards program, This is Your Life. In 1948, Jack Benny secretly agreed to participate in The Walking Man contest, ultimately positioning the quiz program into a national phenomenon. Two years later, the small town of Hot Springs, New Mexico agreed to permanently change its name to Truth or Consequences, making headlines across the globe.

Besides the basic history of the quiz program, from concept/origin to the transition from radio to television, this book documents many stories of contestants and charitable contributions proving that Truth or Consequences was not just an ordinary quiz program. Also included are more than 200 never-before-published photographs, recollections from contestants and crew, and a detailed episode guide.

She made her TV debut in 1939 and was still on the medium eighty years later. Betty White earned her first Emmy nomination in 1951 and her last sixty-three years later. Her longevity in television earned her a spot in the Guinness Book of World Records. Betty White’s incredible career encompasses seventeen regular roles, including The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Golden Girls, and Hot in Cleveland. She also did thousands of guest shots on everything from The Tonight Show to Password and Match Game to SpongeBob SquarePants. Including interviews with many who worked with her, Betty White on TV: From Video Vanguard to Golden Girl recounts and celebrates the achievements of one of entertainment’s most distinguished and beloved celebrities.Wesley Hyatt is the author of The Carol Burnett Show Companion (2016) and Bob Hope on TV (2018), both for Bear Manor Media. This is his tenth book.

Between 1977 and 1992, the lectures and fragments collected in Ritual to Realism were prepared and delivered in a variety of theatre history courses to supplement assigned readings in dramatic literature. The lectures (and fragments thereof) have been collated into sixteen units that, presented chronologically, offer an easily-assimilated survey of Western theatre history—from the ceremonies of the ancient Greeks to the rituals proposed by members of the twentieth-century avant-garde. Designed for a general audience as well as theatre students, actors, directors, and designers, Ritual to Realism does not pretend to be exhaustive. Instead, it provides an entertaining, lively, fact-based consideration of major theatrical movements, theatre practice, playwrights, and dramatic works—virtually, something for everyone with an interest in theatre.

From the introduction, “Search through Ritual to Realism however you like, line by line, back and forth through the chapters that interest you, or strictly as you need to through the index. No matter how you do it, every page, every paragraph will give you pieces of information and ideas that remain as fresh, subversive and radical today as they were in Ancient Greece or Restoration England. Plays, like all artistic creations, have never really changed, holding steadfast in opposition to conventional ideas and commonplaces, striking against the grain, so to speak, as untouchable, blinding entities that have mesmerized the minds of people for millennia. It is easy to find such a notion as historical context to be too abstract, not personal enough to do a student any good in the theater right now. It is through the evolving process by which one develops as an artisan throughout life that one inevitably feels tied ever closer to the historical long-view of the theater. . . . This book is designed to fill your arsenal with tools. Let it be a step that will influence the way you create dramatic art for the rest of your career.”

Cecil B. DeMille boosted the career of Elissa Landi in The Sign of the Cross (1932). Her leading men included Laurence Olivier, Fredric March, Cary Grant, and Robert Donat in The Count of Monte Cristo (1934). After 33 films, Landi gave up on Hollywood, to focus on her career as a novelist. “O’Brien reveals things about Elissa, I never knew!”- Suki Landi Sennett (niece) Elissa Landi is Scott O’Brien’s eighth biography of classic cinema legends. His books have garnered positive reviews in such publications as Classic Images, Sight & Sound, and SF Gate. Three of O’Brien’s books have made the Huffington Post “Best Cinema Books of the Year.”

“We’re here to stay!” was what Nazi Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels assured, speaking to members of the German film industry in early 1933. There were many who agreed with him like Karl Ritter who introduced Mickey Mouse to German audiences in 1930 and in 1933 began to produce propaganda films like Hitler Youth Quex: “In our cinemas we want to see nothing else than convinced National Socialists!”

For a while German film export languished, but with WW2 the Nazis “conquered” cinemas all over Europe and flooded them with their movies, propaganda as well as allegedly “apolitical” entertainment. In the new Germany one can laugh again! the propaganda promised but it was a different way of laughing. It was gallows humor.

This book deals not only with Hitler’s personal cinematic likes and dislikes, with the ambitions of Leni Riefenstahl, with the idyllic world of German animation, with film emigration, with anti-Semitic films, Dachau and Auschwitz. There is also a back story to tell about certain German silents like Metropolis and why the way of Teutonic imagery didn’t end with the death of the Nazi leaders in 1945, why their way of “laughing” is still alive on German screens…

Author Garry Berman gives readers a history lesson in comparing and overlapping the mediums of radio artists and film comedies during the decade of the 1930s. In doing so, he has not only created a new format, he has brought in fresh perspectives of the people that made the magic.” – Bill Cassara, author of Nobody’s Stooge and Edgar Kennedy: Master of the Slow Burn.

“It is a thorough and fascinating study, filled with interesting details.” – James Neibaur, author of Arbuckle & Keaton and The Charley Chase Talkies.

“Garry Berman has done a stellar job.” – Michelle Morgan, author of The Ice Cream Blonde: The Whirlwind Life and Mysterious Death of Screwball Comedienne Thelma Todd.

If there was ever a “Golden Decade” of American comedy, it was the 1930s. At the dawn of that remarkable, laugh-filled era, comedians had, for the first time, three performing venues available to them: the stage, radio, and talking films (plus, in the final year of the decade, the arrival of television), resulting in this ten-year span producing the finest performances by the greatest comedians ever to make audiences laugh. In film, comedy titans Laurel & Hardy, The Marx Brothers, and W. C. Fields all reached their creative peaks, as did Mae West, Our Gang (a.k.a. The Little Rascals), the Three Stooges, and less-remembered teams such as Wheeler & Woolsey, Clark & McCullough, and the Ritz Brothers.

At the same time, radio became a major entertainment force, allowing vaudevillians Jack Benny, Eddie Cantor, Fred Allen, Ed Wynn, George Burns & Gracie Allen, Edgar Bergen, Bob Hope, and Abbott & Costello to become national stars.On the stage, comedians including Bert Lahr, Fannie Brice, Jimmy Durante, and Wynn all thrived, while expanding their respective careers into films and radio.The Funniest Decade devotes one chapter to each calendar year of the 1930s, covering the landmark comedy films, radio programs, and stage performances of each year, while focusing on the individual comedians and comedy teams at key moments in their professional careers, including their first major creative and popular breakthroughs.

Dozens of photos, too!Entertainment historian Garry Berman has been writing about pop culture−especially television, music, and films−for over twenty years. He has contributed to Nostalgia Digest magazine, History magazine, and Beatlefan. He has also written and/or published several comedy scripts and humorous short pieces. This is his sixth non-fiction book.

CAROL BURNETT: Danny Kaye’s show went off the air in 1967 and The Carol Burnett Show was premiering that fall. All I could think about was, We need a Harvey Korman. We need a consummate actor with comedy chops to spare. I believe we had a call in to his agent when one afternoon I happened to see Harvey himself headed for his car in the CBS parking lot. I shouted, “Harvey!” And then proceeded to jump him.I seem to remember leaning him back over a car hood.“Please, please be on our show! You’re the very best! PLEASE?”It wasn’t exactly the most professional way to offer someone a job, but it worked. Harvey signed on, and I was in heaven.

BURT LANCASTER (OSCAR-WINNING ACTOR): “Chris, your father is a brilliant actor. He creates these incredibly believable human characters. On live television, no less.”

PETER MARSHALL (Emmy-Award-winning host of Hollywood Squares) “I always tell people that Chris loves me so much that, when he was six years old and I was in the hospital, he chose to visit me over breakfast at IHOP.”

MEL BROOKS (Oscar-winning writer/director) (Starred Harvey Korman in Blazing Saddles, High Anxiety, and History of the World Part 1): “Chris, I loved your father, even though he could be a real asshole.”

Joseph Warren Revere, a grandson of the legendary Paul Revere, served in the U.S. Navy; circumnavigated the globe; raised the first American flag in Sonoma, California during the Mexican War; battled pirates, sharks, and Indians; searched for gold; had a scandalous affair; joined the Union Army and received a court-martial for his actions at the Battle of Chancellorsville during the Civil War. And then he began the fight of his life.William R. Chemerka, an award-winning educator, author, History Channel commentator, and recipient of the North Jersey Civil War Round Table’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2012, brings the untold story of Revere’s Gothic adventures to life in this detailed biography.

Sneak through the pitch blackness of a distant mountain ridge along the border and stop to listen to the sounds of the night, only to hear people breathing all around you in the dark. Hide in a brush covered draw so dark that a group of approaching people do not even know you are there until they run into your outstretched hand.This is the real Border Patrol, the federal law enforcement agency where for twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, dedicated men and women are on duty in the most remote hills, mountains and deserts along the international border with Mexico, looking for and apprehending men and women who have illegally snuck into the United States.

Border Patrol agents do this because one third of the people they catch have a criminal record. They do this because merciless foot guides or “coyotes” leave their injured or sick countrymen behind to die in the heat or cold of the wilderness. And the agents do this, often on their own and always outnumbered, despite the dangers from armed drug smugglers, border bandits hiding in the shadows, criminal aliens, and the threat of injury from every possible natural obstacle in the untamed borderlands where so many agents skillfully and successfully complete their assigned duties.

Dorothy McGuire remains one of the most beloved stars of Hollywood. An actress of sincerity, dignity and natural beauty, she graced film, radio, television and theater for nearly half a century, delivering unforgettable performances in such classic movies as A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and the suspense thriller The Spiral Staircase. Yet no biography has been written about her—until now.

Adamant is intended not as a definitive biography, but rather as an attempt, which investigates, reveals and examines, with microscopic tenacity, the many facets of McGuire’s personal and professional history, drawing on a wide range of sources, including personal reminiscences of friends, colleagues and family and the author’s own frequentation of the actress. The reasons for the author’s self-deprecating definition of Adamant as an attempt hinge on the definition of exactly what one is attempting when one writes a biography.

The loose strands of philosophical, literary and spiritual Leitmotifs that are woven through the book’s exploration and culminate in its unusual conclusion make it less a biography than a moral, or alchemical, study of Dorothy McGuire. This loving tribute takes the metaphysical route and makes observations not only about its immediate subject but also about the art of acting, personal evolution and virtues, and, most importantly, the act itself of writing a biography.