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Alan Ball: Conversations features interviews that span Alan Ball's entire career and include detailed observations and insights into his Academy Award-winning film American Beauty and Emmy Award-winning television shows Six Feet Under and True Blood. Ball began his career as a playwright in New York, and his work soon caught the attention of Hollywood television producers. After writing for the sitcoms Grace Under Fire and Cybill, Ball turned his attention to the screenplay that would become Ame...

The recent success of Freedomland and Clockers has established Richard Price as one of America's most accomplished novelists. Critics have praised both his uncanny ear for the cadences and pitch of dialogue and his insight into the deeper recesses of the American soul. Perhaps more than any novelist today, Price has captured the undercurrents of our culture and society. Bringing these talents to the art of screenplays, Price has also emerged as one of the foremost talents in screenwriting. Now,...

First published in 2011. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

John Dover Wilson's New Shakespeare, published between 1921 and 1966, became the classic Cambridge edition of Shakespeare's plays and poems until the 1980s. The series, long since out-of-print, is now reissued. Each work is available both individually and as a set, and each contains a lengthy and lively introduction, main text, and substantial notes and glossary printed at the back. The edition, which began with The Tempest and ended with The Sonnets, put into practice the techniques and theorie...

Working with the screenplay by John C. Richards & James Flamberg which is based on Richards' short story. Neil LaBute (In the Company of Men, Your Friends & Neighbors) directs the first film that he hadn't written himself and found that that it all added up to "a year of bold experimentation for me". A darkly comic story about one woman's incredible determination to make her dreams come true against numerous odds, fantasy collides with reality as the main character, Betty Sizemore (Renee Zellweg...

In the words of Richard Maltby . . . "Maximum Movies--Pulp Fictions describes two improbably imbricated worlds and the piece of cultural history their intersections provoked." One of these worlds comprises a clutch of noisy, garish pulp movies--Kiss Me Deadly, Shock Corridor, Fixed Bayonets!, I Walked with a Zombie, The Lineup, Terror in a Texas Town, Ride Lonesome--pumped out for the grind houses at the end of the urban exhibition chain by the studios' B-divisions and fly-by-night independents....

Screenwriters have been central figures in French cinema since the conversion to sound, from early French-language talkies for the domestic market to lavish literary adaptations of the notorious 'quality tradition' of the 1950s, and from the 'aesthetic revolution' of the New Wave to the contemporary popular and auteur film in the 2000s. The first English language study to address screenwriters in French cinema, this volume will be of particular interest to scholars and students of French film an...

Ingmar Bergman's career spanned forty years as he produced more than fifty films, many of which are considered classics. When he began this book, Bergman had not seen most of his movies since he made them. Resorting to scripts and working notebooks, and especially to memory, he comments, brilliantly and always cogently, on his failures as well as his successes; on the themes that bind his work together; on the relationship between his life and art. More clearly than ever before, Images allows us...

Quentin Tarantino's films have single-handedly revived and redefined American noir, bringing to Hollywood a new energy, irony, and cool. Tarantino has won awards and accolades around the world, earned a devoted following among critics, actors, and audiences, and paved the way for a new generation of young filmmakers.Tarantino's directorial debut, Reservoir Dogs, hit the screen with a freshness and brutal edge that left critics and audiences stunned. The story of a heist gone wrong, the film weav...

Despite his untimely death in 1948 at the age of fifty, Sergei Eisenstein's status as a colossus of world cinema was assured with films ranging from the emotionally powerful 'dynamic montage' of OCTOBER and THE BATTLESHIP POTEMKIN, to the baroque magnificence of IVAN THE TERRIBLE. From the last days of Tsarist Russia to the oppressively dark Stalinist years, Ronald Bergan's biography sheds new light on the great director's complex relationship with his homeland and struggle against authority and...

Frances Marion was Hollywood's highest paid screenwriter - male or female - for almost three decades. She was the first woman to twice win an Academy Award for screenwriting. From 1916 to 1946 she wrote over two hundred scripts covering every conceivable genre for stars such as Mary Pickford, Gary Cooper, Greta Garbo, Marion Davies, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, Marion Davies, Rudolph Valentino, Clark Gable, and Marie Dressler. Irving Thalberg "adored her and trusted. her completely," William...

The award-winning new comedy from writer/director David Mamet Part screwball comedy, part showbiz satire, State and Main is the story of a big-budget film production that wreaks moral havoc in a quaint New England town, sowing a bumper crop of corruption, vanity and greed.

David Hare is one of the most prolific and critically acclaimed contemporary playwrights. This study is concerned with the dramatic method that drives the complex moral and political narratives of his work. Taking as its starting point the thematic and formal shifts that took place with the trilogy, Racing Demon, Murmuring Judges and The Absence of War, first staged between 1990 and 1993, it considers the relationship of Hare's writing with its staging and the moment of performance, as well as e...