On Story—Screenwriters and Filmmakers on Their Iconic Films
by Austin Film Festival
“On Story is film school in a box, a lifetime’s worth of filmmaking knowledge squeezed into half-hour packages.” —Kenneth Turan, film critic for the Los Angeles Times Austin Film Festival (AFF) is the first organization focused on the writer’s creative contribution to film. Its annual Film Festival and Conference offers screenings, panels, workshops, and roundtable discussions that help new writers and filmmakers connect with mentors and gain advice and insight from masters, as well as refreshi...
Winner of the Venice Film Festival's Golden Lion Award for 1987, Louis Malle's Au revoir les enfants has been acclaimed as a masterpiece wherever it has been shown. One of the great filmmakers of our time, Malle both wrote and directed this delicate and heartbreaking portrait of a friendship -- between Julian, a Catholic boy, and his schoolmate Jean, one of several Jewish children being sheltered at a boarding school during the Nazi occupation of France. It is once a moving, unforgettable story...
A volume containing the screenplays for Barton Fink - winner of the Best Director, Best Actor and the Palme d'Or for Best Film at Cannes 1991 - and Miller's Crossing. The former is a psychological thriller set in the Hollywood of the 1940s, while the latter reinvents the 1930s gangster film.
Carla's Song tells the story of the relationship between George, a feckless Scottish bus driver, and Carla, a refugee from Nicaragua, adrift in Glasgow. It is 1987 and in Carla's home country the US-backed Contra rebels are mounting their final lethal assault against the Sandinista government. At first, Carla resists George's attentions. But he persists, fascinated both by her beauty and by the traumatic mystery that he senses in her past. Emboldened by her love for George, Carla returns with hi...
In Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting (1979), Syd Field first popularized the Three-Act Paradigm of Setup, Confrontation and Resolution for conceptualizing and creating the Hollywood screenplay. For Field, the budding screenwriter needs a clear screenplay structure, one which includes two well-crafted plot points, the first at the end of Act I, the second at the end of Act II. By focusing on the importance of the four essentials of beginning and end, and the two pivotal plot points, Fi...
McGee studies historical representation in commodified, popular cinema as expressions of historical truths that more authentic histories usually miss and argues for the political and social significance of mass culture through the interpretation of four recent big-budget movies: Titanic, Gangs of New York, Australia, and Inglourious Basterds .
Scripting Hitchcock
by Author Walter Raubicheck and Author Walter Srebnick
Scripting Hitchcock explores the collaborative process between Alfred Hitchcock and the screenwriters he hired to write the scripts for three of his greatest films: Psycho, The Birds, and Marnie. Drawing from extensive interviews with the screenwriters and other film technicians who worked for Hitchcock, Walter Raubicheck and Walter Srebnick illustrate how much of the filmmaking process took place not on the set or in front of the camera, but in the adaptation of the sources, the mutual creation...
As the market for documentaries expands, so does the challenge to create memorable, compelling films. Story and structure are the most important (and least expensive) tools available. This guide shows how to make stronger, more compelling documentaries through improved storytelling techniques. It offers a writerly perspective to filmmakers at every stage of production, from concept and treatment to shooting and postproduction. It is intended for the novice as well as the experienced filmmaker an...
Set in the South two years before the Civil War, Django Unchained stars Django, a slave whose brutal history with his former owners lands him face-top-face with German-born bounty hunter, Dr. King Schultz. Schultz is on the trail of the murderous Brittle brothers, and only Django can lead him to his bounty. The unorthodox Schultz acquires Django with a promise to free him upon the capture of the Brittles — dead or alive. Success leads Schultz to free Django, though the two men choose not to go t...
Motion Picture and Video Lighting
Motion Picture and Video Lighting explores the technical, aesthetic and practical aspects of lighting for film and video. Written by a professional in the field, this comprehensive book reveals inside information based on years of experience and thoroughly explores the challenges faced by cinematographers, lighting directors, gaffers and grips. Through a hands on approach which is augmented by insightful diagrams, tables, charts and photographs, the author illustrates the power of light as on...
Screening World Cinema (The Screen Readers)
Screening World Cinema brings together a selection of the best articles on the topic of world cinema published in the esteemed Screen journal. Available in one volume for the first time, this collection allows readers to cross-reference debates and essays that have ranged across many issues of Screen. Themes addressed include:the problem of defining ‘world cinema’the relationship between ‘first’ and ‘third’ cinema and criticismissues of modernity and modernizationquestions of national and trans...
Documentary Editing offers clear and detailed strategies for tackling every stage of the documentary editing process, from organizing raw footage and building select reels to fine cutting and final export. Written by a Sundance award- winning documentary editor with a dozen features to his credit and containing examples from over 100 films, this book presents a step-by-step guide for how to turn seemingly shapeless footage into focused scenes, and how to craft a structure for a documentary of an...
Der Sammelband bringt verschiedene Zugänge und Kontexte zu Twin Peaks zusammen und greift dabei auch die besonderen produktions- und rezeptionsästhetischen Spezifika der Serie auf. Das Spektrum der Beiträge umfasst ganz unterschiedliche Themenbereiche: Genremix, Transaktualität, komplexe narrative Strukturen, Traum und Traumhaftigkeit, Geschlechts- und Identitätskonzepte, extremer Fankult, visuelle Ästhetik, akustische Dimensionen, postmoderne Verweiskultur und nicht zuletzt die Frage danach, we...
Because screenwriter Robert Riskin spent most of his career collaborating with legendary Hollywood director Frank Capra, Riskin's own unique contributions to film have been largely overshadowed. With five Academy Award nominations to his credit for the monumental films Lady for a Day, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, You Can't Take It with You, Here Comes the Groom, and It Happened One Night (for which he won the Oscar), Riskin is often imitated but rarely equaled. In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career...
Enjoy a unique glimpse into the intelligent and quirky inner workings of the comedic mind! "Show Me the Funny!" presents 25 top comedy screenwriters, from the revered figures of television's 'Golden Age' to today's favourite movie jokesters. Authors Desberg and Davis put an innovative spin on the traditional interview: each writer was given the same loosely structured comedic premise and asked to develop it in any way he or she wanted, no rules, no boundaries, no limits! The result is a hilariou...
Most modern studies of narrative tend to focus predominantly on literature with only some reference to film. In Film Narratology, Peter W.J. Verstraten makes film narratives his primary focus, while noting the unexplored and essentially different narrative effects that film can produce with mise-en-scène, cinematography, and editing. Reworking the definitive theory of narration offeredby literary scholar Mieke Bal, Film Narratology examines cinematic techniques such as external and internal narr...
Playwright David Mamet's brilliant debut as a film director, House of Games is a psychological thriller in which a young woman psychiatrist falls prey to an elaborate and ingenious con game by one of her patients, who entraps her--with her own subconscious connivance--in a series of criminal escapades. It is a breathless roller-coaster ride of a movie that keeps springing one bizarre surprise after another, sustaining suspense with dazzling audacity. The unsuspecting audience is lured into a psy...