Watch Me


Anjelica Huston - 2014
    She writes about learning the art and craft of acting, about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honour, about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Frears. She writes movingly and beautifully about the death of her father, the legendary director John Huston and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham.

Katharine Hepburn


Barbara Leaming - 1995
    She is the last of the great ones: a celebrated actress, a brilliant personality, an original.Barbara Leaming has discovered thousands of never-before-seen documents that finally illuminate the mystery of this enigmatic, fascinating woman. Based on letters by Hepburn, her friends, and her family, as well as interviews with Hepburn herself, Leaming's book is a family story that brings alive three generations of fearless women, personal and political crusaders who shaped the history of women in our century.

The Man Who Made the Movies: The Meteoric Rise and Tragic Fall of William Fox


Vanda Krefft - 2017
    This landmark biography brings into focus a fascinating brilliant entrepreneur—like Steve Jobs or Walt Disney, a true American visionary—who risked everything to realize his bold dream of a Hollywood empire. Although a major Hollywood studio still bears William Fox’s name, the man himself has mostly been forgotten by history, even written off as a failure. Now, in this fascinating biography, Vanda Krefft corrects the record, explaining why Fox’s legacy is central to the history of Hollywood.At the heart of William Fox’s life was the myth of the American Dream. His story intertwines the fate of the nineteenth-century immigrants who flooded into New York, the city’s vibrant and ruthless gilded age history, and the birth of America’s movie industry amid the dawn of the modern era. Drawing on a decade of original research, The Man Who Made the Movies offers a rich, compelling look at a complex man emblematic of his time, one of the most fascinating and formative eras in American history.Growing up in Lower East Side tenements, the eldest son of impoverished Hungarian immigrants, Fox began selling candy on the street. That entrepreneurial ambition eventually grew one small Brooklyn theater into a $300 million empire of deluxe studios and theaters that rivaled those of Adolph Zukor, Marcus Loew, and the Warner brothers, and launched stars such as Theda Bara. Amid the euphoric roaring twenties, the early movie moguls waged a fierce battle for control of their industry. A fearless risk-taker, Fox won and was hailed as a genius—until a confluence of circumstances, culminating with the 1929 stock market crash, led to his ruin.

Silent Bob Speaks: The Selected Writings


Kevin Smith - 2005
    Kevin Smith, the legendary independent film-maker, columnist and cultural commentator, launches himself on an unsuspecting world with a series of hilarious rants on the absurdity of just about everything. Unlike his unforthcoming screen alter-ego Silent Bob, Smith is ready to let rip at maximum volume, whether it be on the madness of Hollywood, 'The Unholy Tale of Greasy Reese Witherspoon', his bloodcurdling hatred of Britney Spears or the highly-sexed comics industry. Along the way we get a shocking insight into the making of Smith's movies, and learn far more than is necessary about his bathroom habits.

Brat Pack America: A Love Letter to '80s Teen Movies


Kevin Smokler - 2016
    Like few other eras in movie history, the '80s teen movies has endured and gotten better with time. In Brat Pack America, Kevin Smokler gives virtual tours of your favorite movies while also picking apart why these locations are so important to these movies.Including interviews with actors, writers, and directors of the era, and chock full of interesting facts about your favorite '80s movies, Brat Pack America is a must for any fan. Smokler went to Goonies Day in Astoria, OR, took a Lost Boys tour of Santa Cruz, CA, and deeply explored every nook and cranny of the movies we all know and love, and it shows.

Monkey Business: The Lives and Legends of The Marx Brothers


Simon Louvish - 2000
    From Groucho Marx's first warblings with the singing Leroy Trio, this book brings to life the vanished world of America's wild and boisterous variety circuits, leading to the Marx Brothers' Broadway successes, and their alliance with New York's theatrical lions, George S. Kaufman and the 'Algonquin Round Table'.Never-before-published scripts, well-minted Marxian dialogue, and much madness and mayham feature in this tale of the Brothers' battles with Hollywood, their films, their loves and marriages, and the story of the forgotten brother Gummo.

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.

A History of Narrative Film


David A. Cook - 1981
    The Fourth Edition adds an entire chapter on computer-generated imaging, updates filmographies for nearly all living directors mentioned in the text, and includes major new sections that both revisit old content and introduce contemporary trends and movements.

Shooting to Kill


Christine Vachon - 1998
    Hailed by the New York Times as the "godmother to the politically committed film" and by Interview as a true "auteur producer," Christine Vachon has made her name with such bold, controversial, and commercially successful films as "Poison," "Swoon," Kids," "Safe," "I Shot Andy Warhol," and "Velvet Goldmine."Over the last decade, she has become a driving force behind the most daring and strikingly original independent filmmakers-from Todd Haynes to Tom Kalin and Mary Harron-and helped put them on the map.So what do producers do? "What don't they do?" she responds. In this savagely witty and straight-shooting guide, Vachon reveals trheguts of the filmmaking process--rom developing a script, nurturing a director's vision, getting financed, and drafting talent to holding hands, stoking egos, stretching every resource to the limit and pushing that limit. Along the way, she offers shrewd practical insights and troubleshooting tips on handling everything from hysterical actors and disgruntled teamsters to obtuse marketing executives.Complete with behind-the-scenes diary entries from the sets of Vachon's best-known films, Shooting To Kill offers all the satisfactions of an intimate memoir from the frontlines of independent filmmaking, from one of its most successful agent provocateurs-and survivors.

My Wicked, Wicked Ways


Errol Flynn - 1959
    In this highly readable, witty and colourful autobiography, reissued by Aurum Press in B-format using the original uncensored text, Flynn reveals himself and his remarkable life as he did nowhere else.

All I Need to Know about Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger


Lloyd Kaufman - 1998
    Lloyd Kaufman's spirited, outrageous, no-holds-barred look at low-budget, guerilla filmmaking is truly an inspiration to

Memo from David O. Selznick


David O. Selznick - 1972
    Selznick was a unique figure in the golden Hollywood studio era. He produced some of the greatest and most memorable American films ever made--notably, Rebecca, A Star Is Born, Anna Karenina, A Farewell to Arms, and, above all, Gone With the Wind. Selznick's absolute power and artistic control are evidenced in his impassioned, eloquent, witty, and sometimes rageful memos to directors, writers, stars and studio executives, writings that have become almost as famous as his films. Newsweek wrote, I can't imagine how a book on the American movie business could be more illuminating, more riveting or more fun to read than this collection of David Selznick's memos.

My Movie Business: A Memoir


John Irving - 1999
    Frederick C. Irving, a renowned obstetrician and gynecologist, and includes Mr. Irving's incisive history of abortion politics in the United States. But My Movie Business focuses primarily on the thirteen years John Irving spent adapting his novel The Cider House Rules for the screen--for four different directors. Mr. Irving also writes about the failed effort to make his first novel, Setting Free the Bears, into a movie; about two of the films that were made from his novels (but not from his screenplays), The World According to Garp and The Hotel New Hampshire; about his slow progress at shepherding his screenplay of A Son of the Circus into production. Not least, and in addition to its qualities as a memoir--anecdotal, comic, affectionate, and candid--My Movie Business is an insightful essay on the essential differences between writing a novel and writing a screenplay.The photographs in My Movie Business were taken by Stephen Vaughan, the still photographer on the set of The Cider House Rules--a Miramax production directed by Lasse Hallström, with Michael Caine in the role of Dr. Larch. Concurrently with the November 1999 release of the film, Talk Miramax Books will publish John Irving's screenplay.

Signs and Meaning in the Cinema


Peter Wollen - 1969
    Divided into three sections, Part One deals with the work of S.M. Eisenstein, both as a director and theorist of his art. Part two concerns the auteur theory and investigates the recurrence of themes and images throughout a director's career. Part three shows how the study of cinema can be considered a province of the general study of signs. Throughout this richly illustrated book the relationship of the cinema to the other arts is kept constantly before the reader. This new edition includes a retrospective chapter by the author.

James Dean


George Perry - 2005
    This candid portrait of one of the greatest stars of all time tells the story behind the making of an American icon, uncovering new details about the man behind the legend, with in-depth commentary from his closest friends and family, including his cousin and executor of his estate, Marcus Winslow and his best friend and roommate, William Bast. Loaded with features that chronicle his life and times, this book is a must have for fans of the man, the movie star--the legend.