Author event! Burt Kearns with Ray Richmond

Zibby's Bookshop is excited to host author, journalist, and producer Burt Kearns as he celebrates the launch of his new biography, MARLON BRANDO: HOLLYWOOD REBEL. Burt will be joined in conversation by entertainment journalist and author, Ray Richmond.

About the book:

Over the last eighty years, Marlon Brando has become such an object of fascination, buried under so many accreted layers of mythos and half-truth, that it is all but impossible to see the man behind the icon. As we approach the centennial of this undisputed American legend, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel isa revelatory biography that tells its story the same way the man himself approached a role: from the inside.

Author, journalist, and pop culture authority Burt Kearns digs deep into the unexplored aspects of Brando’s career, interests, and singular personality, revealing how his roles on stage and screen, combined with his wild and restless personal life, helped to transform popular culture and society writ large. His influence was both broad and deep. Brando’s intense approach to acting technique was emulated by his contemporaries as well as generations of actors who followed, from Nicholson and DeNiro to DiCaprio and Gosling. But his legacy extends far beyond acting. His image in The Wild One helped to catalyze a youth revolution, setting the stage for rock ‘n’ roll culture in a way that directly inspired Elvis Presley, the Beatles, Andy Warhol, and punk rock culture. Brando was also frank about his affairs with both sexes; a leader of the sexual revolution and a hero of gay culture, he defied stereotypes and redefined sexual boundaries in his life and the roles he played. But of all his passions, activism was even more important to Brando than acting: he was an early supporter of Israel, civil rights, the American Indian movement, Black Power, gay rights, and environmentalism.

Startlingly intimate and powerfully told, Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel shows how the greatest actor of the twentieth century helped lead the world into the twenty-first.

About the authors:

Burt Kearns is an author, journalist, and film and television producer, dubbed by Vanity Fair as “a show business and pop culture savant.” Along with Marlon Brando: Hollywood Rebel, his books include Lawrence Tierney: Hollywood’s Real Life Tough Guy, The Show Won’t Go On, and the memoir, Tabloid Baby. Shemp! The Biography of The Three Stooges’ Shemp Howard, The Face of Film Comedy, will be published by Applause Theatre & Cinema Books in October 2024. His screenwork includes The Seventh Python, All the Presidents’ Movies, Conspiracy Theory with Jesse Ventura, Kardashian: The Man Who Saved O.J. Simpson, and the 2023 WE tv docuseries, Breaking the Ice. He also cowrote and produced, along with Academy Award winner Albert S. Ruddy, the Burt Reynolds comedy movie, Cloud 9.

Ray Richmond has worked as entertainment journalist and author since 1984 and has been a television critic, columnist, Hollywood awards expert and reporter for publications including The Hollywood Reporter, Daily Variety, Los Angeles Daily News, Orange County Register and Deadline Hollywood. Since October 2022, he has worked as the News and Features Editor and columnist for the Hollywood awards website Gold Derby. Richmond is the author of several books, most recently the bestselling coffee table biography Betty White: 100 Remarkable Moments in an Extraordinary Life and the collector’s edition, The Sopranos: The Complete Visual History, to be published by Simon & Schuster in October 2024. He also teaches a graduate course in the History of Television as an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange.