The screenplay of a Tim Burton film featuring the eccentric Ed Wood, who directs trashy films while dressed in women's clothes. The story communicates his struggle to express creativity in a harsh and uncomprehending world.
'Tell me the story so far' were the words Evan Hunter heard each morning as he sat down to work with Alfred Hitchcock on the screenplay of The Birds. The starting point was Daphne du Maurier's short story, but all that Hitchcock retained from the original was the title and the idea of birds attacking humans - the rest emerged in the working sessions in which Hitchcock and Hunter grappled with the ideas and notions that eventually coalesced into the final film. Me and Hitch provides a rare glimps...
With the Batman films, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and Ed Wood, Tim Burton has established himself as one of cinema's great visionaries. Formerly an animator with Walt Disney, Burton's ascent through the studio system to his current position as one of Hollywood's most successful directors has been swift. But while his movies are box-office gold, his approach is distinctly personal. In this fascinating and enlightening book, Burton talks about his childhood i...
Leni Riefenstahl achieved fame as a dancer, actress, photographer and director but her entire career is coloured by her association with the Nazi party. Appointed by Hitler, she directed the Nazi propaganda film "Triumph des Willens" along with her best known work "Olympia", a documentary of the 1936 Munich Olympics. By 1939 Riefenstahl was arguably the most famous woman film director in the world, yet after the war she was never again accepted as a filmmaker. Rainer Rother's book provides detai...
It's the best-kept secret in the entertainment industry: how much actors- even award-winning movie stars - distrust directors, and how most directors, in turn, fear actors. This work shows young film and television directors how to overcome the obstacles and meet the challenges of working with actors effectively and successfully. It provides guidance on such key topics as understanding the actor, the director's preparation, casting, rehearsals, and working on the set. An additional chapter featu...
William Wild Bill Wellman was not Paramount Pictures' first choice to direct the World War I epic Wings (1927), but as a former aviator and war hero, he was the right choice. Despite months waging epic battles of his own with studio executives, Wild Bill managed to finish the big-budget war saga by inventing many of the techniques still used to film aerial battle scenes. The film, starring Clara Bow, broke box office records and earned its studio the first Academy Award for Best Picture. Conside...
The award-winning art film "Hana-Bi", the stoic gangster elegy "Sonatine", the surfer romance "A Scene at the Sea", the absurdist comedy "Getting Any?", the entertainment samurai spectacle "Zatoichi" - very different films made under one name, Kitano Takeshi. Who is Kitano Takeshi? - an artistic auteur in the traditional sense or a new kind of star who manages multiple identities, strategically changing them from film to film and situation to situation? This book explores issues of auteurship an...
A Sight & Sound Book of the Year "Eye-opening and addictively readable." Total Film Who and what decides if a film gets funded? How do those who control the purse strings also determine a film's content and even its message? Writing as the director of award-winning feature films including Welcome to Sarajevo, 24 Hour Party People and The Road to Guantanamo as well as the hugely popular The Trip series, Michael Winterbottom provides an insider's view of the workings of international film fund...
Philippe Grandrieux is one of cinema’s only living true radicals and feted as one of the most innovative and important film makers of his generation. His consistently controversial work remains, however, relatively unknown outside of the international art film festival circuit. In this volume, the first book-length study of the work of Grandrieux in any language, Greg Hainge provides an overview and critical analysis of Grandrieux’s entire career during which he has produced works for television...
Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain (Film Theory in Practice)
by Matthew Tinkcom
Queer Theory and Brokeback Mountain examines queer theory as it has emerged in the past three decades and discusses how Brokeback Mountain can be understood through the terms of this field of scholarship and activism. Organized into two parts, in the first half the author discusses key canonical texts within queer theory, including the work of writers as Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. He provides an historical account of the questions these scholars have posed to our...
LIMITED FIRST EDITION contains red foil gilded page edges, foil cover elements, and a black satin ribbon marker. As featured in Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, MovieMaker, SYFY, Fangoria, SFX, Mental Floss, Total Film, and more! How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon? You've Got Red on You details the previously untold story of 2004's Shaun of the Dead, the hilarious, terrifying horror-comedy whose fan ba...
Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery has been described as “a kind of Rear Window for retirees.” As this quote suggests, an analysis of Alfred Hitchcock’s methodical use of comedy in his films is past due. One of Turner Classic Movies’ on-screen scholars for their summer 2017 online Hitchcock class, the author grew tired of misleading throwaway references to the director’s “comic relief”. This book examines what should be obvious: Hitchcock systematically incorporated assorted types of comedy...
George Orson Welles (1915-1985) is considered to be among the greatest and most influential filmmakers of all time. At just twenty-five years old, he co-wrote, produced, directed, and starred in his Academy-Award-winning debut film Citizen Kane (1941). His innovative and distinctive directorial style - nonlinear narratives, unusual camera angles, deep focus shots, and long takes - continues to be emulated by directors and cinematographers to this day. The brilliant yet provocative Welles won mul...
David Greig has been described as 'one of the most interesting and adventurous British dramatists of his generation' (Daily Telegraph) and 'one of the most intellectually stimulating dramatists around' (Guardian). Since he began writing for theatre in the early nineties, his work has been both copious and remarkably varied, defying neat generalisations or attempts to pigeon-hole his work. Besides his original plays, he has adapated classics, is co-founder of the Suspect Culture Theatre Group and...
Jurassic Park (1993) is one of Steven Spielberg’s most beloved films. Over twenty-five years on from its original release, it has accrued four sequels, a legion of worldwide fans, and a wide range of merchandise covering everything from action figures and board games to comic books and video games. As such, the film is widely acknowledged as one of the most significant blockbusters of the 1990s, a position underlined by its pioneering use of CGI to resurrect the dinosaurs with more realism than...
In this book Richard Ayoade - actor, writer, director, and amateur dentist - reflects on his cinematic legacy as only he can: in conversation with himself. Over ten brilliantly insightful and often erotic interviews, Ayoade examines himself fully and without mercy, leading a breathless investigation into this once-in-a-generation visionary. Only Ayoade can appreciate Ayoade's unique methodology. Only Ayoade can recognise Ayoade's talent. Only Ayoade can withstand Ayoade's peculiar scent. On...
Television and film have always been connected, but recent years have seen them overlapping, collaborating, and moving towards each other in ever more ways. Set amidst this moment of unprecedented synergy, this book examines how television and film culture interact in the 21st century. Both media appear side by side in many platforms or venues, stories and storytellers cross between them, they regularly have common owners, and they discuss each other constantly. Jonathan Gray and Derek Johnson...
A World Redrawn is an exploration by the artist Zoe Beloff of Sergei Eisenstein and Bertolt Brecht’s experiences in Hollywood in the 1930s and ‘40s, what their time in Hollywood meant to them then and what it might mean to us now. Beloff focuses on two unrealized films written during this time: “Glass House” by Eisenstein and “A Model Family” by Brecht. The book reproduces many important and little-known documents from the period, including a large selection of previously unpublished drawings b...
At once a pop culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch’s work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch’s life also evades simple categorization, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur, and vocal proponent of Transcendent...
Paul Sharits. Katalog und Werkverzeichnis 1965 - 1992
by Melissa Ragona, Jonas Mekas, Helen Marten, Tony Conrad, Paul Chan, and Branden W. Joseph