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"Basics Film-Making: Screenwriting" is the second in the "Basics Film-Making" series and is aimed both at students on film production courses, as well as those wishing to write a short film. The book teaches the key elements of screenwriting through examining areas such as dialogue, sound, setting, shots and structure. It also provides advice to new film-makers on how to market their productions. This is an essential guide to screenwriting and will teach the reader to write and produce artistica...

Screenwriting looks at the foundation on which every great film is built - the script. Whether an original concept or an adaptation, the screenplay is the key to the success of a movie - good dialogue, story pacing and character development are the framework everything else hangs on. Featuring in-depth interviews with modern masters of film including Stephen Gaghan, Guillermo Arriaga, Caroline Thompson, Hossein Amini, David Hare, David Webb Peoples and Jean-Claude Carrière, this book reve...

The 21st-Century Screenplay is the long-awaited, much-expanded successor to the author's internationally acclaimed Scriptwriting Updated. Many books in one, it offers a comprehensive, highly practical manual of screenwriting from the classic to the avant-garde, from The African Queen and Tootsie, to 21 Grams, Pulp Fiction, Memento and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Whether you want to write short films, features, adaptations, genre films, ensemble films, blockbusters or art house movies,...

Released in 1943, "Cat People" was the first production from the unit set up by RKO to make low-cost, high-return horror movies. Producer Val Lewton was handed the title and ordered to come up with a film to fit. He and director Jacques Tourneur created an innovative picture about a Serbian emigree in New York ("Simone Simon") who's convinced she's suffering from a hereditary curse that will transform her into a panther if her passions are aroused. Kim Newman positions this 74-minute classic in...

The Collaborative Art of Filmmaking: From Script to Screen explores what goes into the making of Hollywood’s greatest motion pictures. Join veteran script consultant Linda Seger as she examines contemporary and classic screenplays on their perilous journey from script to screen. This fully revised and updated edition includes interviews with over 80 well-known artists in their fields including writers, producers, directors, actors, editors, composers, and production designers. Their discussions...

Al Fountain, the main character of Box of Moonlight, is a driven, ambitious man whose determination to succeed has alienated him from his family, friends and work-mates. A chance encounter with a young drop-out, dressed in a purloined Davy Crockett outfit, changes his life irrevocably and rescues Al's humanity. Like one of the characters in Shakespeare's Arcadian comedies, Al enters the forest and is transformed. Tom DiCillo has mapped Al's odyssey in search of his self with a lightness of tone...

Secrets & Lies was awarded the Palme d'Or for Best Film at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival. It tells the story of Hortense, a young black Londoner who goes in search of her birth mother. Hortense's voyage of discovery leads her to Cynthia - a depressed, unmarried, white woman who has uneasy relationships with both her second daughter and her brother. Hortense's attempt to uncover the hidden, almost forgotten, world of her parents fundamentally affects each of the characters. The film culminates in...

Hal Hartley is one of the best-known independent US writer-directors, and owns one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary American cinema. The screenplays brought together in this volume - "Simple Men & Trust", "Amateur", "Flirt", and "Henry Fool" - display his characteristic verbal dexterity and mordant humour.

John Irving's memoir begins with his account of the distinguished career and medical writings of the novelist's grandfather Dr Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynaecologist, and includes Mr Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen - for four different directors.Mr Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his...

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...

Since his death in 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky has become increasingly recognized as one of the great masters of world cinema. In his films, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky defined a new way of looking at the world. His non-realistic, highly-charged images are a continuing source of inspiration - not only for a new generation of film-makers, but also for poets, musicians and painters. This volume collects his great works for the first time in one volume, as well as three of hi...

When "Thelma & Louise" opened in 1991, it was greeted with acclaim and controversy, quickly earning first-time screenwriter Callie Khouri a reputation as one of the only writers of real movie roles for women. She lived up to expectations with "Something to Talk About, " which won praise for its originality and authenticity. Published here in one volume, these two screenplays gives us an oppurtunity to savor the work of a groundbreaking author.

Drive in Cinema offers Žižek-influenced studies of films made by some of the most engaging and influential filmmakers of our time, from avant-garde directors Jean-Luc Godard, Werner Herzog, Alexander Kluge, Pier Paolo Pasolini and Vera Chytilová, to independent filmmakers William Klein, Oliver Ressler, Hal Hartley, Olivier Assayas, Vincent Gallo, Jim Jarmusch and Harmony Korine. These essays in critical cultural theory present interdisciplinary perspectives on the relations between art, film and...

Yes, you can write a great screenplay. Let Syd Field show you how. “I based Like Water for Chocolate on what I learned in Syd's books. Before, I always felt structure imprisoned me, but what I learned was structure really freed me to focus on the story.”—Laura Esquivel Technology is transforming the art and craft of screenwriting. How does the writer find new ways to tell a story with pictures, to create a truly outstanding film? Syd Field shows what works, why, and how in four extraordinary f...

European stardom is very different from that of Hollywood, where the industry concentrates intensively on establishing and promoting major stars. This unique book sets out to highlight the career of Sophia Loren as a prime example of a highly original rise to fame in a European context. Pauline Small emphasizes that although primarily an Italian star, Loren’s career crossed the boundaries of a shifting network of film-making ventures that spanned Italy, Hollywood and Europe.Loren was one of the...

Written for working and aspiring filmmakers, directors, producers and screenwriters, The Marketing Edge for Filmmakers walks through every stage of the marketing process - from concept to post-production - and illustrates how creative decisions at each stage will impact the marketability of a film. In this book, marketing experts Schwartz and MacDonald welcome you behind the curtain into the inner workings of Marketing department at both the studios and independents. They also track films of di...

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"...

Film editing is part of the long process of formulating, acquiring and presenting the images and sounds that make a film. The film editor makes decisions about the arrangement of the visual and aural material that they receive in the cutting room, not for their own satisfaction but to stimulate the participation of the cinema and television viewer. Three interrelated aspects, Emotion, Performance and Story, influence this decision-making. Combining history, practice, study and theory, Film Edi...

Full Length, Drama Characters: 3 male, 2 female 2 Interior Sets Isaac Geldhart, the imperious scion of a family owned publishing house, is under siege. A takeover is being engineered by his son Aaron, who sees the firm's profitability steadily declining and wants to publish a trashy novel to bring in the bucks. Isaac plans to go on publishing scholarly works such as a multi volume history of Nazi medical experiments. Aaron has the necessary yen from Japanese backers but he needs the votes of...

In this text, the moral, ethical, aesthetic and communicative problems of documentary film-making are explored through knowledge and experience in the field, studio, editing room, theatre and television. This revised edition increases the discussion of video, adds a new chapter on fundraising and international marketing, provides more writing examples, and gives more attention to production development. An internationally renowned documentary film-maker with more than 60 films to his credit, inc...