Nightmare Alley


William Lindsay Gresham - 1946
    Young Stan Carlisle is working as a carny, and he wonders how a man could fall so low. There’s no way in hell, he vows, that anything like that will ever happen to him.And since Stan is clever and ambitious and not without a useful streak of ruthlessness, soon enough he’s going places. Onstage he plays the mentalist with a cute assistant (before long his harried wife), then he graduates to full-blown spiritualist, catering to the needs of the rich and gullible in their well-upholstered homes. It looks like the world is Stan’s for the taking. At least for now.

The Mousetrap: A Play


Agatha Christie - 1952
    Who can it be? One by one the suspicious characters reveal their sordid pasts until at the last, nerve-shredding moment the identity and the motive are finally revealed.The Mousetrap is the longest-running play in the history of London's West End

Sleeping with the Enemy


Nancy Price - 1987
    She changed her name. Her looks. Her life. All to escape the most dangerous man she ever met: her husband.

Stanley Kubrick's Clockwork Orange


Stanley Kubrick - 1972
    As Kubrick comments in his introduction: “I have always wondered if there might be a more meaningful way to present a book about a film. To make, as it were, a complete graphic representation of the film, cut by cut, with the dialogue printed in the proper place in relation to the cuts, so that within the limits of still photos and words, an accurate (and I hope interesting) record of a film might be available… This book represents that attempt.”Screenplay by Stanley Kubrick, based on the novel by Anthony Burgess.

The Life of Brian: Screenplay


Graham Chapman - 1979
    But, with its unforgettable songs and its infinitely quotable script it has gone on to become an enduring cult classic.

Citizen Kane


Laura Mulvey - 1992
    What more can there be to say about a masterpiece so universally acknowledged? As Laura Mulvey shows in a fresh and original reading, the richness of the film, both thematically and stylistically, is inexhaustible. In a lucid and perceptive critique she investigates the psychoanalytic structure that underlines the film's presentation of Kane's biography, for once taking seriously what Orson Welles himself disparagingly referred to as "dollar-book Freud." She also illuminates the film's historical context, revealing it to be a prescient commentary on the isolationist politics of prewar America.

The Cabin in the Woods: The Official Visual Companion


Joss Whedon - 2011
    It's a little more complicated than that..." All will be revealed in the Official Visual Companion, featuring in-depth interviews, the full screenplay by Whedon and Goddard, stunning production art, and hundreds of color photos!

The Two Mrs. Grenvilles


Dominick Dunne - 1985
    . . . This is a candy of a book."-- "Cosmopolitan.""Smoothly written, engrossing . . . Ann is a heroine you love to hate . . . . Will be read with enormous enjoyment for the personalities, from Brenda Frazier to the Duchess of Windsor, that decorate its pages for the knowing glimpses of high living in high places."-- "Publishers Weekly.""Dominick Dunne is the best chronicler of American Society since Truman Capote. He is the only person writing about high society from inside the aquarium"--Tina Brown, "Vanity Fair

28 Days Later


Alex Garland - 2003
    Four seemingly unaffected people--a young man, a young woman, a father, and his daughter--flee London through an apocalyptic landscape as they try to reach the coast, beset along the way by attacks of "Infected" at every turn. When they arrive at an isolated house in the country, inhabited by a small group of soldiers, they think they have found a haven from the violence outside. But they soon find they've jumped from the frying pan into the fire.

The Complete Gillian Flynn: Gone Girl, Dark Places, Sharp Objects


Gillian Flynn - 2014
    A #1 New York Times bestseller, Gone Girl is an unputdownable masterpiece about a marriage gone terribly, terribly wrong. The Chicago Tribune proclaimed that Flynn’s work “draws you in and keeps you reading with the force of a pure but nasty addiction.” Gone Girl’s toxic mix of sharp-edged wit and deliciously chilling prose creates a nerve-fraying thriller that confounds you at every turn. Flynn’s second novel, Dark Places, is an intricately orchestrated thriller that ravages a family's past to unearth the truth behind a horrifying crime. A New York Times bestseller and Weekend Today Top Summer Read, Dark Places solidified Flynn’s status as one of the most critically acclaimed suspense writers of our time. In Sharp Objects, Flynn’s debut novel, a young journalist returns home to cover a dark assignment—and to face her own damaged family history. With its taut, crafted writing, Sharp Objects is addictive, haunting, and unforgettable.

The Bourne Identity


Robert Ludlum - 1980
    Suffering from amnesia, he does not even know that he is Jason Bourne. What manner of man is he? What are his secrets? Who has he killed?

Into the Woods: A Five Act Journey Into Story


John Yorke - 2013
    Many of us love to tell them, and even dream of making a living from it too. But what is a story? Hundreds of books about screenwriting and storytelling have been written, but none of them ask 'Why?' Why do we tell stories? And why do all stories function in an eerily similar way? John Yorke has been telling stories almost his entire adult life, and the more he has done it, the more he has asked himself why? Every great thinker or writer has their theories: Aristotle, David Hare, Lajos Egri, Robert McKee, Gustav Freytag, David Mamet, Christopher Booker, Charlie Kaufman, William Goldman and Aaron Sorkin - all have offered insightful and illuminating answers. Here, John Yorke draws on these figures and more as he takes us on a historical, philosophical, scientific and psychological journey to the heart of all storytelling.What he reveals is that there truly is a unifying shape to narrative - one that echoes the great fairytale journey into the woods, and one, like any great art, that comes from deep within. Much more than a 'how to write' book, Into the Woods is an exploration of this fundamental structure underneath all narrative forms, from film and television to theatre and novel-writing. With astonishing detail and wisdom, John Yorke explains to us a phenomenon that, whether it is as a simple fable, or a big-budget 3D blockbuster, most of us experience almost every day of our lives.

Casablanca Companion: The Movie Classic and Its Place in History


Richard E. Osborne - 1997
    Whether you've watched "Casablanca" countless times or you're going to see it for the first time, "The Casablanca Companion" will both deepen your understanding and heighten your enjoyment.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street


Mark Salisbury - 2007
    Lovett, Sweeney's amorous accomplice, who creates diabolical meat pies... The cast also includes Alan Rickman,Timothy Spall and Sacha Baron Cohen.Produced in close co-operation with Tim Burton and the production team, this lavish, full colour hardcover official companion volume to the film will include a Foreword by Tim Burton, over 200 photos, concept drawings and production designs, extracts from the screenplay and interviews with the cast and crew.

The Other Side of Me


Sidney Sheldon - 2005
    Author of over a dozen bestsellers, Academy Award-winning screenwriter, and creator of some of television's greatest hits, Sheldon has seen and done it all, and now in this candid memoir, he shares his story for the first time.