Film Directing Shot by Shot: Visualizing from Concept to Screen


Steven D. Katz - 1991
    Aspiring directors, cinematographers, editors, and producers, many of whom are now working professionals, learned the craft of visual storytelling from Shot by Shot, the most com-plete source for preplanning the look of a movie.The book contains over 800 photos and illustrations, and is by far the most comprehensive look at shot design in print, containing storyboards from movies such as Citizen Kane, Blade Runner, Dead-pool, and Moonrise Kingdom. Also introduced is the concept of A, I, and L patterns as a way to sim-plify the hundreds of staging choices facing a director in every scene.Shot by Shot uniquely blends story analysis with compositional strategies, citing examples then il-lustrated with the storyboards used for the actual films. Throughout the book, various visual ap-proaches to short scenes are shown, exposing the directing processes of our most celebrated au-teurs — including a meticulous, lavishly illustrated analysis of Steven Spielberg’s scene design for Empire of the Sun.

Big Maggie


John Brendan Keane - 1969
    The dialogue crackles with hilarious, caustic putdowns as the indomitable Maggie deals with her feckless family and unwanted suitors. Everyone wants a part of Big Maggie and her property but she has other ideas.

Harlem Duet


Djanet Sears - 1997
    Winner of the Chalmers Play Award. A rhapsodic blues tragedy. Harlem Duet could be the prelude to Shakepeare's Othello, and recounts the tale of Othello and his first wife Billie (yes, before Desdemona). Set in contemporary Harlem at the corner of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X boulevards, the play explores the space where race and sex intersect. Harlem Duet is Billie's story.

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write: On Umbrellas and Sword Fights, Parades and Dogs, Fire Alarms, Children, and Theater


Sarah Ruhl - 2012
    She has written a stunningly original book of essays whose concerns range from the most minimal and personal subjects to the most encompassing matters of art and culture. The titles themselves speak to the volume's uniqueness: "On lice," "On sleeping in the theater," "On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)," "Greek masks and Bell's palsy."100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is a book in which chimpanzees, Chekhov, and child care are equally at home. A vibrant, provocative examination of the possibilities of the theater, it is also a map to a very particular artistic sensibility, and an unexpected guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life.

Theatrical Design and Production: An Introduction to Scene Design and Construction, Lighting, Sound, Costume, and Makeup


J. Michael Gillette - 1987
    Health and safety precautions for the backstage crew appear throughout in boxes labeled Safety Tips, and Design I

The Great Comet: The Journey of a New Musical to Broadway


Dave Malloy - 2016
    The musical is based on a dramatic 70-page slice of Leo Tolstoy’s War and Peace. Profusely illustrated, the book also includes an annotated script and a special CD with three songs from the Off-Broadway production and two all-new recordings for the Broadway production featuring Josh Groban with a 25-piece orchestra.

Acting in Film: An Actor's Take on Movie Making


Michael Caine - 1989
    This new revised and expanded edition features great photos throughout, with chapters on: Preparation, In Front of the Camera - Before You Shoot, The Take, Characters, Directors, On Being a Star, and much more. "Remarkable material ... A treasure ... I'm not going to be looking at performances quite the same way ... FASCINATING!" - Gene Siskel

The Origin of German Tragic Drama


Walter Benjamin - 1928
    Indeed, Georg Lukacs—one of the most trenchant opponents of Benjamin’s aesthetics—singled out this work as one of the main sources of literary modernism in the twentieth century.The Origin of German Tragic Drama begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar stage-form of the royal martyr dramas called Trauerspiel. Benjamin also comments on the engravings of Durer, and the theatre of Shakespeare and Calderon. Baroque tragedy, he argues, was distinguished from classical tragedy by its shift from myth into history.The characteristic atmosphere of the Trauerspiel was consequently ‘melancholy’. The emblems of baroque allegory point to the extinct values of a classical world that they can never attain or repeat. Their suggestive power, however, remains to haunt subsequent cultures, down to this century.

Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare?


James Shapiro - 2010
    In this remarkable book, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro explains when and why so many people began to question whether Shakespeare wrote his plays. Among the doubters have been such writers and thinkers as Sigmund Freud, Henry James, Mark Twain, and Helen Keller. It is a fascinating story, replete with forgeries, deception, false claimants, ciphers and codes, conspiracy theories—and a stunning failure to grasp the power of the imagination. As Contested Will makes clear, much more than proper attribution of Shakespeare’s plays is at stake in this authorship controversy. Underlying the arguments over whether Christopher Marlowe, Francis Bacon, or the Earl of Oxford wrote Shakespeare’s plays are fundamental questions about literary genius, specifically about the relationship of life and art. Are the plays (and poems) of Shakespeare a sort of hidden autobiography? Do Hamlet, Macbeth, and the other great plays somehow reveal who wrote them?Shapiro is the first Shakespeare scholar to examine the authorship controversy and its history in this way, explaining what it means, why it matters, and how it has persisted despite abundant evidence that William Shakespeare of Stratford wrote the plays attributed to him. This is a brilliant historical investigation that will delight anyone interested in Shakespeare and the literary imagination.

A Number


Caryl Churchill - 2002
    And which one of him is the original. . . ?“Churchill’s harrowing bioethics fable leaves us with a number of things to chew on.” –Kris Vire, Time Out Chicago“A Number confirms Churchill’s status as the first dramatist of the 21st century. On the face of it, it is human cloning… Like all Churchill’s best plays, A Number deals with both the essentials and the extremities of human experience… The questions this brilliant, harrowing play asks are almost unanswerable, which is why they must be asked.” –Sunday Times“Caryl Churchill’s magnificent new play only last an hour but contains more drama, and more ideas, than most writers manage in a dozen full-length works.” –Daily TelegraphCaryl Churchill has written for the stage, television and radio. A renowned and prolific playwright, her plays include Cloud Nine, Top Girls, Far Away, Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, Bliss, Love and Information, Mad Forest and A Number. In 2002, she received the Obie Lifetime Achievement Award and 2010, she was inducted into the American Theater Hall of Fame.

The Antipodes


Annie Baker - 2018
    I mean the happy satiety that comes from being in the hands of a real right-brain/left-brain author who channels her ineffable instincts with a master artisan’s practical skills … Ms. Baker has established herself as one of the freshest voices in American theater. Here she also provides evidence of her peerless ear for contemporary language.” —New York Times“Tantalizing … In John, a play set in a quaintly eerie bed and breakfast, Baker flirted with occult suspense. Here, in a drama confined to a fluorescent room … she edges into symbolist territory. Baker’s signature hyper-realism makes room for an irrational dimension that lightly evokes the supernatural enigmas of Maurice Maeterlinck and August Strindberg.” —Los Angeles Times“A paradoxical, puzzling, compellingly hypnotic work.” —Village VoiceIn Annie Baker’s The Antipodes, a group of people sit around a table telling, cataloging, and theorizing stories. Their purpose is never clear: are they brainstorming ideas for a TV show? A film? A mythology? This is a world where ghostly fables co-exist with mundane discussions of snacks and sexual exploits, where the vague instruction to tell stories about “something monstrous” though “it might not be a literal monster” becomes maddeningly impossible. Part satire, part sacred rite, The Antipodes asks what value stories have for a world in crisis. (TCG)

On Acting


Laurence Olivier - 1986
    A unique guided tour of the techniques of acting.

Amadeus


Peter Shaffer - 1979
    Devout court composer Antonio Salieri plots against his rival, the dissolute but supremely talented Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. How far will Salieri go to achieve the fame that Mozart disregards? The 1981 Tony Award winner for Best Play. An L.A. Theatre Works full cast performance featuring: Steven Brand as Baron van Swieten James Callis as Mozart Michael Emerson as Salieri Darren Richardson as Venticello 2 Alan Shearman as Count Orsini-Rosenberg Mark Jude Sullivan as Venticello 1 Simon Templeman as Joseph II Brian Tichnell as Count Johann Kilian Von Strack Jocelyn Towne as Constanze Directed by Rosalind Ayres. Recorded in Los Angeles before a live audience at The James Bridges Theater, UCLA in September of 2016.

Financial Management for Public, Health, and Not-For-Profit Organizations


Steven A. Finkler - 2000
    Intended for introductory courses in financial and managerial accounting in the areas of government or public policy and management, not-for-profit management, and health policy and management, this texts addresses financial and managerial accounting within the three major areas of the public sector - government, health, and not-for-profit.

The Duchess of Malfi


John Webster - 1614
    An entirely new introduction sets the tragedy in the context of pre-Civil War England and gives a revealing view of its imagery and dramatic action.From its well-documented early performances to the two productions seen in the West End of London in the 1995-96 season, a stage history gives an account of the play in performance. Students, actors, directors and theatre-goers will all find here a reappraisal of Webster's artistry in the greatest age of English theatre, which highlights why it has lived on stage with renewed force in the last decades of the twentieth century.