Director Anthony Minghella (The English Patient, The Talented Mr Ripley) has produced a powerful adaptation for film of the bestselling debut novel by Charles Frazier. Set in the waning days of the American Civil War, Cold Mountain is the story of Inman, a wounded Confederate soldier (played by Jude Law) who struggles on a perilous journey to get back home to Cold Mountain, North Carolina - and to Ada (Nicole Kidman), the woman he left behind in going off to fight. In the course of his journey,...
This is Ismail Merchant's account of the making of the film, "The Proprietor". It was his first feature film as a director in the English language. The well-crafted screenplay was developed from a number of circumstances - a meeting with Jeanne Moreau, an apartment in Paris, the french property auction tradition, amongst others - which are all detailed in this story. There are humorous details, such as how Ismail Merchant impersonated the Maharaja of Jodhpur to inveigle his way into a hotel, and...
The Comedy Bible: From Stand-up to Sitcom - The Comedy Writers Ultimate Guide
by Carter
Judy Carter, guru to aspiring comedy writers and stand-up comics, tells all about the biz of being funny and writing funny in this bright, entertaining, and totally practical guide on how to draw humor from your life and turn it into a career. Do you think you're funny? Do you want to turn your sense of humor into a career? If the answer is yes, then Judy Carter's The Comedy Bible is for you. The guru to aspiring stand-up comics provides the complete scoop on being--and writing--funny for money....
Billy Wilder won two Oscars - as co-screenwriter and director - for this mordant comedy about getting ahead in the corporate world. Jack Lemmon played the 'schnook' who lends out his apartment for his boss's sexual trysts, only to fall in love with the boss's girl - played by Shirey MacLaine. The Apartment is a beautifully judged piece of writing saved from cynicism by Wilder and Diamond's tenderness towards their central characters. This edition of the screenplay includes a specially commiss...
Examinations and Analysis of Sequels and Serials in the Film Industry
There are many elements in the concept of visual continuity, and they are all interrelated. In films or film series that are described as sequels, establishing a visual integrity relationship between films comes to the fore. The concept of the sequel appears in two ways. Sometimes, while the ideas are scripted, the story is divided into more than one part. Sometimes the story is planned as a single movie, and after a certain time, it can be realized as a follow-up movie/film for different reason...
A masterclass on the art of directing from the Pulitzer Prize-winning (and Oscar and Tony-nominated) writer of Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow, The Verdict, and Wag the Dog Calling on his unique perspective as playwright, screenwriter, and director of his own critically acclaimed movies like House of Games, State and Main, and Things Change, David Mamet illuminates how a film comes to be. He looks at every aspect of directing—from script to cutting room—to show the many tasks directors und...
From her BAFTA-winning television work, such as My Beautiful Son, to her big screen debut alongside Michael Caine in Educating Rita, her starring in Billy Elliot (both of which earned her Oscar nominations) and her portrayal of Mrs Weasley in the Harry Potter films, Julie Walters has worked with some of the greatest and most diverse actors and directors in the world today. In December 2005, at the British Comedy Awards, Walters - alongside longtime friend and television comedy partner Victoria W...
Marry an Agent! (Or...How to Get an Agent Without Even Dating One.)
by Robert L. McCullough and Suzanne Herrera-McCullough
Constructions of the Real (Artwork Scholarship: International Perspectives in Education)
Constructions of the Real features a wide range of writing from non-fiction and documentary filmmakers who undertake theoretically informed practice and think through making. These global filmmakers and writers straddle the divide between the academy and industry and they reflect on, interrogate and explicate their filmmaking practices in relationship to questions of form, content, and process. The book is in four sections. The first is on intimate, first-person works where memory and identity...
Who killed Mrs Gandhi? We know the name of the assassins, but did they act alone? In this fictional filmscript, Tariq Ali suggests that larger forces were at work, exploiting genuine Sikh grievances to settle their own score with a prime minister who, whatever her faults, was fiercely independent of Washington and safeguarded Indian sovereignty with a zeal inherited from her father. Provocative and suggestive, this script planned as the second of a series was never completed. The Assassination i...
Five Conversations About Peter Sellers is an essay that begins as an exploration of the author’s burgeoning obsession with Peter Sellers, and specifically his role in hijacking and derailing production of the spy spoof, Casino Royale, in the late 60s. But what begins as a reported piece on how the film set erupted into chaos, quickly devolves into its own chaos as the essay splits into 5 different narrators, each with their own idea of what the essay is actually about. Is it about how Peter Sell...
This study provides the first detailed contrast between the experiences of reading a novel and watching a movie. Kroeber shows how fiction evokes morally inflected imagining, and how movies reveal through magnification of human movements and expression subjective effects of complex social changes.