Engineering Hollywood tells the story of the formation of the Hollywood studio system not as the product of a genius producer, but as an industry that brought together creative practices and myriad cutting-edge technologies in ways that had never been seen before. Using extensive archival research, this book examines the role of technicians, engineers, and trade organizations in creating a stable technological infrastructure on which the studio system rested for decades. Here, the studio system...
Cary Grant famously said, "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant--even I want to be Cary Grant." His development of that star image required serious work, but he also played a variety of characters requiring special performing talents. He was equally skilled in the screwball farce The Awful Truth, the dark thriller Notorious, the romantic melodrama An Affair to Remember, the domestic comedy Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, and the social drama None But the Lonely Heart. In a lively style acc...
The Kid Stays in the Picture is considered to be one of the best Hollywood memoirs ever, and now Robert Evans' sensational life story continues in his much anticipated follow-up, The Fat Lady Sang. Told with Bob's unmistakable voice and panache, The Fat Lady Sang is full of even more outrageous and unbelievable stories about one of the most turbulent times in Hollywood. Told in the same irresistible style that made The Kid Stays in the Picture one of the most acclaimed memoirs of our time, The F...
The major Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini was also a poet, novelist, essayist, and iconoclastic political commentator. Naomi Greene reveals to English-speaking readers the diverse talents that made him one of the most controversial European intellectuals of the postwar era, at the center of political and cultural debates still vital to our time. Greene presents Pasolini's films to the English-speaking world in full detail and in a rich critical context, using them to trace the evolution of...
Anthony Minghella, the writer and director behind films like Truly Madly Deeply, The English Patient and The Talented Mr Ripley, here explores his own work and the art of film-making. He offers candid commentary and fascinating insights with chapters on subjects from the practical - 'Writing' or 'The Business of Film' - to the philosophical - 'Structure' or 'Theories, Poetry and Mortality'.With a preface by Sydney Pollack, this book is essential for admirers of the director's work, or indeed for...
In Adventures of a Suburban Boy, John Boorman, hailed by the Observer as 'arguably Britain's greatest living director', offers an enthralling memoir of a creative life spent turning dreams into celluloid, and money into light.One of cinema's authentic visionaries, Boorman nevertheless enjoyed an archetypal English suburban boyhood in the 1940s and 50s, attending Catholic school and finding his first employment in a dry-cleaner's. But his abiding passion was for film, and he got his first break d...
Since 1992, The Directors Guild of America has hosted annual seminars featuring its nominees for outstanding feature film directing. Since its inception, film and television director Jeremy Kagan has moderated these sessions in which the finest contemporary directors weigh in on every aspect of the filmmaking process. In this book, Kagan has culled the most insightful and entertaining responses from these acclaimed directors. From script development through pre-production to production and post-...
Stanley Kubrick
These 17 critical essays examine the career and films of director Stanley Kubrick. Part One focuses on his more obscure initial career, including his early career, including his first newsreels, his photography for ""Look"" magazine, and his earliest films. Part Two examines Kubrick's major or most popular films. Part Three provides a thorough case study of ""Eyes Wide Shut"", with four very different essays focusing on the film's use of sound, its representation of gender, its ""carnivalesque""...
Born to be the center of attention Mel Brooks grew up learning the ropes of entertainment in the Catskills during its biggest days. He later emerged as a skilled comedy writer by literally muscling his way into television in the late 1940s. Brooks would be involved with some of the most notorious musicals on Broadway in the 1950s and 1960s before finally breaking through nearly 50 years later with a musical version of his first film ÊThe ProducersÊ (2001). With Carl Reiner he would create th...
Each of the thirty-nine tales of Alexander Kluge's Cinema Stories combines fact and fiction, and they revolve around movie-making. The book compresses a lifetime of feeling, thought, and practice: Kluge—considered the father of New German Cinema—is an inventive wellspring of narrative notions. "The power of his pros," as Small Press noted, "exudes the sort of pregnant richness one might find in the brief scenarios of unknown films." Cinema Stories is a treasure trove of strikingly original writi...
Ang Lee came to the forein the 1990s as one of the 'second wave' of Taiwanese directors. After studying at NewYork University, Lee returned to Taiwan where he directed Pushing Hands, The Wedding Banquet, Eat Drink Man Woman. Austen's Sense And Sensibility was a tremendous critical and commercial success. But it was his triumphant return to the East with Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon which has transformed him into an internationally successful director.
By the time of his death in 1973, John Ford was probably the most celebrated director of Hollywood’s golden age. The winner of four best director Oscars, he was the first filmmaker to be awarded his country’s highest civilian honour, the Medal of Freedom, and the man chosen by the American Film Institute to receive its first life achievement award.In his work, Ford returned regularly to the same themes, employed the same actors and had a visual style that was personal and distinctive. This volum...
John Cassavetes in Person
John Cassavetes - celebrated as the father of American independent filmmaking - managed to frustrate biographers with wildly conflicting 'facts' about himself, making it impossible to form an accurate picture of the man and the artist. In this extraordinary book, Ray Carney assembles the filmmaker's statements and writings to present Cassavetes' life and work in his own words, vividly revealing the personal and cultural forces that shaped his career as a writer-director of fiercely independent f...
On the life and achievement of Satyajit Ray, 1921-1992, Indian film director, producer, and Bengali author; includes lists of his books and films produced and directed.
American director Philip Kaufman is hard to pin down: a visual stylist who is truly literate, a San Franciscan who often makes European films, he is an accessible storyteller with a sophisticated touch. Celebrated for his vigorous, sexy, and reflective cinema, Kaufman is best known for his masterpiece The Unbearable Lightness of Being and the astronaut saga The Right Stuff. His latest film, Hemingway & Gellhorn(premiering May 2012 on HBO), stars Nicole Kidman and Clive Owen. In this study, Anne...
Thousand Eyes of Fritz Lang (ESRI Occasional Papers in Literary & Cultural Studies)
by Paul Gubbins
John Grierson (Occasional Paper, #1)
by Sir Denis Forman and Gus Macdonald
The Charm of Evil (The Scarecrow Filmmakers, #26)
by Wheeler W. Dixon and John Carpenter
Terence Fisher was the director who brought the modern Gothic horror film to life in the second half of the twentieth century. As director John Carpenter (Halloween) notes in his introduction to the volume, "to see [Fisher's] films now...is to witness a focused and coherent world-view emerging from the Gothic horror formula...Terence Fisher and The Curse of Frankenstein was the beginning of it all for the modern horror film..." But Fisher's career is much more than the Hammer horror films. He wo...
The Bengali filmmaker, Ritwik Kumar Ghatak (1925-1976), wrote, produced, directed and/or acted in plays, feature films and documentaries in Bengal during the socially and politically tumultuous period from the late 1940s through the mid-1970s. Why Ghatak? Within the contexts of Bengali, Indian and world cinema, Ghatak is considered an innovative, revolutionary master of the cinematic medium who possessed a singular cinematic sensibility. He composed numerous essays on film and filmmaking in Engl...
Hitchcock Annual
Hitchcock Annual volume 25 includes essays on Mr. and Mrs. Smith, Young and Innocent, the dynamic heroines of Hitchcock, Hitchcock's nightmares, Vertigo and Jonathan Glazer's Birth, Hitchcock's villains, and sound in Hitchcock's films. A special feature of the volume is an expanded section of detailed review essays on recent books on such key topics as Rope, The Lodger, Rebecca, and Slavoj Žižek's writings on Hitchcock.
This book presents a series of essays that reassess the role of melodrama in a number of touchstone films in the art-cinema tradition that explore the subjective experience of a central male protagonist, announcing the emergence of a genre that has progressively proliferated in contemporary cinema. Case studies by such notable auteurs as Vittorio De Sica, Satyajit Ray, Vincente Minnelli, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Ingmar Bergman, François Truffaut, Jacques Demy, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Luca Guad...