Elia Kazan's varied life and career is related here in his autobiography. He reveals his working relationships with his many collabourators, including Harold Clurman, Lee Strasberg, Clifford Odets, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, James Dean, John Steinbeck and Darryl Zanuck, and describes his directing "style" as he sees it, in terms of position, movement, pace, rhythm and his own limitations. Kazan also retraces his own decision to inform for the House Un-Ameri...
By the end of 1914, Charlie Chaplin had become the most popular actor in films, and reporters were clamoring for interviews with the comedy sensation. But no reporter had more access than Fred Goodwins. A British actor who joined Chaplin’s stock company in early 1915, Goodwins began writing short accounts of life at the studio and submitted them to publications. In February 1916 the British magazine Red Letter published the first of what became a series of more than thirty-five of Goodwins’s art...
In 1963 Stanley Kubrick declared, “Dr. Strangelove came from my desire to do something about the nuclear nightmare.” Thirty years later, he was preparing to film another story about the human impulse for self-destruction. Unfortunately, the director passed away in 1999, before his project could be fully realized. However, fellow visionary Steven Spielberg took on the venture, and A.I. Artificial Intelligence debuted in theaters two years after Kubrick’s death. While Kubrick’s concept shares simi...
Ernst Lubitsch (1982–1947) was one of the most successful and influential German filmmakers in American film comedy. In this volume, Rick McCormick argues for a more transnational view of Lubitsch's career and films with respect to nationality, ethnicity, migration, class, sexuality, and gender. McCormick focuses on Lubitsch's Jewishness, which is inseparable from the distinct transnational character of the director, categorizing his early films as "Jewish comedies" where Lubitsch strikes a tenu...
Since the early 1970s, Steven Spielberg has directed more than two dozen films, many of which have achieved classic status. In addition to critical and commercial successes that include E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Lincoln, Spielberg’s name has become synonymous with such thrilling adventure films as Jaws, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Jurassic Park, and Minority Report. Before he became a world-renowned filmmaker, however, Spielberg established himself on te...
In the thirty years since its original release in 1986, Jim Henson’s timeless fantasy film Labyrinth has captured the minds and imaginations of authors, artists, filmmakers, and fans across the world. In honor of the film’s 30th anniversary, return to the world of Labyrinth and see the beloved characters, imaginative locations, and unforgettable moments as realized by a collection of uniquely original artistic voices in an unprecedented celebration of the cult classic thirty years in the making.
Capturing the 1990s independent film scene and art world through a collection of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa along with photographs and other artifacts from his archive If Films Could Smell is at once an assemblage of interviews and writings by Roddy Bogawa (born 1962) from his nearly 30 years as a filmmaker and artist, and a time capsule of the independent film scene and art world of the 1990s as told through artifacts, diary entries, letters, emails, photographs, script notes and...
In considering Jane Campion's early award-winning short films on through international sensation The Piano and beyond, Kathleen McHugh traces the director's distinctive visual style as well as her commitment to consistently renovating the conventions of "women's films." By refusing to position her female protagonists as victims, McHugh argues, Campion scrupulously avoids the moral structures of melodrama, and though she often works with the narratives, mise-en-scene, and visual tropes typical of...
The Cinema of ÁLex De La Iglesia (Spanish and Latin-American Filmmakers)
by Andy Willis, Nuria Triana-Toribio, and Peter Buse
Álex de la Iglesia, initially championed by Pedro Almodóvar, and at one time the enfant terrible of Spanish film, still makes film critics nervous. The director of some of the most important films of the Post-Franco era – Acción mutante, El día de la bestia, Muertos de risa – receives here the first full length study of his work. Breaking away from the pious tradition of acclaiming art-house auteurs, The cinema of Álex de la Iglesia tackles a new sort of beast: the popular auteur, who brings t...
The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, The Barefoot Contessa, and All About Eve-just three of the most well-known films of writer, director, and producer Joseph L. Mankiewicz. This work contains, first, critical essays about the man and his work, and then presents a guide to resources, an annotated bibliography, and a filmography. The essays on each of his films are categorised under Mankiewicz's Dark Cinema, The Mankiewicz Woman, Filmed Theatre, and Literary Adaptations. The annotated bibliography includes w...
Lana and Lilly Wachowski have redefined the technically and topically possible while joyfully defying audience expectations. Visionary films like The Matrix trilogy and Cloud Atlas have made them the world's most influential transgender media producers, and their coming out retroactively put trans* aesthetics at the very center of popular American culture. Cáel M. Keegan views the Wachowskis' films as an approach to trans* experience that maps a transgender journey and the promise we might learn...
Michael Winterbottom (British Film-Makers)
by Brian McFarlane and Deane Williams
This is the first book-length study of the most prolific and most critically acclaimed director working in British cinema today. Michael Winterbottom has also established himself, and his company, Revolution Films, as a dynamic force in world cinema. No other British director can claim such an impressive body of work in such a variety of genres, from road movie to literary adaptation, from musical to sex film, to stories of contemporary political significance. The authors of this book use a rang...
Josh Hartnett Definitely Wants To Do This . . . True Stories From A Life In The Screen Trade
by Bruce Beresford
A wickedly funny account of celebrity, Hollywood and everything in between ...now in paperback. What's it like to be a veteran director up against the machinations of modern-day Hollywood, with its self-absorbed stars, studio executives who think 'Singapore' is a made-up country, destitute producers posing as lords of finance - the mad, the bad and the downright notorious? Award-winning film-maker Bruce Beresford takes us through the highs and lows of the screen trade - from high-powered dinner...
Wes Anderson (Close-Ups, #1)
by Sophie Monks Kaufman and Little White Lies
The indispensable, illustrated pocket guide to the films of Wes Anderson, from Bottle Rocket to Isle of Dogs. ALSO AVAILABLE: Close-Ups: Vampire Movies Close-Ups: New York Movies Wes Anderson is a distinctive auteur of modern American cinema, known for having created a personal universe out of pastel colour palettes, meticulous set design, nostalgic soundtracks and a tro...
Steven Spielberg has fashioned an enviable career as a writer, producer, and director of American motion pictures, winning Academy Awards for Best Direction (Saving Private Ryan, Schindler's List), and for Best Film (Schindler's List). With David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg he founded Dreamworks SKG, already one of the most productive and respected studios in Hollywood. Despite Spielberg's notable successes, however, his films have not avoided controversy. The Films of Steven Spielberg provid...
At his peak, from the late 1960s through the early 1970s, Sam Peckinpah was hailed as one of the new masters of the Western film, while simultaneously becoming one of the most controversial American directors of the era. In a time of great social turmoil, Peckinpah's on-screen orchestration of physical and emotional violence drew adamant praise for what some considered fearless realism and vehement criticism for what others called tasteless gore and brutal misogyny. Debate over the violence an...
Examines the work of one of the central figures of the avant-garde from her first feature-length film in 1972, Lives of Performers, through Privilege (1990). The comprehensive study surveys critical reaction and includes Rainer's critical writings, photos, full biographical information, a complete filmography and bibliography. A valuable resource for students and instructors of critical studies in film, the book investigates dominant structural elements which enliven Rainer's filmic texts: her c...
The Films of Reginald Leborg (The Scarecrow Filmmakers)
by Wheeler Winston Dixon
This is the first in-depth look at Reginald LeBorg, the quintessential Hollywood contract director, who worked constantly during the 1940s and 50s at such studios as Universal, PRC, and Monogram, making a series of beautiful and resonant films under severe constraints of time and budget. Here, in a book-length interview recorded a year before his death in 1989, LeBorg looks back at all his work—Destiny, Calling Doctor Death, Weird Woman, The Flight That Disappeared, Jungle Woman, Diary of A Madm...
Before, In and After Hollywood (The Scarecrow Filmmakers)
by Anthony Slide
In 1914, a young midwesterner quit his railroad job to crack the Hollywood motion picture boom. Impressed by his energy and honesty in his role as Lincoln, D.W. Griffith made him his assistant for Intolerance. Griffith then made Joe a director. He swiftly progressed to a preeminent position in the industry, directing some of the biggest Hollywood stars of the 1920's including Douglas Fairbanks, Fatty Arbuckle, and Rudolph Valentino. Versatility played an important role in Joe's rich creative li...
Glimmering with candor and dead-on humor, this memoir tells the story of the meteoric rise of Japanese American filmmaker Jon Moritsugu (born 1965), from 1980s teenage delinquent in Honolulu to Ivy League slumster to take-no-prisoners movie auteur with a serious attitude problem, detailing Moritsugu's dive into drinking, drugging, narcissism and a fast and polluted lifestyle that might arguably have been the biggest influence on his string of utterly original films. The New York Times describes...
Best known for directing the Impressionist classic The Smiling Madame Beudet and the first Surrealist film The Seashell and the Clergyman, Germaine Dulac, feminist and pioneer of 1920s French avant-garde cinema, made close to thirty fiction films as well as numerous documentaries and newsreels. Through her filmmaking, writing, and cine-club activism, Dulac’s passionate defense of the cinema as a lyrical art and social practice had a major influence on twentieth century film history and theory....
Sonic Space in Djibril Diop Mambety's Films (African Expressive Cultures)
by Vlad Dima
The art of Senegalese director Djibril Diop Mambety's cinema lies in the tension created between the visual narrative and the aural narrative. His work has been considered hugely influential, and his films bridge Western practices of filmmaking and oral traditions from West Africa. Mambety's film Touki Bouki is considered one of the foundational works of African cinema. Vlad Dima proposes a new reading of Mambety's entire filmography from the perspective of sound. Following recent analytical pat...
Paul Robeson, Isadora Duncan & Charlie Chaplin - three famous performers, who all suffered personally and professionally for their political stand. Here We Stand looks at their very different careers and how their artistic work was affected by their determined stand for what they believed was right - Robeson's outspoken criticism of racism, which resulted in his blacklisting by McCarthy; Duncan's Soviet sympathies, which provoked hostility and worse; and Chaplin's anti-war stance, which led to...