Spike Lee's Gotta Have It: Inside Guerilla Filmmaking
Spike Lee - 1987
Shot on a shoe-string budget of $175,000 in black-and-white 16mm, the film was made with Spike Lee's persistence and talent plus the help of family and friends. It grossed $8 million at the box office and proved to be a major hit with both critics and audiences. Now Spike Lee reveals how he did it, mapping out the entire creative and production processes-from early notebook jottings to film festival awards. Spike Lee's Gotta Have It is a unique document in film literature - it's funny, absorbing, and fresh as the hit film itself.
Barton Fink & Miller's Crossing
Joel Coen - 1991
The former is a psychological thriller set in the Hollywood of the 1940s, while the latter reinvents the 1930s gangster film.
The Great Movies
Roger Ebert - 2002
The Great Movies collects one hundred of these essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to that film with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm–or perhaps to an avid first-time viewing. Ebert’s selections range widely across genres, periods, and nationalities, and from the highest achievements in film art to justly beloved and wildly successful popular entertainments. Roger Ebert manages in these essays to combine a truly populist appreciation for our most important form of popular art with a scholar’s erudition and depth of knowledge and a sure aesthetic sense. Wonderfully enhanced by stills selected by Mary Corliss, film curator at the Museum of Modern Art, The Great Movies is a treasure trove for film lovers of all persuasions, an unrivaled guide for viewers, and a book to return to again and again.The Great Movies includes: All About Eve • Bonnie and Clyde • Casablanca • Citizen Kane • The Godfather • Jaws • La Dolce Vita • Metropolis • On the Waterfront • Psycho • The Seventh Seal • Sweet Smell of Success • Taxi Driver • The Third Man • The Wizard of Oz • and eighty-five more films.From the Hardcover edition.
Filmish: A Graphic Journey Through Film
Edward Ross - 2015
In Filmish, Ross's cartoon alter-ego guides readers through the annals of cinematic history, introducing us to some of the strange and fascinating concepts at work in the movies. Each chapter focuses on a particular theme - the body, architecture, language - and explores an eclectic mix of cinematic triumphs, from A Trip to the Moon to Aliens. Sitting within the tradition of bestselling non-fiction graphic novels like Scott McClouds Understanding Comics and the Introducing...series, Filmish tackles serious issues - sexuality, race, censorship, propaganda - with authority and wit, throwing new light on some of the greatest films ever made.
The Big Picture: The Fight for the Future of Movies
Ben Fritz - 2018
In the past decade, Hollywood has endured a cataclysm on a par with the end of silent film and the demise of the studio system. Stars and directors have seen their power dwindle, while writers and producers lift their best techniques from TV, comic books, and the toy biz. The future of Hollywood is being written by powerful corporate brands like Marvel, Amazon, Netflix, and Lego, as well as censors in China.Ben Fritz chronicles this dramatic shakeup with unmatched skill, bringing equal fluency to both the financial and entertainment aspects of Hollywood. He dives deeply into the fruits of the Sony hack to show how the previous model, long a creative and commercial success, lost its way. And he looks ahead through interviews with dozens of key players at Disney, Marvel, Netflix, Amazon, Imax, and others to discover how they have reinvented the business. He shows us, for instance, how Marvel replaced stars with “universes,” and how Disney remade itself in Apple’s image and reaped enormous profits.But despite the destruction of the studios’ traditional playbook, Fritz argues that these seismic shifts signal the dawn of a new heyday for film. The Big Picture shows the first glimmers of this new golden age through the eyes of the creative mavericks who are defining what our movies will look like in the new era.
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
Peter Biskind - 1998
This down-and-dirty romp through Hollywood in the 1970s introduces the young filmmakers--Coppola, Scorsese, Lucas, Spielberg, Altman, and Beatty--and recreates an era that transformed American culture forever.
The Wes Anderson Collection
Matt Zoller Seitz - 2013
A true auteur, Anderson is known for the visual artistry, inimitable tone, and idiosyncratic characterizations that make each of his films—Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, The Darjeeling Limited, Fantastic Mr. Fox, and Moonrise Kingdom—instantly recognizable as “Andersonian.”The Wes Anderson Collection is the first in-depth overview of Anderson’s filmography, guiding readers through his life and career. Previously unpublished photos, artwork, and ephemera complement a book-length conversation between Anderson and award-winning critic Matt Zoller Seitz. The interview and images are woven together in a meticulously designed book that captures the spirit of his films: melancholy and playful, wise and childish—and thoroughly original.
The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood
Sam Wasson - 2020
and Fosse comes the revelatory account of the making of a modern American masterpiece Chinatown is the Holy Grail of 1970s cinema. Its twist ending is the most notorious in American film and its closing line of dialogue the most haunting. Here for the first time is the incredible true story of its making.In Sam Wasson's telling, it becomes the defining story of the most colorful characters in the most colorful period of Hollywood history. Here is Jack Nicholson at the height of his powers, as compelling a movie star as there has ever been, embarking on his great, doomed love affair with Anjelica Huston. Here is director Roman Polanski, both predator and prey, haunted by the savage death of his wife, returning to Los Angeles, the scene of the crime, where the seeds of his own self-destruction are quickly planted. Here is the fevered dealmaking of "The Kid" Robert Evans, the most consummate of producers. Here too is Robert Towne's fabled script, widely considered the greatest original screenplay ever written. Wasson for the first time peels off layers of myth to provide the true account of its creation.Looming over the story of this classic movie is the imminent eclipse of the '70s filmmaker-friendly studios as they gave way to the corporate Hollywood we know today. In telling that larger story, The Big Goodbye will take its place alongside classics like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and The Devil's Candy as one of the great movie-world books ever written.Praise for Sam Wasson:"Wasson is a canny chronicler of old Hollywood and its outsize personalities...More than that, he understands that style matters, and, like his subjects, he has a flair for it." -
The New Yorker
"Sam Wasson is a fabulous social historian because he finds meaning in situations and stories that would otherwise be forgotten if he didn't sleuth them out, lovingly." - Hilton Als
Room to Dream
David Lynch - 2018
Lynch responds to each recollection and reveals the inner story of the life behind the art.
Double Lives, Second Chances: The Cinema of Krzysztof Kieslowski
Annette Insdorf - 1999
His best-known films, Blue; White; Red; The Double Life of Veronique; and The Decalogue, remain watershed events in lmmaking history. Author Annette Insdorf, Kieslowskis close friend and translator, offers a revealing portrait of his life and monumental body of work. From the gold-bathed images of The Double Life of Veronique to the emotionally dark, visually haunting Blue, Kieslowskis films explore personal and social issues with inimitable brilliance. This paperback edition includes an updated introduction with information on the much anticipated release of Heaven (March 2002) which Kieslowski wrote and planned to film, before he died unexpectedly in March 1996.
Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film
Helen O'Hara - 2021
Early pioneers like Dorothy Arzner (who invented the boom mic, among other innovations) and Alice Guy-Blache shaped the way films are made. But it wasn't long before these talented women were pushed aside and their contributions written out of film history. How and why did this happen?Hollywood was born just over a century ago, at a time of huge forward motion for women's rights, yet it came to embody the same old sexist standards. Women found themselves fighting a system that feeds on their talent, creativity and beauty but refuses to pay them the same respect as their male contemporaries - until now...The tide has finally begun to turn. A new generation of women, both in front of and behind the camera, are making waves in the industry and are now shaping some of the biggest films to hit our screens. There is plenty of work still needed before we can even come close to gender equality in film - but we're finally headed in the right direction.In Women vs Hollywood: The Fall and Rise of Women in Film, Empire's 'geek queen' Helen O'Hara takes a closer look at the pioneering and talented women of Hollywood and their work in film since Hollywood began. Equal representation in film matters because it both reflects and influences wider societal gender norms. In understanding how women were largely written out of Hollywood's own origin story, and how the films we watch are put together, we can finally see how to put an end to a picture that is so deeply unequal - and discover a multitude of stories out there just waiting to be told.
Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone
Christopher Frayling - 2005
With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating "A Fistful of Dollars", the first in a trilogy of films (with "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time in the West", these films came to define the Spaghetti Western
On Directing Film
David Mamet - 1991
Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition of uninflected images. The best films, Mamet argues, are composed of simple shots. The great filmmaker understands that the burden of cinematic storytelling lies less in the individual shot than in the collective meaning that shots convey when they are edited together. Mamet borrows many of his ideas about directing, writing, and acting from Russian masters such as Konstantin Stanislavsky, Sergei M. Eisenstein, and Vsevelod Pudovkin, but he presents his material in so delightful and lively a fashion that he revitalizes it for the contemporary reader.
Save the Cat: The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need
Blake Snyder - 2005
This ultimate insider's guide reveals the secrets that none dare admit, told by a show biz veteran who's proven that you can sell your script if you can save the cat!
Rebel Without a Crew, or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player
Robert Rodríguez - 1995
This is both one man's remarkable story and an essential guide for anyone who has a celluloid story to tell and the dreams and determination to see it through. Part production diary, part how-to manual, Rodriguez unveils how he was able to make his influential first film on only a $7,000 budget. Also included is the appendix, 'The Ten Minute Film Course,” a tell-all on how to save thousands of dollars on film school and teach yourself the ropes of film production, directing, and screenwriting.