Biography & Autobiography : Entertainment & Performing Arts

Dear Reader,. You probably think you already know me because you've seen one of my two thousand porn movies, or maybe you caught me on VH1's The Surreal Life , or rented my movie Pornstar , or heard me rapping in someone's music video. . . . Yeah, that's me. But believe it or not, that's not the real me. The real me is just an average guy trying to make it in the world like everyone else. Well . . . sort of . . . I always wanted to be a legitimate actor (that's right, don't laugh). But when the gigs didn't come I didn't let it get me down. Instead, I'd fall into the arms of beautiful women and let them heal my bruised soul. One of them insisted on taking nude pictures of me and sending them to Playgirl . For some reason I agreed, and when it was published, I got tons of phone calls. One of them was from a casting director who wanted me in his next picture. There was only one problem: it was a porno. ''What do you think?'' I asked my dad. He rubbed his chin and paused for a moment. ''I think you should do it,'' he said. ''I mean, you're already halfway there, and . . . at least you'll be performing, right?''. That's exactly what I thought. From there, my life only got better. I traveled all over the world, made tons of money, and got more famous every year. But more than anything, I wanted to be legit, so I started doing stand-up comedy, moved to Hollywood, and kept my acting hopes alive by mingling with every major—Wait a minute, you don't care about any of this, do you? You just want to know about the celebrity orgies, the constant sex, and how I learned to blow myself. . . . All right, fine . But keep reading. . . . I guarantee you'll get more than you bargained for. . . . —Ron Jeremy. more...

Price: $19.95

In this laugh-out-loud funny and inspiring autobiography, one ofHollywood’s best-loved comediennes muses about movies, men, motherhood, and MS. In a book that is at once Hollywood hilarious and personally moving, Teri Garr, star of such classic films as Young Frankenstein, Oh God!, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Mr. Mom, and Tootsie, for which she received an Academy Award nomination, writes about her life with the same wit and warmth that have won the hearts of fans for over three decades. From sipping Cokes with Elvis Presley to hangin’ with the Beatles; from her secrets to succeeding in Hollywood without losing her sanity, to dealing with the fear, anxiety, and denial of being plagued by mysterious physical problems that eluded diagnosis for over twenty years—the insights in Speedbumps, while always couched in Garr’s trademark humor, are honest, heartfelt, and often profound. more...

Price: $15.00

Actor and comedian Billy Crystal has forged a highly successful career by portraying other people in movies like When Harry Met Sally… and City Slickers. But in 700 Sundays, a memoir based on his one-man Broadway play of the same name, Crystal tells his own story, dissecting an often complex relationship with his father and how that relationship resonated in other aspects of his life. His father, Jack Crystal was an influential jazz concert promoter and operated an influential jazz record label, affording his son an opportunity to tell stories of being taken to his first movie by Billie Holliday and seeing his grandmother suggest that Louis Armstrong simply "try coughing it up." But Jack died when his son was fifteen years old, soon after a forever-unresolved argument between the two, leaving Billy to cope with crushing grief while simultaneously and perhaps ironically trying to launch a career in comedy. more...

Price: $9.99

Since the day she was scouted by a modeling agent while shopping at a London street fair when she was just nineteen, Alek Wek's life has been nothing short of a fantasy. When she's not the featured model in print campaigns for hip companies, or gracing the cover of Elle , she is working the runways of Paris, New York, and Milan to model for the world's leading designers, including Karl Lagerfeld for Chanel. But nothing in her early years prepared her for the life of a model. Born in Wau, in the southern Sudan, Alek knew only a few years of peace with her family before they were caught up in a ruthless civil war that pitted outlaw militias, the Muslim-dominated government, and southern rebels against each other in a brutal conflict that killed nearly two million people. Here is her daring story of fleeing the war on foot and her escape to London, where her rise from young model to supermodel was all the more notable because of Alek's non-European looks. A probe into the Sudanese conflict and an inside look into the life of a most unique supermodel, Alek is a book that will inspire as well as inform. more...

Price: $10.95

He came to mainstream prominence as a machine more human than his creators in Blade Runner , terrified us as a hitchhiker bent on his own death and the death of anyone who got in his way in The Hitcher , and unforgettably portrayed a lonely king roaming the night as a wolf and pining for the love of a hawk during the day in Ladyhawke . Rutger Hauer has dazzled audiences for years with his creepy, inspiring, and villainous portrayals of everyone from a cold-blooded terrorist in Nighthawks to a blind martial arts master in Blind Fury , but his movie career was nothing compared to his real-life adventures of riding horses, sword fighting, and leaving home at fifteen to scrub decks on a freighter and explore the world. From poverty to working with a traveling theater troupe to his breakout European performance in Turkish Delight and working with legendary directors such as Paul Verhoeven ( RoboCop and Basic Instinct ) and Ridley Scott ( Alien and Gladiator ), Hauer has collected All Those Moments here. more...

Price: $10.95