Don't You Forget About Me: Contemporary Writers on the Films of John Hughes


Jaime Clarke - 2007
    Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful are timeless tales of love, angst, longing, and self-discovery that illuminated and assuaged the anxieties of an entire generation. Fondly nostalgic, filled with wit and surprising insights, don't you forget about me contains original essays from a skillfully chosen crop of novelists and essayists on the films' far-reaching effects on their own lives -- an irresistible read for anyone who came of age in the eighties (or just wishes they did). Featuring new writing from: Steve Almond * Julianna Baggott * Lisa Borders * Ryan Boudinot * T Cooper * Quinn Dalton * Emily Franklin * Lisa Gabriele * Tod Goldberg * Nina de Gramont * Tara Ison * Allison Lynn * John McNally * Dan Pope * Lewis Robinson * Ben Schrank * Elizabeth Searle * Mary Sullivan * Rebecca Wolff * Moon Unit Zappa

The Dudes Abide: The Coen Brothers and the Making of The Big Lebowski


Alex Belth - 2014
    Their sixth, Fargo, was released that March to acclaim; awards would follow. Alex Belth, a 25-year-old aspiring filmmaker, landed a job as their personal assistant on Lebowski — and for the next year, was the fly on the wall as the Coens created the movie that would become an enduring movie classic. First as their personal assistant and then as an assistant film editor, Belth observed everything from the pre-production work of location scouting, casting, and rehearsals, all the way through filming and post-production. Belth witnessed when Jeff Bridges and John Goodman met for the first time and rehearsed their iconic roles as The Dude and Walter; when a private screening was held for Alan Klein, the Rolling Stones' notorious former business manager; and long editing sessions with the Coen brothers in the editing room, as they tied their movie together. The Dudes Abide is the first behind-the-scenes account of the making of a Coen Brothers movie, and offers an intimate, first-hand narrative of the making of The Big Lebowski — including never-before-revealed details about the making of the film, and insight into the inner workings of the Coen Brothers' genius. About the Author: Alex Belth, praised as New York's best sportswriter by the Village Voice, is the creator of Bronx Banter, a blog about the New York Yankees. He began his career in the film business, working for Woody Allen, Ken Burns, and the Coen Brothers. Belth is the author of Stepping Up, a biography of Curt Flood, and the editor of The Best Sports Writing of Pat Jordan and Yankee Stadium Memories. He has written for Sports Illustrated, SB Nation, and The Daily Beast and Deadspin. His story on iconoclastic sportswriter George Kimball was included in The Best American Sports Writing 2012. [Cover Design by Adil Dara]

Kubrick: The Definitive Edition


Michel Ciment - 1980
    If Stanley Kubrick had made only" 2001: A Space Odyssey" or "Dr. Strangelove," his cinematic legacy would have been assured. But from his first feature film, "Fear and Desire," to the posthumously released "Eyes Wide Shut," Kubrick created an accomplished body of work unique in its scope, diversity, and artistry, and by turns both lauded and controversial.In this newly revised and definitive edition of his now classic study, film critic Michel Ciment provides an insightful examination of Kubrick's thirteen films--including such favorites as "Lolita, A Clockwork Orange," and "Full Metal Jacket-"-alongside an assemblage of more than four hundred photographs that form a complementary photo essay. Rounding out this unique work are a short biography of Kubrick; interviews with the director, as well as cast and crew members, including Malcolm McDowell, Shelley Duvall, and Jack Nicholson; and a detailed filmography and bibliography. Meshed with masterful integrity, the book's text and illustrations pay homage to one of the most visionary, original, and demanding filmmakers of our time.

Profoundly Disturbing: The Shocking Movies That Changed History


Joe Bob Briggs - 2003
    . . 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.

What Happens Next: A History of American Screenwriting


Marc Norman - 2007
    Silent-film comedy pioneer Mack Sennett forbade his screenwriters from writing anything down, for fear they’d get inflated ideas about themselves as creative artists. The great midcentury director John Ford was known to answer studio executives’ complaints that he was behind schedule by tearing a handful of random pages from his script and tossing them over his shoulder. And Ken Russell was so contemptuous of Paddy Chayefsky’s screenplay for Altered States that Chayefsky insisted on having his name removed from the credits.Of course, popular impressions aside, screenwriters have been central to moviemaking since the first motion picture audiences got past the sheer novelty of seeing pictures that moved at all. Soon they wanted to know: What happens next? In this truly fresh perspective on the movies, veteran Oscar-winning screenwriter Marc Norman gives us the first comprehensive history of the men and women who have answered that question, from Anita Loos, the highest-paid screenwriter of her day, to Robert Towne, Quentin Tarantino, Charlie Kaufman, and other paradigm-busting talents reimagining movies for the new century.The whole rich story is here: Herman Mankiewicz and the telegram he sent from Hollywood to his friend Ben Hecht in New York: “Millions are to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots.” The unlikely sojourns of F. Scott Fitzgerald and William Faulkner as Hollywood screenwriters. The imposition of the Production Code in the early 1930s and the ingenious attempts of screenwriters to outwit the censors. How the script for Casablanca, “a disaster from start to finish,” based on what James Agee judged to be “one of the world’s worst plays,” took shape in a chaotic frenzy of writing and rewriting—and how one of the most famous denouements in motion picture history wasn’t scripted until a week after the last scheduled day of shooting—because they had to end the movie somehow.Norman explores the dark days of the Hollywood blacklist that devastated and divided Hollywood’s screenwriting community. He charts the rise of the writer-director in the early 1970s with names like Coppola, Lucas, and Allen and the disaster of Michael Cimino’s Heaven’s Gate that led the studios to retake control. He offers priceless portraits of the young William Hurt, Steven Spielberg, and Steven Soderbergh. And he describes the scare of 2005 when new technologies seemed to dry up the audience for movies, and the industry—along with its screenwriters—faced the necessity of reinventing itself as it had done before in the face of sound recording, color, widescreen, television, and other technological revolutions.Impeccably researched, erudite, and filled with unforgettable stories of the too often overlooked, maligned, and abused men and women who devised the ideas that others brought to life in action and words on-screen, this is a unique and engrossing history of the quintessential art form of our time.

Picture


Lillian Ross - 1951
    Journalism of the Twentieth Century were chosen by the New York University Department of Journalism and a distinguished panel that included David Brinkley, Pete Hamill, Jeff Greenfield, Mary McGrory, and Morley Safer, Picture had an honored place on that list.

The Nolan Variations: The Movies, Mysteries, and Marvels of Christopher Nolan


Tom Shone - 2020
    A rare, revelatory portrait, as close as you're ever going to get to the Escher drawing that is Christopher Nolan's remarkable brain (Sam Mendes). In chapters structured by themes and motifs (Time; Chaos; Dreams), Shone offers an unprecedented intimate view of the director. Shone explores Nolan's thoughts on his influences, his vision, his enigmatic childhood past--and his movies, from plots and emotion to identity and perception, including his latest blockbuster, the action-thriller/spy-fi Tenet (Big, brashly beautiful, grandiosely enjoyable--Variety).Filled with the director's never-before-seen photographs, storyboards, and scene sketches, here is Nolan on the evolution of his pictures, and the writers, artists, directors, and thinkers who have inspired and informed his films.Fabulous: intelligent, illuminating, rigorous, and highly readable. The very model of what a filmmaking study should be. Essential reading for anyone who cares about Nolan or about film for that matter.--Neal Gabler, author of An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood and Walt Disney, The Biography

Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How "The Graduate" Became the Touchstone of a Generation


Beverly Gray - 2017
    . . The book as a whole offers a fascinating look at how this movie tells a timeless story.” —The Washington PostMrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you? When The Graduate premiered in December 1967, its filmmakers had only modest expectations for what seemed to be a small, sexy art-house comedy adapted from an obscure first novel by an eccentric twenty-four-year-old. There was little indication that this offbeat story—a young man just out of college has an affair with one of his parents’ friends and then runs off with her daughter—would turn out to be a monster hit, with an extended run in theaters and seven Academy Award nominations. The film catapulted an unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, to stardom with a role that is now permanently engraved in our collective memory. While turning the word plastics into shorthand for soulless work and a corporate, consumer culture, The Graduate sparked a national debate about what was starting to be called “the generation gap.” Now, in time for this iconic film’s fiftieth birthday, author Beverly Gray offers up a smart close reading of the film itself as well as vivid, never-before-revealed details from behind the scenes of the production—including all the drama and decision-making of the cast and crew. For movie buffs and pop culture fanatics, Seduced by Mrs. Robinson brings to light The Graduate’s huge influence on the future of filmmaking. And it explores how this unconventional movie rocked the late-sixties world, both reflecting and changing the era’s views of sex, work, and marriage.

Considering Doris Day


Tom Santopietro - 2007
    America's favorite girl next door may have projected a wholesome image that led Oscar Levant to quip "I knew Doris Day before she was a virgin," but in Considering Doris Day Tom Santopietro reveals Day's underappreciated and effortless acting and singing range that ran the gamut from musicals to comedy to drama and made Day nothing short of a worldwide icon.             Covering the early Warner Brothers years through Day's triumphs working with artists as varied as Alfred Hitchcock and Bob Fosse, Santopietro's smart and funny book deconstructs the myth of Day as America's perennial virgin, and reveals why her work continues to resonate today, both onscreen as pioneering independent career woman role model, and off, as a recipient of the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the United States' highest civilian honor. Praised by James Cagney as "my idea of a great actor" and by James Garner as "the Fred Astaire of comedy," Doris Day became not just America's favorite girl, but the number one film star in the world. Yet after two weekly television series, including a triumphant five year run on CBS, she turned her back on show business forever.             Examining why Day's worldwide success in movies overshadowed the brilliant series of concept recordings she made for Columbia Records in the  '50s and '60s, Tom Santopietro uncovers the unexpected facets of Day's surprisingly sexy acting and singing style that led no less an observer than John Updike to state "She just glowed for me." Placing Day's work within the social context of America in the second half of the twentieth century, Considering Doris Day is the first book that grants Doris Day her rightful place as a singular American artist.

Conquest of the Useless: Reflections from the Making of Fitzcarraldo


Werner Herzog - 2004
    Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man) is one of the most revered and enigmatic filmmakers of our time, and Fitzcarraldo is one of his most honored and admired films.  More than just Herzog’s journal of the making of the monumental, problematical motion picture, which involved, among other things, major cast changes and reshoots, and the hauling (without the use of special effects) of a 360-ton steamship over a mountain, Conquest of the Useless is  a work of art unto itself, an Amazonian fever dream that emerged from the delirium of the jungle.  With fascinating observations about crew and cast - including Herzog’s lead, the somewhat demented internationally renowned star Klaus Kinski - and breathtaking insights into the filmmaking process that are uniquely Werner Herzog, Conquest of the Useless is an eye-opening look into the mind of a cinematic master.

The Silent Clowns


Walter Kerr - 1975
    It covers such characters as Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Laurel and Hardy.

Sick Little Monkeys: The Unauthorized Ren & Stimpy Story


Thad Komorowski - 2013
    Through vigorous draftsmanship, charismatic voices, irreverent sight gags, crass humor, and stellar character acting, animation's most talented and disturbed artists created an entity for the Nickelodeon cable network that pulled the art form out of a 25-year rut. The world has never been quite the same since - and we're eternally grateful!Now you too can join the rollercoaster ride that is the fascinating, insane real-life story of art, money, and ego that gave birth to Ren Hoek and Stimpson J. Cat. History Eraser Buttons need not apply. No stone has been unturned, no magic nose goblins unpicked, in this extensively detailed history of the show that defined a generation and changed an entire medium.It's everything you wanted to know about Ren & Stimpy - but were afraid to ask!

Horror Cinema


Jonathan Penner - 2008
    Depicting deep-rooted, even archetypal fears, while at the same time exploiting socially and culturally specific anxieties, cinematic horror is at once timeless and utterly of its time and place. This exciting visual history, which includes unique images from the David Del Valle archive, examines the genre in thematic, historical, and aesthetic terms, breaking it down into the following fundamental categories: Slashers & Serial Killers; Cannibals, Freaks & Hillbillys; Revenge of Nature & Environmental Horror; Sci-fi Horror; The Living Dead; Ghosts & Haunted Houses; Possession, Demons & Evil Tricksters; Voodoo, Cults & Satanists; Vampires & Werewolves; and The Monstrous-Feminine. Among the many films featured are classics such as Psycho, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Alien, The Exorcist, Dracula, and The Wicker Man.

Thinking In Pictures: The Making Of The Movie Matewan


John Sayles - 1987
    Many films later, he still works outside the studio system and guides every phase of his productions.Now Sayles has written an illuminating book about the complex choices that lie at the heart of every movie. Using the making of his film Matewan as an example, he offers chapters on screenwriting, directing, editing, sound, and more. Photographs, sketches, and the complete shooting script illustrate this engaging account of how Sayles's curiosity about a coal miners' strike in the town of Matewan, West Virginia, became a screenplay--and then a movie.

The Art of Making Money: The Story of a Master Counterfeiter


Jason Kersten - 2009
    He took to crime almost immediately, starting with petty theft before graduating to robbing drug dealers. Eventually a man nicknamed "DaVinci" taught him the centuries-old art of counterfeiting. After a stint in jail, Williams emerged to discover that the Treasury Department had issued the most secure hundred-dollar bill ever created: the 1996 New Note. Williams spent months trying to defeat various security features before arriving at a bill so perfect that even law enforcement had difficulty distinguishing it from the real thing. Williams went on to print millions in counterfeit bills, selling them to criminal organizations and using them to fund cross-country spending sprees. Still unsatisfied, he went off in search of his long-lost father, setting in motion a chain of betrayals that would be his undoing. In The Art of Making Money, journalist Jason Kersten details how Williams painstakingly defeated the anti-forging features of the New Note, how Williams and his partner-in-crime wife converted fake bills into legitimate tender at shopping malls all over America, and how they stayed one step ahead of the Secret Service until trusting the wrong person brought them all down.