Oscar Night: 75 Years of Hollywood Parties

FROM THE PUBLISHER

From the first Academy Awards black-tie dinner dance in 1929 to the glittering Vanity Fair gala in 2004, from the 1940s gatherings at the most fashionable nightspots in Los Angeles-Ciro's, Mocambo, Romanoff's, Chasen's-to the star-studded parties thrown by legendary agent Swifty Lazar from the 1960s to the 1990s, here is a photo history of all those events, presented by Graydon Carter and David Friend. More than five hundred archival and personal black-and-white and color photographs-many never seen before-have been collected in Oscar Night. There is an afterword by Dominick Dunne and a look at every detail, from menus to matchbooks to seating charts.

You'll see intimate and unposed photographs of such classic icons as Cary Grant, Elizabeth Taylor, John Wayne, Gloria Swanson, David O. Selznick, and Alfred Hitchcock, among many others, at the formal dinners of the 1930s through the 1950s. Here also are amazing photographs of another generation of icons at the exclusive Governors Balls: Jack Nicholson, John Travolta, and John Belushi, Dennis Hopper with Michelle Phillips, and a very young Ali MacGraw dancing with Robert Evans. And here is a mix of New York and Hollywood at Swifty's parties, with pictures of Bianca Jagger, Sam Shepard, Michael Caine, David Geffen, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and the Ahmet Erteguns. Here, too, is the Hollywood that gathers today at the Vanity Fair Oscar party: Warren Beatty, Mick Jagger, Oprah Winfrey, Nicole Kidman, Scarlett Johansson, Charlize Theron, Sofia Coppola, Sigourney Weaver, Fran Lebowitz, Sean Combs, and Renée Zellweger.

Irresistibly sumptuous-and juicy-Oscar Night is a book full of elegance and egos, ofglamorous pictures that you will want to look at again and again.

SYNOPSIS

Vanity Fair's Oscar Night will be a sumptuous collection of 400 black-and-white and color images that take the reader inside the Oscar party, starting with the first Academy Awards-night banquet on May 16, 1929, at the Blossom Room of the Roosevelt Hotel to Swifty Lazar's parties at Spago and the Bistro to Dani Janssen's dinners to the current Vanity Fair party held at Morton's.

We see this party in the '30s as it moves from the Roosevelt Hotel to the Coconut Grove at the Ambassador Hotel to the Biltmore Hotel and back to the Roosevelt. By the time of the war, in 1944, it was only a ceremony at Grauman's Chinese Theater, with after-parties at Ciro's, Mocambo, and Romanoff's. By 1951 a radio simulcast was done, half in Los Angeles and half in New York, because so many actors were on Broadway.

In 1952, the first televised awards were given out in an RKO theater and in 1958, the first Governor's Ball was held by the Academy after the awards in the theater. Up until 1958 there had only been after-parties. Then by the early '60s, Milton Berle and the Billy Wilders were giving Oscar parties.

This book will show official Governor's Ball pictures from the '60s and '70s and pictures from Swifty Lazar's difficult-to-get into parties, first at the Bistro, in 1964, and later, starting in 1982, at Spago.

In addition to the photographs of the stars at the parties, there will be invitations as well as quotes from golden gossip columnists Louella Parsons, Hedda Hopper, Liz Smith, and a variety of actors and Oscar party regulars such as Fran Lebowitz.

Oscar Night is a book that anyone who likes movies will want to have.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

Four years after Carter, Friend and Dunne weighed in with the impressive Vanity Fair's Hollywood, they top themselves with this superb collection of in situ celebrity photographs. Parties that begin right after the Academy Awards have long been a Tinseltown tradition; the electricity and glamour of those events is captured in this hefty assemblage of b&w and color images. Dunne provides anecdotal memories from 1955 to 1994, an era when agent Swifty Lazar's Oscar-night parties moved from Romanoff's to the Bistro to Spago. After Lazar's 1994 death, VF editor Carter stepped in as host; darting through decades in this lavish book, he now invites everyone to the party. Here is a "celebrity gridlock" of famous faces-from Marilyn Monroe to Anna Nicole Smith, Brando to Brad Pitt, Judy Garland to Monica Lewinsky. In a bedsheet-size format (10 1/2" 13 1/2"), photos are displayed full-bleed; the authors also include insets of such totems as matchbook covers, programs and seating charts. Captions deliver details, but regrettably, the photographers who took these memorable pictures get little or no copy, and their credits are buried in the back. Although several blurry shots suffer when expanded to full-page size, this spectacular book, sprinkled with star dust, is well worth its high price tag. (Nov. 2) Copyright 2004 Reed Business Information.

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