He has pursued his revolution in works ranging from the explosive Breathless to the eloquent Contempt to the controversial Hail Mary and the postmodern Histoire(s) du cinema, shaking up conventional formulas with boldly innovative approaches to every aspect of cinema and video - including film criticism via provocative essays in Cahiers du Cinema and interviews dating to the early years of his career. This book presents a varied selection of his conversations with critics, scholars, and journalists, spanning the 1960s to the 1990s and illuminating key facets of his life work and ideas.

    "Heaven and Mel" is Eszterhas's explosive, unabridged, no-holds-barred account. It is a Hollywood story but it's not. It is the story of love and hatred, of anti-Semitism and fathers and sons, and of a movie star's tragic sexual obsession. It is the story of God and the Devil, devastating but often hilarious. It is Joe Eszterhas at his best: two-fisted, movingly sensitive, always outrageous.

    They teach you how to discover the "Franchise" or structure of a television show in order to write a successful and eye catching spec script. The four-act structure is covered, along with the elements that go into telling a good story. After you've blown them away with your spec script, learn how to pitch confidently and concisely. You'll also find invaluable information on how to work with producers, how to handle your first writing assignment, and tackle revisions. Also included are Writer's Guidelines, and beat sheets, from several television shows to help you familiarize yourself with the way writer's work.

    Ted Hope, whose films have garnered 12 Oscar nominations, draws from his own personal experiences working on the early films of Ang Lee, Eddie Burns, Hal Hartley, Michel Gondry, Nicole Holofcener, Todd Solondz and other indie mavericks, relating those decisions that brought him success as well as the occasional failure.Whether navigating negotiations with Harvey Weinstein over final cuts or clashing with high-powered CAA agents over their clients, Hope offers behind-the-scenes stories from the wild and often heated world of low-budget cinema—where art and commerce collide. As mediator between these two opposing interests, Hope offers his unique perspective on how to make movies while keeping your integrity intact and how to create a sustainable business enterprise out of that art while staying true to yourself. Against a backdrop of seismic changes in the indie-film industry, from corporate co-option to the rise of social media, Hope for Film provides not only an entertaining and intimate ride through the ups and downs of the business of art-house movies over the last 25 years, but also hope for its future.

    1958) is the youngest of Hollywood's most successful directors. He has the knack of making films with a very broad appeal, taking the silliness out of the representation of children, while remaining in touch with the child within himself and his audiences. Burton emerged as a director and storyteller after working as an animator for Disney. His meeting with Johnny Depp enabled him to give physical form to the heroes of his imaginary worlds, where fear is mixed with laughter, strange is normal and those who are not normal, such as "Edward Scissorhands" (1990), must be preserved. After "Beetlejuice" (1988) and "Charlie and the Chocolate Factory" (2005), the resolutely boyish Burton, now in his fifties, presents his version of "Alice in Wonderland" (2010).

    Loden’s 1970 film Wanda is a masterpiece of early cinema vérité, an anti-Bonnie-and-Clyde road movie about a young woman, adrift in rust-belt Pennsylvania in the early 1960s, who embarks on a crime spree with a small-time crook.How to paint a life, describe a personality? Inspired by the film, a researcher seeks to piece together a portrait of its creator. In her soul-searching homage to the former pin-up girl famously married to Hollywood giant Elia Kazan, the biographer’s evocative powers are put to the test. New insights into Loden’s sketchy biography remain scarce and the words of Marguerite Duras, Georges Perec, Jean-Luc Godard, Sylvia Plath, Kate Chopin, Herman Melville, Samuel Beckett and W.G. Sebald come to the narrator’s rescue. As remembered scenes from Wanda alternate with the droll journal of a flailing research project, personal memories surface, and with them, uncomfortable insights into the inner life of a singular woman who is also, somehow, every woman.

    Written by Neil Landau, an experienced screenwriter and script consultant to the major movie studios, this is the perfect book for anyone who wants to know about the inner-workings of this industry. Whether it's someone who wants to make movies as a full-timecareer, or just someone who is interested in film, this book covers it all.

    Outrageous evaluations of Picasso, Turner, Cézanne, many more. Text includes 15 renderings of paintings discussed and 44 of Dalí's calligraphic decorations. Will delight anyone who enjoys the artist's unconventional opinions and egotistical posturing.

    In The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together, film critic Adam Nayman carefully sifts through their complex cinematic universe in an effort to plot, as he puts it, “some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness.” The book combines critical text—biography, close film analysis, and enlightening interviews with key Coen collaborators—with a visual aesthetic that honors the Coens’ singular mix of darkness and levity. Featuring film stills, beautiful and evocative illustrations, punchy infographics, and hard insight, this book will be the definitive exploration of the Coen brothers’ oeuvre.

    But before you can screen your short film, you need to shoot it. And before you can shoot it, you need to write it. The Short Screenplay provides both beginning and experienced screenwriters with all the guidance they need to write compelling, filmable short screenplays. Explore how to develop characters that an audience can identify with. How to create a narrative structure that fits a short time frame but still engages the audience. How to write dialogue that's concise and memorable. How to develop story ideas from concept through final draft. All this and much more is covered in a unique conversational style that reads more like a novel than a "how-to" book. The book wraps up with a discussion of the role of the screenplay in the production process and with some helpful (and entertaining) sample scripts. This is the only guide you'll ever need to make your short film a reality!

    In many ways, Tarantino is the paradigmatic 1990s success story: from high school dropout, toiling anonymously in a California video store, taking acting lessons, to world acclaim, with Pulp Fiction as the Grand Prix winner at Cannes.With his first film, Reservoir Dogs, the then 29-year-old became an inspiration for filmmakers even younger than himself on how to produce stylish, subterranean cinema. (Not that his extra-violent imitators, labeled "Tarantino school," could match the wit of his scripts, his talent with actors, and the vivacity, energy, and originality of his shooting style.)Tarantino, turning famous, remains the same manic talker who is obsessed with American pop culture and is endlessly enthusiastic about his favorite movies and moviemakers. Informal, gregarious, accessible, he has been a journalist's dream, for his wonderfully expressive, almost stream-of-consciousness chatter.This collection is the first book of Tarantino interviews to be published. The selections are his most uninhibited, far reaching, and revealing. They demonstrate conclusively that the source of his world-renowned pop-culture dialogue is his own brash, vivid, virtuosic conversation."I realized I didn't want to be an actor," he says. "I wanted to be a director. My favorite actors were character actors and I realized they still had to read for parts. I didn't want to be fifty years old and still reading for parts. I wanted some control over my destiny, and it seemed to me that directors did."Gerald Peary is a film critic and columnist for the Boston Phoenix, a professor of journalism and communications at Suffolk University, and a lecturer at Boston University. He is also Acting Curator of the Harvard University Film Archive.

    The most innovative and creative screenwriting book yet, from an author who knows first-hand what it takes to get a movie made.Based on an award-winning website hailed as "smart enough for professional screenwriters and accessible enough for aspiring screenwriters", Crafty Screenwriting is the first book not only to offer a successful screenwriter's tricks of the trade, but to explain what development executives really mean when they complain that the "dialogue is flat," or "the hero isn't likeable." Fresh, provocative, and funny, Alex Epstein diagnoses problem that other screenwriting books barely address, and answers questions they rarely ask, like "Why is it sometimes dangerous to know your characters too well before you start writing," or "Why does your script have to be so much better than the awful pictures that get made every day?" As a development executive who has accepted and rejected countless screenplays, and a produced screenwriter himself, Epstein can take you into the heart of the most important question of all: "Is this a movie?" A crucial book for anyone who has ever wondered what it takes to get their movie made.

    Two-time Academy Award-winning screenwriter and the bestselling author of Marathon Man, Tinsel, Boys and Girls Together, and other novels, Goldman now takes you into Hollywood's inner sanctums...on and behind the scenes for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President's Men, and other films...into the plush offices of Hollywood producers...into the working lives of acting greats such as Redford, Olivier, Newman, and Hoffman...and into his own professional experiences and creative thought processes in the crafting of screenplays. You get a firsthand look at why and how films get made and what elements make a good screenplay. Says columnist Liz Smith, "You'll be fascinated.

    Provides new insights and observations from Vogler's pioneering work in mythic structure for writers.

     Much has been written about the storied New Hollywood of the 1970s, but at the same time as Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola were making their first classic movies, a parallel universe of directors gave birth to the modern horror film-aggressive, raw, and utterly original. Based on unprecedented access to the genre's major players, The New York Times's critic Jason Zinoman's Shock Value delivers the first definitive account of horror's golden age. By the late 1960s, horror was stuck in the past, confined mostly to drive-in theaters and exploitation houses, and shunned by critics. Shock Value tells the unlikely story of how the much-disparaged horror film became an ambitious art form while also conquering the multiplex. Directors such as Wes Craven, Roman Polanski, John Carpenter, and Brian De Palma- counterculture types operating largely outside the confines of Hollywood-revolutionized the genre, exploding taboos and bringing a gritty aesthetic, confrontational style, and political edge to horror. Zinoman recounts how these directors produced such classics as Rosemary's Baby, Carrie, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Halloween, creating a template for horror that has been imitated relentlessly but whose originality has rarely been matched. This new kind of film dispensed with the old vampires and werewolves and instead assaulted audiences with portraits of serial killers, the dark side of suburbia, and a brand of nihilistic violence that had never been seen before. Shock Value tells the improbable stories behind the making of these movies, which were often directed by obsessive and insecure young men working on shoestring budgets, were funded by sketchy investors, and starred porn stars. But once The Exorcist became the highest grossing film in America, Hollywood took notice. The classic horror films of the 1970s have now spawned a billion-dollar industry, but they have also penetrated deep into the American consciousness. Quite literally, Zinoman reveals, these movies have taught us what to be afraid of. Drawing on interviews with hundreds of the most important artists in horror, Shock Value is an enthralling and personality-driven account of an overlooked but hugely influential golden age in American film.