In 1969, an obscure middle-aged novelist and pulp magazine journalist named ­Mario Gianluigi Puzo hit the literary jackpot. He wrote "The Godfather," he later told Larry King, "to make money." By his own admission, it wasn't well written. "If I'd known so many people were going to read it," he famously said, "I'd have written it better."

How many people have read it? It can be said with some certainty that having sold between 20 million and 30 million copies, "The Godfather" is one of the best-selling books of all time. By most yardsticks, it is one of the top 10 best-selling works of American fiction. Four decades later, it's still selling, in a paperback edition from the New American Library...

...Italian-American gangsters were a part of our popular culture long before Puzo's novel. "But it was Puzo's genius to turn them into family men," says Maria Laurino, author of "Old World Daughter, New...

[Editors Note: IMG MGMT is an annual image-based artist essay series. Today's invited artist, Michaela Melián, lives and works in Upper Bavaria. This fall her work will be exhibited in the show "See This Sound" at Lentos Museum Linz, "The Dwelling" at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, and "Different Places - Different Stories," a series of interventions in public spaces along the German/Dutch borderline. She is intensively working on the realization of "Memory Loops," a memorial audio project for the Holocaust victims of the city of Munich. The project will open in Summer 2010.]

Hedy Lamarr, legally Hedwig Kiesler, was born on November 9, 1914, in Vienna.

In 1933, in the movie Ekstase, she simulated the first orgasm seen onscreen in cinematic history; in another scene, she swims naked in a lake. From 1933-1937, she was married to Austrian munitions factory owner Fritz Mandl. Afterward, she emigrated to the USA....

...I found myself sitting beside Quentin Tarantino’s pool in the Hollywood Hills, listening in wonder as the writer and director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction diagnosed what he saw as the essential, maddening flaw of every Holocaust movie ever made.

“Holocaust movies always have Jews as victims,” he said, plainly exasperated by Hollywood’s lack of imagination. “We’ve seen that story before. I want to see something different. Let’s see Germans that are scared of Jews. Let’s not have everything build up to a big misery, let’s actually take the fun of action-movie cinema and apply it to this situation.”...

...Munich, though, is a neurotic’s delight in comparison to Tarantino’s preposterous, sporadically brutal, and greatly entertaining new film, Inglourious Basterds. (The misspellings are intentional, for reasons that Tarantino won’t fully explain.) Though he opens the film with the murder of a Jewish family in a French farmhouse, he spends much of the rest...

The National Museum of Singapore presents A Story of the Image: Old & New Masters From Antwerp, showcasing an exclusive collection of 150 artworks from the Royal Museum of Fine Arts of Antwerp (KMSKA), the Museum Plantin-Moretus/Print room and the Museum of Contemporary Art (MuHKA). The exhibition runs from 14 August to 4 October 2009.

In the exhibition, historical and contemporary artworks are juxtaposed to examine the subversion of the purpose and intent of the original image, when early religious iconography gave way to new market oriented genres, and commissioned art pieces evolved into mass produced images. This theme has been explored with artworks from the port city of Antwerp – the origins of art commercialisation, where in the 16th century, there was already a prosperous art market lucrative enough to support an industry of mass produced paintings and prints.

The exhibition also offers the opportunity for visitors to see original oil paintings by...

Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a $100 million outdoor performing arts center and museum located approximately 90 minutes from New York City at the site of the original 1969 Woodstock festival in Bethel, NY. The 15,000 seat outdoor performing arts venue and The Museum at Bethel Woods are set within nearly 2,000 bucolic acres. The Pavilion Stage covers 4,500 seats with another 10,500 on a natural sloping lawn while offering unique backdrops including the original festival site and the majesty of the surrounding Sullivan County countryside. Other venues at the center include a 1,000-seat outdoor Terrace Stage, the Museum Events Gallery – an intimate indoor space for performance, lectures and special events and the original Woodstock concert site, which holds a permit for 30,000 concertgoers to attend major musical events. The 2008 season marked the 10th anniversary of the Harvest Festival, an annual event celebrating the bounty, talent, and beauty of Sullivan County and the...

The crash of the stock market in 1929 initiated a chain of events that crippled the American art scene. As money from private patrons and museums evaporated, artists joined the nation’s staggering number of unemployed workers. The toils and triumphs of a wide range of individual artists and art organizations—documented in letters, photographs, journals, business records and oral-history interviews at the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art—reveal how American artists survived against the odds. The exhibition will be on display from Aug. 10 to Nov. 8 in the Lawrence A. Fleischman Gallery at the Smithsonian’s Reynolds Center for American Art and Portraiture.

Beginning in 1933, government-sponsored art programs provided work relief for artists, employing them as muralists, painters, sculptors, art educators and researchers. New Deal programs, such as the Civil Works Administration’s Public Works of Art Program, the Treasury Section of Painting and Sculpture and the Works...

... Politics and Washington in the 1980s will forever be associated with Ronald Reagan. But if you lived in DC during that decade (and didn't work for the White House), Barry was the more totemic political figure. He was responsible for whether your trash got picked up, your street got plowed, or your kindergarten teacher showed up at school each day. But it was the fact that, as often as not, these things did not happen that made him seem even more powerful. Barry's tenure as mayor was a great high-wire act and a constant fight for political survival. Reagan may have beaten the evil empire, but Barry was expert at confounding what his supporters termed the "white power establishment"--which, depending on the day, was either the U.S. attorney, The Washington Post, the city's white residents, or some combination of all three. The establishment, Barry always maintained, was out to get him.

And then the establishment, this time in the form of FBI, finally did--...

The four-hour live action adventure, based on the 1865 Lewis Carroll story, will star Tim Curry and Kathy Bates.

Bradford-born actor Andrew-Lee Potts is also cast together with relative newcomer Caterina Scorsone, who will play Alice.

It comes as a new Alice in Wonderland film from Tim Burton which stars Johnny Depp, who will play the Mad Hatter, is due to be released in March 2010.

In Willing's version, the main character Alice Hamilton is an independent 20-something in an outlandish city of twisted towers and casinos run by a Queen of Hearts played by Kathy Bates.

Carroll's flamingos are then turned into a cross between motorbikes and biplanes.

At the show's launch in Los Angeles, Willing said his version would be "much racier, tougher and sexier".

"Our show is very different from faithful adaptations of 'Alice in Wonderland'," he said...

In the movie “Good Will Hunting,” Matt Damon’s character sees a book on a shelf. It is “A People’s History of the United States” by radical historian Howard Zinn.

“This,” Damon tells his shrink, “will knock you on your ass.”

That line turned out to be one part product placement, one part prophecy.

Damon grew up next to Zinn, who taught at Boston University, and the young actor-to-be read “People’s History” when it was published in 1980.

“It had a huge impact on my life,” said Damon, who co-wrote the “Good Will” screenplay with Ben Affleck.

Zinn’s book was American history from the bottom up, telling our story not from the POV of the country’s great men, but the ordinary men and women who led popular movements to organize labor, fight for equal rights, end slavery and the Vietnam War and other causes.

Damon had no intention of limiting his enthusiasm for Zinn’s book to a shout-out from Will Hunting. As soon as he...