Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine
Samantha Barbas
Sep 2018 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Donna Postel
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Audiobook
12 hr 53 min
Unabridged
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About this audiobook
In the 1950s, Confidential magazine, America's first celebrity scandal magazine, revealed Hollywood stars' secrets, misdeeds, and transgressions in gritty, unvarnished detail. Deploying a vast network of tipsters to root out scandalous facts about the stars, including their sexual affairs, drug use, and sexuality, publisher Robert Harrison destroyed celebrities' carefully constructed images and built a media empire. Confidential became the bestselling magazine on American newsstands in the 1950s, surpassing Time, Life, and the Saturday Evening Post. Confidential's spectacular rise was followed by an equally spectacular fall. Stars filed multimillion dollar libel suits against the magazine, and the state of California, prodded by the film studios, prosecuted its publisher for obscenity, culminating in a famous, star-studded Los Angeles trial in 1957. The lawsuits forced Confidential to end its scandalmongering, and stopped printing its sleazy gossip in 1958. However, the magazine's legacy lives on in our culture's obsession with gossip and celebrity scandal. This is Confidential's story, how the magazine revolutionized celebrity culture and American society in the 1950s and beyond.
About the author
Samantha Barbas is a professional historian and law professor. She is an expert on Hollywood and journalism history, as well as media law, and is the author of Movie Crazy, The First Lady of Hollywood, Laws of Image, and Newsworthy.
Donna Postel is fascinated by all kinds of stories and loves telling them. From memoir and biography to literary fiction, romance, mystery, and suspense, Donna uses her innate curiosity, talent, and decades of experience on stage and in the recording studio to bring books to life.
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