Contents -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction: A Respectable Genre of Very Low Repute -- Book One: The Great (White) Man Biopic and Its Discontents -- 1. Strachey's Way, or All's Well That Ends Welles -- 2. Rembrandt -- 3. Citizen Kane and the Biopic -- 4. Lawrence of Arabia: "But does he really deserve a place in here?" -- 5. Nixon, Oliver Stone, and the Unmaking of the Self-Made Man -- P.S.: W. -- 6. Thirty Two Short Films About Glenn Gould: Ghost Picture -- 7. Ed Wood: The Biopic of Someone Undeserving -- 8. Spike Lee's Malcolm X: Appropriation or Assimilation? -- 9. Raoul Peck's Lumumba: Drama, Documentary, and Postcolonial Appropriation -- Book Two: A Woman's Life is Never Done: Female Biopics -- 10. Prologue -- 11. Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story: Toying with the Genre -- 12. I Want to Live! Criminal Woman, Male Discourses -- 13. Barbra and Julie at the Dawning of the Age of Aquarius -- Funny Girl -- Star! -- 14. Hacked: Gorillas in the Mist and Other Female Biopics of the 1980s -- 15. An Angel at My Table: Re-Framing the Female Biography -- 16. Erin Brockovich: Hollywood Feminist Revisionism, after a Fashion -- 17. Twenty-First-Century Woman -- The Notorious Bettie Page: Free Will and God's Will -- Marie Antoinette: The Female Biopic Gets the Guillotine -- 18. I'm Not There: Some Conclusions on a Book Concerning Biopics.