Tolkien. It serves as an introduction to those who have seen the films but fear the books are for anoraks and is of sufficient depth for devoted Tolkienites. It tracks the evolution of the Lord of the Rings phenomenon from Ronald Tolkien's upbringing and contemporaries such as C.S. Lewis to the revival of fantasy fiction, the obsessive fans and the trilogy's influence on figures from George Lucas to J.K. Rowling. There is also an in-depth look at the characters, a guide to Middle Earth and a rundown of the best film locations to visit, including practical details of how to get there and where best to stay.

    From the graceful and proficient Elves to the horrendous war machines of the Dark Lord, each culture's approach to warfare is explained - how they fought, why they were fighting, what armor they wore and what weapons they used against their enemies. Now you can get as close to a marauding Orc as you could ever wish, without suffering the consequences!Treating the filmmakers' notes, designs and props as a true archive, Weapons and Warfare describes in detail every major conflict depicted in the film trilogy - from The Last Alliance of Elves and Men to the climactic Battle of the Pelennor Fields - each accompanied by a battle diagram from the films' chief designers.Armed with a wealth of fascinating facts and unique imagery, and with an exclusive foreword by Christopher Lee and an introduction by the Academy Award winner Richard Taylor, Weapons and Warfare promises to be the most striking companion to The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy published to date.

    The sheer number of false rumors and downright lies disseminated about the man and his films is truly astonishing. Yet Herzog's body of work is one of the most important in postwar European cinema. His international breakthrough came in 1973 with Aguirre, The Wrath of God, in which Klaus Kinski played a crazed Conquistador. For The Enigma of Kaspar Hauser, Herzog cast in the lead a man who had spent most of his life institutionalized, and two years later he hypnotized his entire cast to make Heart of Glass. He rushed to an explosive volcanic Caribbean island to film La Soufrière, paid homage to F. W. Murnau in a terrifying remake of Nosferatu, and in 1982 dragged a boat over a mountain in the Amazon jungle for Fitzcarraldo. More recently, Herzog has made extraordinary "documentary" films such as Little Dieter Needs to Fly. His place in cinema history is assured, and Paul Cronin's volume of dialogues provides a forum for Herzog's fascinating views on the things, ideas, and people that have preoccupied him for so many years.

    The book also explores the near-religious fervour that the film inspires in a huge number of devoted fans.

    Now Andy Serkis tells his own story about how a three-week commission to provide a voiceover for Gollum grew into a five-year commitment to breathe life and soul into The Lord of the Rings' most challenging creation.- Did the voice of Gollum really start with a cat being sick?- What was it like acting in a bodysuit covered in dots?- How much was Gollum modeled to look like Andy?- What surprises does The Return of the King hold in store?Fully illustrated with more than one hundred exclusive behind-the-scenes photos and drawings, and with contributions from the many designers and animators who brought Gollum to life, this book examines the transition to the big screen of one of literature's most unforgettable creatures. As the filming takes him from London to Wellington, and from the MIsty Mountains to Mount Doom, Andy Serkis explains the methods - and the madness - behind the most amazing five years in this actor's life.

    In this revised edition of "When the Game Stands Tall," author Neil Hayes, who had unrestricted access to the De La Salle team, writes from the inside about the games, the players, and their visionary coach, Bob Ladouceur, who managed to amass the highest winning percentage in football history (.995) through standing for something greater than winning. The book, which also features interviews with major sports figures like Bill Walsh and John Gruden, is a revealing portrait of the coach who believed above all in instilling basic life skills where winning is not the goal, but merely the byproduct of playing the game. The Streak had become a national story long before it ended in September 2004. In this revised paperback, Neil Hayes catches up on the lives of the main characters and takes readers through the final tumultuous year. What results is a timeless and inspirational story of struggle, tragedy, and triumph.

    Out of desperation, he contacts the inventor of the process, Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson), to have Clementine removed from his own memory. But as Joel's memories progressively disappear, he begins to rediscover their earlier passion. From deep within the recesses of his brain, Joel attempts to escape the procedure.As Dr. Mierzwiak and his crew chase him through the maze of his memories, it's clear that Joel just can't get her out of his head.The movie stars Jim Carrey, Kate Winslet, Kirsten Dunst,Tom Wilkinson, Elijah Wood, and Mark Ruffalo.In the acclaimed Newmarket Shooting Script® format, the book includes an introduction by director Michel Gondry (Human Nature), a facsimile of the script, a Q&A with Kaufman, a selection of black-and-white movie stills with commentary, and the complete cast and crew credits.

    . . Film of the year.' Sleazenation'Magnificently bizarre . . . Wonderful.' Empire'Unlike anything you'll have seen before . . . Honestly mind-blowing.' BBC Radio 1'Stunning . . . Totally original.' Time Out'Dazzling . . . Demands a second viewing.' Total FilmThe critical and audience response made Donnie Darko the cult film of the year - one whose dark ambiguities caused audiences to go back to the film again and again trying to fathom its mysteries.This book brings its readers further into the world of Donnie Darko and its creator Richard Kelly. Contained within these pages are an in-depth interview with Richard Kelly who recounts the gestation of the film; the screenplay; photos and drawings from the film and artwork inspired by it.Donnie Darko will never surrender up all its mysteries, but this book will be an indispensable guide into its intriguing world.

    Problem was the more successful he was, the more he traded what really mattered. His integrity. His relationship with his wife. His time with his son.He was chasing things that had no eternal significance. It wasn t until God slowly unraveled everything that he saw how empty his life had become.Now it will take a courageous heart and a saving grace for Jay to finally turn his drive into a desire for a more authentic life with God as well as with his wife and son.In a world filled with cheap imitations that distract us from God s higher plans, "Flywheel" is a powerful parable for all who hunger to live an authentic life."

    New in this edition are entries to describe such film hits as "Lord of the Rings", "Mystic River", "Fahrenheit 9/11", and "Million Dollar Baby". But in fact, this volume's team of critics goes back to 1902, describing such films as "The Great Train Robbery", and progressing chronologically across the decades to cover the best cinematic dramas, comedies, westerns, musicals, suspense and horror films, gangster classics, "films noirs", sci-fi epics, documentaries, and adaptations of novels and stage plays made by filmmakers around the world. Movie fans will find descriptions of great musicals like "Singing in the Rain", westerns like "High Noon", science-fiction classics like "Star Wars", dramas like "Chinatown" and "Schindler's List", and international classics from master directors who include Fellini, Antonioni, Resnais, Truffaut, Eisenstein, Kurosawa, and many others.Each entry includes a full list of cast and credits, awards won by the film, an essay summarizing the story line and screen-history, and still shots of the film's memorable scenes. At the back of the book, both an alphabetical index and a genre index will help readers find any film they're looking for. The book is illustrated with hundreds of movie still shots in color and black and white.

    In 25 years, Kaufman, along with partner Michael Herz, has built Troma Studios up from a company struggling to find its voice in a field crowded with competitors to its current--and legendary--status as a lone survivor, a bastion of true cinematic independence, and the world's greatest collection of camp on film.As entertaining and funny as it is informative and insightful, Make Your Own Damn Movie! places Kaufman's radically low-budget, independent-studio style of filmaking directly in the reader's hands. Thus we learn how to: develop and write a knock-out screenplay; raise funding; find locations and cast actors; hire a crew; obtain equipment, permits, and music rights (all for little or no money); make incredible special effects for $0.79 each; charm, schmooze, and network while on the film-festival circuit; and, finally, make a bad actor act so bad it's actually good.From scriptwriting and directing to financing and marketing, this book is brimming with utterly off-the-wall, decidedly maverick, yet consistently proven advice on how to fully develop one's idea for an independent film.

    It's the story of The Bride, a world-class assassin and a retired member of the elite, all-female Deadly Viper Assassination Squad (DiVAS), who's ready to settle down to a quiet life of marriage and family.

    His slow descent into semi-madness is chronicled here, in The Office, The Scripts volume 2. Following on from the phenomenal success of series 1 voted Comedy of the Year at the British Comedy Awards the second series averaged over 4 million viewers, with a 25% audience share. This book features the scripts from all six episodes and contains over 500 picture screengrabs taken from the broadcast masters and available exclusively in this BBC publication. Original and accurate and painfully funny: it will have every office in the country twitching with spasms of recognition This is a gem. The Times

    This is the latest biography of William Claude Dukinfield who can be seen in The Bank Dick and My Little Chickadee.

    As he attempts to mend the broken lives of those closest to him, he finds that every trip into the past brings chaotic results into the present, leading him to travel back again and again and causing irreparable damage.

    . . ugly and obscene . . . a degrading, senseless misuse of film and time." –The Los Angeles Times"People are right to be shocked." –The New YorkerFrom the murky depths can come the most extraordinary things. . . . Profoundly Disturbing examines the underground cult movies that have–unexpectedly and unintentionally–revolutionized the way that all movies would be made. Called "exploitation films" because they often exploit our most primal fears and desires, these overlooked movies pioneered new cinematographic techniques, subversive narrative structuring, and guerrilla marketing strategies that would eventually trickle up into mainstream cinema. In this book Joe Bob Briggs uncovers the most seminal cult movies of the twentieth century and reveals the fascinating untold stories behind their making. Briggs is best known as the cowboy-hat wearing, Texas-drawling host of Joe Bob's Drive-in Theater and Monstervision, which ran for fourteen years on cable TV. His goofy, disarming take offers a refreshingly different perspective on movies and film making. He will make you laugh out loud but then surprise you with some truly insightful analysis. And, with more than three decades of immersion in the cult movie business, Briggs has a wealth of behind-the-scenes knowledge about the people who starred in, and made these movies. There is no one better qualified or more engaging to write about this subject.All the subgenres in cult cinema are covered, with essays centering around twenty movies including Triumph of the Will (1938), Mudhoney (1965), Night of the Living Dead (1967), Deep Throat (1973), The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974), Drunken Master (1978), and Crash (1996). Accompanying the text are dozens of capsule reviews providing ideas for related films to discover, as well as kitschy and fun archival film stills. An essential reference and guide to this overlooked side of cinema, Profoundly Disturbing should be in the home of every movie fan, especially those who think they've seen everything.

    From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino' s short and tragic life–the first fully documented biography of the star–Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover' s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino's androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women's darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino's experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen's first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

    Now, here is the complete shooting script of this extraordinary film from Universal Pictures, Dreamworks Pictures, and Spyglass Entertainment, featuring a foreword from "Seabiscuit" author Laura Hillenbrand and thirty full-color still photos from the motion picture. An American epic of triumph and perseverance set during the Great Depression, this stunning adaptation brilliantly dramatizes the story of the three men and the down-and-out racehorse that took them and the entire nation on the ride of a lifetime.

    Archives.

    Drawing on research and interviews with those who knew Chaplin, Jeffrey Vance presents an illustrated account which captures Chaplin's fascinating life as well as his creative process. Vance describes in detail the atmosphere on Chaplin's film sets and his relationships with the cast and crew, his first attempts at comedy sequences that later became famous, and the main themes and ideas that persist through the major Chaplin films. stage of which is documented in photographs: his poverty-stricken childhood in late Victorian London, his unparalleled success in Hollywood, his numerous romances and four marriages, his political persecution during the anti-communist witch-hunts, and his happy years of quiet exile in Switzerland.

    Acclaimed biographer Patrick McGilligan re-examines his life and extraordinary work, challenging perceptions of Hitchcock as the “macabre Englishman” and sexual obsessive, and reveals instead the ingenious craftsman, trickster, provocateur, and romantic.With insights into his relationships with Hollywood legends – such as Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly – as well as his 54-year marriage to Alma Reville and his inspirations in the thriller genre, the book is full of the same dark humor, cliffhanger suspense, and revelations that are synonymous with one of the most famous and misunderstood figures in cinema.

    As war raged on in Vietnam and the cold war continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the US, more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci's steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amidst all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, American Graffiti) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the anti-hero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.140 A-Z film entries include:- Synopsis- Film stills and production photos- Cast/crew listings- Box office figures- Trivia- Useful information on technical stuff- Actor and director biosPlus: a complete Academy Awards list for the decade

    Vieira calls the escape valve of the American psyche, is imprinted on popular culture. Hollywood Horror captures all the mystery, power, dark humour and chilling beauty of the genre from its roots in the silent film era to 1968, which, according to Vieira, marks the end of the classic scary movie. aspect of cinematic horror, from seminal icons such as James Whale's Frankenstein and Tod Browning's Dracula to the steamy pre-Code jungle sorcery of The Island of the Lost Souls.

    This volume is a study of the classic western film Rio Bravo, which, according to the author, remains "beyond politics, as an argument as to why we should all want to go on living."

    The popular story of Dr. Seuss' Cat in the Hat comes alive with 15 Sound buttons and an interactive game.

    Five hundred movie stills and photographs highlight this comprehensive overview of European cinematographic art, which offers incisive analyses of one hundred seminal films---from Battleship Potemkin to The Elephant Man--along with a technical and creative history of the cameraperson's craft.

    This is a comprehensive examination of Blade Runner's highly influential special effects which contains numerous images, and in-depth interviews witth Ridley Scott and the designer Syd Mead.

    Gripping photos taken on the set of Mel Gibson's new film, The Passion of Christ, together with the biblical narratives in the Douay Rheims Translation, present the story in vivid detail. A sweeping overview of the Passion story in powerful images that will enhance the movie experience! "This is a movie about love, hope, faith, and forgiveness. He [Jesus] died for all mankind, suffered for all of us. It's time to get back to that basic message. The world has gone nuts. We could all use a little more love, faith, hope, and forgiveness." --Mel Gibson, Icon Productions

    Original.

    Compilation of notable films from the 60s

    Ginette Vincendeau discusses the artistic value of his films in their proper context and comments on Jean-Pierre Melville's love of American culture and his controversial critical and political standing in this English language study.

    A string of successes followed, including Peck's Bad Boy, Oliver Twist, and A Boy of Flanders, earning Coogan a fortune of four million dollars. Dubbed 'The Millionaire Kid' by the press, he later had to sue his parents in a futile attempt to recover his squandered fortune. His later years were marked with penury and the cruel diminishment of his childhood fame. As an adult, he found work in character roles and gained unexpected but fleeting fame as 'Uncle Fester' in the series The Addams Family. He continued to make guest appearances on television until his death in 1984. In Jackie Coogan: The World's Boy King, Diana Serra Cary reveals the little-known and even less understood private life of this famous child star and his dysfunctional family. She looks at the highs and lows of an actor who reached the height of fame before ten and whose subsequent career took an inevitable fall. Cary also examines the conduct of Coogan's parents, whose behavior served as an unfortunate model for countless others who sought fame and fortune through their children's success. The author, a major child star (the former Baby Peggy), employs her own hard-won insight to explore the career and family woes of another in this fascinating account about one of the greatest child stars of all time. Includes more than 30 photos.

    This book explains in precise, easy to understand language everything the novice director needs to know before taking on his or her first professional assignment.

    From 1896 to 1920 she directed 400 films (including over 100 synchronized sound films), produced hundreds more, and was the first--and so far the only--woman to own and run her own studio plant (The Solax Studio in Fort Lee, NJ, 1910-1914). However, her role in film history was completely forgotten until her own memoirs were published in 1976. This new book tells her life story and fills in many gaps left by the memoirs. Guy BlachT's life and career mirrored momentous changes in the film industry, and the long time-span and sheer volume of her output makes her films a fertile territory for the application of new theories of cinema history, the development of film narrative, and feminist film theory. The book provides a close analysis of the one hundred Guy BlachT films that survive, and in the process rewrites early cinema history.

    This visual approach to the filmmaking process ensures that new (and established!) filmmakers get an instant overview of each and every discipline. Backing up the diagrams are copious notes - humorous in tone, yet broad and deep in content. Wherever possible, the text is broken apart into box outs, hot tips and sub-diagrams. This book is entertaining, irreverent, and never less than painfully practical. The Guerilla Film Makers Movie Blueprint will have its own dedicated website where readers can download the tools, forms, software, and artwork detailed in the book. Jones's latest endeavor is packed with over a decade's worth of experience, know-how, and insider tips. A must-read for every budding filmmaker.

    These films, such as The Maltese Falcon, Murder, My Sweet, This Gun for Hire and The Big Sleep, fascinated French moviegoers with their new breed of criminals - love-starved husbands and wives, local business owners, writers, gamblers, small-time hoods, private eyes, mental patients, war veterans, rebellious teenagers and corrupt lawyers, politicians, judges and cops.

    Six-year-old Mark O’Brien moved his arms and legs for the last time. He came out of a thirty-day coma to find himself enclosed from the neck down in an iron lung, the machine in which he would live for much of the rest of his life.How I Became a Human Being is Mark O’Brien’s account of his struggles to lead an independent life despite a lifelong disability. In 1955, he contracted polio and became permanently paralyzed from the neck down. O’Brien describes growing up without the use of his limbs, his adolescence struggling with physical rehabilitation and suffering the bureaucracy of hospitals and institutions, and his adult life as an independent student and writer. Despite his weak physical state, O’Brien attended graduate school, explored his sexuality, fell in love, published poetry, and worked as a journalist. A determined writer, O’Brien used a mouthstick to type each word.O’Brien’s story does not beg for sympathy. It is rather a day-to-day account of his reality—the life he crafted and maintained with a good mind, hired attendants, decent legislation for disabled people in California, and support from the University of California at Berkeley. He describes the ways in which a paralyzed person takes care of the body, mind, and heart. What mattered most was his writing, the people he loved, his belief in God, and his belief in himself.

    A former painter, Bava extended his eye for beauty in composition to forge breathtaking symphonies of colour and light in a series of masterful horror classics. His influence extends beyond such acknowledged cinematic disciples as Dario Argento and Lucio Fulci, to a new generation of admirers including the likes of Tim Burton, Quentin Tarantino and Martin Scorsese.

    It is also about discovering the power of change in our world, whether it be the change from winter to spring, or from small to large, or the transformation of a boy to a man. This epic story combines humor and emotion with breathtaking images of nature and wildlife from a time long forgotten.

    But it is also laced with the fear and claustrophobia found in the forties film noirs, as Norma and her husband Ben Barzman are driven from Hollywood—during the postwar McCarthyite witch hunt—into an emotionally difficult 30-year exile in France. While their hair-raising and amusing adventures continue, Ben battles depression as he attempts to rehabilitate his career, while frustrating Norma's own aspirations as a writer. She seeks solace in a string of affairs, one of them ending in a pregnancy that she aborts. However, Norma's passion for life, Ben and her seven children, and her radical instincts, shine throughout this dazzling memoir. 20 black-and-white photographs are included.

    

    In a sense, Garfield never left the Bronx, but he began his acting career not far away, on Broadway as a member of the Group Theater in the mid-thirties. But soon, seduced by the myth of Hollywood and the reality of Warner Brothers, he made his movie debut, in 1938, in Four Daughters and immediately established himself as an earthy, rebellious and electrifying presence on the screen in retrospect the James Dean of the Depression era. Frequenty cast as a lawbreaker, in such films as They Made Me a Criminal, Dust Be My Destiny, Castle on the Hudson and, late in his career, the cult favorite Force of Evil, Garfield went on to roles in classics like The Postman Always Rings Twice (with Lana Turner), Body and Soul and Gentleman's Agreement .

    Raised in Savannah, Mercer brought a quintessentially southern style to both his life in New York and to his lyrics, which often evoked the landscapes and mood of his youth ("Moon River", "In the Cool, Cool, Cool of the Evening"). Mercer also absorbed the music of southern blacks--the lullabies his nurse sang to him as a baby and the spirituals that poured out of Savannah's churches-and that cool smooth lyrical style informed some of his greatest songs, such as "That Old Black Magic".Part of a golden guild whose members included Cole Porter and Irving Berlin, Mercer took Hollywood by storm in the midst of the Great Depression. Putting words to some of the most famous tunes of the time, he wrote one hit after another, from "You Must Have Been a Beautiful Baby" to "Jeepers Creepers" and "Hooray for Hollywood." But it was also in Hollywood that Mercer's dark underside emerged. Sober, he was a kind, generous and at times even noble southern gentleman; when he drank, Mercer tore into friends and strangers alike with vicious abuse. Mercer's wife Ginger, whom he'd bested Bing Crosby to win, suffered the cruelest attacks; Mercer would even improvise cutting lyrics about her at parties.During World War II, Mercer served as Americas's troubadour, turning out such uplifting songs as "My Shining Hour" and "Ac-cent-tchu-ate the Positive." He also helped create Capitol Records, the first major West Coast recording company, where he discovered many talented singers, including Peggy Lee and Nat King Cole. During this period, he also began an intense affair with Judy Garland, which rekindled time and again for the rest of their lives. Although they never found happiness together, Garland became Mercer's muse and inspired some of his most sensuous and heartbreaking lyrics: "Blues in the Night," "One for My Baby," and "Come Rain or Come Shine."Mercer amassed a catalog of over a thousand songs and during some years had a song in the Top Ten every week of the year--the songwriting equivalent of Joe DiMaggio's hitting streak--but was plagued by a sense of failure and bitterness over the big Broadway hit that seemed forever out of reach.Based on scores of interviews with friends, family and colleagues, and drawing extensively on Johnny Mercer's letters, papers and his unpublished autobiography, Skylark is an important book about one of the great and dramatic characters in 20th century popular music.

    Over 200 photos.

    Describes and rates more than twenty thousand videos, and provides indexes by theme, awards, actors, actresses, and directors.

    You need to create four walls around them, a landscape, the sun and moon - a whole life for them. You have to get inside that puppet and first make it live, then make it perform. Susannah Shaw provides the first truly practical introduction to the craft skills of model animation. This is a vital book in the development of model animation which, following the success of Aardman's first full-length film 'Chicken Run', is now at the forefront of modern animation. Illustrated in full colour throughout you are shown step by step how to create successful model animation. Starting with some basic exercises, readers will learn about developing a story, making models, creating sets and props, the mechanics of movement, filming, post production and how to set about finding that elusive first job in a modern studio.

    In addition to a synopsis of each film, other details included are cast, writer, director, genre, year of release, running time and even distributor contact details. All films are listed in an easy-to-read A-Z format, but each film is also indexed by country, director and genre. "The Bent Lens: 2nd Edition "also includes essays from experts Judith Halberstam, Barbara Hammer, Helen Hok-Sze Leung and Daniel Mudie Cunningham exploring gay and lesbian film traditions and how gay identity is viewed in Western and non-Western cultures. And finally, this remarkable guide includes a complete listing of gay and lesbian film festivals around the world, making "The Bent Lens" a must for all film and video aficionados.Features more than 200 black-and-white photographs.Lisa Daniel is director and Claire Jackson is president of the Melbourne Queer Film Festival.

    The Cinematic ImagiNation provides readers with valuable insight into the relationships between nation-building, gender, sexuality, the family, and popular cinema, using post-Independence India as a case study." --Gina Marchetti, author of Romance and the "Yellow Peril": Race, Sex, and Discursive Strategies in Hollywood Fiction India produces more films than any other country in the world, and these works are avidly consumed by non-Western cultures in Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and by the Indian communities in Australia, Britain, the Caribbean Islands, and North America. Jyotika Virdi focuses on how this dominant medium configures the "nation" in post-Independence Hindi cinema. She scrutinizes approximately thirty films that have appeared since 1950 and demonstrates how concepts of the nation form the center of this cinema's moral universe. As a kind of storytelling, Indian cinema provides a fascinating account of social history and cultural politics, with the family deployed as a symbol of the nation. Virdi demonstrates how the portrayal of the nation as a mythical community in Hindi films collapses under the weight of its own contradictions--irreconcilable differences that encompass gender, sexuality, family, class, and religious communities. Through these film narratives, the author traces transactions among the various constituencies that struggle, accommodate, coexist uneasily, or reconstitute each other over time, and, in the process, reveal the topography of postcolonial culture.

    Actors (including Mike Connors, Brett Halsey, Natalie Trundy and Richard Kiel), writers, producers and directors recall legendary genre figures Lugosi, Chaney, Jr., Tod Browning and James Whale; films ranging in quality from The Thing to Macumba Love and Eegah; behind-the-scenes tales of cult TV series (Twilight Zone, Batman, Lost in Space, more) and serials; and, of course, the usual barrage of outlandish movie menaces, this time including the Fly, Flesh Eaters, Monolith Monsters, ape men, voodoo women and spider babies! And all in the candid, no-holds-barred style that has made Weaver ?king of the interviewers? (Classic Images)!

    A collection of 43 interviews from horror and science fiction movie writers, producers, directors, and the men and women who saved the planet from aliens, behemoths, monsters, zombies, and other bloated, stumbling threats - in the movies, at least.

    Then as now, his celebrated films embrace the spirit of the era: challenging authority, questioning accepted morality, and examining the thin line between civilization and savagery. In Adventures of a Suburban Boy, Boorman delves deeply into these themes, applying his subversive sensibility to his life story as well as to some of the most important political and cultural events of the twentieth century. The result is a heady fusion of personal memoir and cinematic study, as a child of the London Blitz becomes the influential director known for films such as Point Blank, Excalibur, Hope and Glory, Deliverance, and The General--discussing the cultural role of the motion picture and the art of filmmaking along the way. With a vividly depicted supporting cast that includes Sean Connery, Richard Burton, Burt Reynolds, and Cher, among others, this entertaining and witty tour through the life, times, and works of one of the cinema's great practitioners is not only essential for anyone seeking a fuller understanding of Boorman's incredible body of work, but is also indispensable resource for anyone who is fascinated by film's impact on our lives.

    Those who work principally with one type of film may leave a unique imprint on an entire genre. James Bernard was one such composer. From 1952 to the late 1990s he was one of horror's definitive and distinctive voices, scoring many of Hammer's best-known films, including Dracula. This critical biography details Bernard's life from struggle to success. More than just a biography, however, it is also a meticulous examination of his music, including its intricate mechanisms and the many sources of Bernard's inspiration. Movie scores examined include The Quatermass Experiment, The Curse of Frankenstein, Dracula and The Hound of the Baskervilles. Reviews of Bernard's work and reminiscences of the composer himself add depth and personal feeling to the biography. A music glossary and a filmography complete the work.

    From peeking in at the special effects for The Ten Commandmants, the original silent film, to his first job as an editor, slowly, patiently splicing film...Dmytryk's brilliantly written and until now unpublished look back on old Hollywood is a joy you won't be able to put down.