Book picks similar to
William Cameron Menzies: The Shape of Films to Come by James Curtis
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biography
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Bette and Joan: The Divine Feud
Shaun Considine - 1989
They worked together once, in the film Whatever Happened To Baby Jane, but their real-life dislike of one another transcended even the antagonism depicted in the film.
The Gross: The Hits, the Flops: The Summer That Ate Hollywood
Peter Bart - 1999
A backstage glimpse of the realities of the new Hollywood focuses on the film releases and strategies of the summer of 1998, showing why Godzilla was fated to fail and how Spielberg triumphed.
George Cukor: A Double Life
Patrick McGilligan - 1991
Relates the life of the secretly gay Hollywood director who guided to stardom such legendary actresses as Garbo, Bergman, Garland, and Hepburn.
Seduction: Sex, Lies, and Stardom in Howard Hughes's Hollywood
Karina Longworth - 2018
But as Karina Longworth reminds us, long before the Harvey Weinsteins there was Howard Hughes—the Texas millionaire, pilot, and filmmaker whose reputation as a cinematic provocateur was matched only by that as a prolific womanizer.His supposed conquests between his first divorce in the late 1920s and his marriage to actress Jean Peters in 1957 included many of Hollywood’s most famous actresses, among them Billie Dove, Katharine Hepburn, Ava Gardner, and Lana Turner. From promoting bombshells like Jean Harlow and Jane Russell to his contentious battles with the censors, Hughes—perhaps more than any other filmmaker of his era—commoditized male desire as he objectified and sexualized women. Yet there were also numerous women pulled into Hughes’s grasp who never made it to the screen, sometimes virtually imprisoned by an increasingly paranoid and disturbed Hughes, who retained multitudes of private investigators, security personnel, and informers to make certain these actresses would not escape his clutches.Vivid, perceptive, timely, and ridiculously entertaining, Seduction is a landmark work that examines women, sex, and male power in Hollywood during its golden age—a legacy that endures nearly a century later.
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.
Empire of Dreams: The Epic Life of Cecil B. DeMille
Scott Eyman - 2010
DeMille lived a life as epic as any of his cinematic masterpieces. As a child DeMille learned the Bible from his father, a theology student and playwright who introduced Cecil and his older brother, William, to the theater. Tutored by impresario David Belasco, DeMille discovered how audiences responded to showmanship: sets, lights, costumes, etc. He took this knowledge with him to Los Angeles in 1913, where he became one of the movie pioneers, in partnership with Jesse Lasky and Lasky’s brother-in-law Samuel Goldfish (later Goldwyn). Working out of a barn on streets fragrant with orange blossom and pepper trees, the Lasky company turned out a string of successful silents, most of them directed by DeMille, who became one of the biggest names of the silent era. With films such as The Squaw Man, Brewster’s Millions, Joan the Woman, and Don’t Change Your Husband, he was the creative backbone of what would become Paramount Studios. In 1923 he filmed his first version of The Ten Commandments and later a second biblical epic, King of Kings, both enormous box-office successes. Although his reputation rests largely on the biblical epics he made, DeMille’s personal life was no morality tale. He remained married to his wife, Constance, for more than fifty years, but for most of the marriage he had three mistresses simultaneously, all of whom worked for him. He showed great loyalty to a small group of actors who knew his style, but he also discovered some major stars, among them Gloria Swanson, Claudette Colbert, and later, Charlton Heston. DeMille was one of the few silent-era directors who made a completely successful transition to sound. In 1952 he won the Academy Award for Best Picture with The Greatest Show on Earth. When he remade The Ten Commandments in 1956, it was an even bigger hit than the silent version. He could act, too: in Billy Wilder’s classic film Sunset Boulevard, DeMille memorably played himself. In the 1930s and 1940s DeMille became a household name thanks to the Lux Radio Theater, which he hosted. But after falling out with a union, he gave up the program, and his politics shifted to the right as he championed loyalty oaths and Sen. Joseph McCarthy’s anticommunist witch hunts. As Scott Eyman brilliantly demonstrates in this superbly researched biography, which draws on a massive cache of DeMille family papers not available to previous biographers, DeMille was much more than his clichéd image. A gifted director who worked in many genres; a devoted family man and loyal friend with a highly unconventional personal life; a pioneering filmmaker: DeMille comes alive in these pages, a legend whose spectacular career defined an era.
Giant: Elizabeth Taylor, Rock Hudson, James Dean, Edna Ferber, and the Making of a Legendary American Film
Don Graham - 2018
Isolating his star cast in the wilds of West Texas, director George Stevens brought together a volatile mix of egos, insecurities, sexual proclivities, and talent. Stevens knew he was overwhelmed with Hudson’s promiscuity, Taylor’s high diva-dom, and Dean’s egotistical eccentricity. Yet he coaxed performances out of them that made cinematic history, winning Stevens the Academy Award for Best Director and garnering nine other nominations, including a nomination for Best Actor for James Dean, who died before the film was finished. In this compelling and impeccably researched narrative history of the making of the film, Don Graham chronicles the stories of Stevens, whose trauma in World War II intensified his ambition to make films that would tell the story of America; Edna Ferber, a considerable literary celebrity, who meets her match in the imposing Robert Kleberg, proprietor of the vast King Ranch; and Glenn McCarthy, an American oil tycoon; and Errol Flynn lookalike with a taste for Hollywood. Drawing on archival sources Graham’s Giant is a comprehensive depiction of the film’s production showing readers how reality became fiction and fiction became cinema.
Dear Cary: My Life with Cary Grant
Dyan Cannon - 2011
When they began living together, she was 25; he was 58. Three years later, they married, but within a year and a half, she left him, amidst reports of loud arguments and spanking episodes. Their divorce, finalized in 1968, was a major news splash even in that pre-TMZ, pre-internet era. Grant died in 1986, but Cannon has continued to wrestle with the details, the rights, and the wrongs of their relationship. Dear Cary is a memoir that celebrates and scrutinizes the great love of her life.
The Citizen Kane Book
Pauline Kael - 1971
Mankiewicz and Orson Welles --Notes on the shooting script / prepared by Gary Carey --RKO cutting continuity of the Orson Welles production, Citizen Kane.
Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland
Gerald Clarke - 2000
The girl with the pigtails, the symbol of innocence in The Wizard of Oz. The brightest star of the Hollywood musical and an entertainer of almost magical power. The woman of a half-dozen comebacks, a hundred heartbreaks, and thousands of headlines. Yet much of what has been written about her is either inaccurate or incomplete, and the Garland the world thought it knew was merely a sketch for the astonishing woman Gerald Clarke portrays in Get Happy. Here, more than thirty years after her death, is the real Judy.
Dean and Me: A Love Story
Jerry Lewis - 2005
Before they teamed up, Dean Martin seemed destined for a mediocre career as a nightclub singer, and Jerry Lewis was dressing up as Carmen Miranda and miming records on stage. But the moment they got together, something clicked—something miraculous—and audiences saw it at once. Before long, they were as big as Elvis or the Beatles would be after them, creating hysteria wherever they went and grabbing an unprecedented hold over every entertainment outlet of the era: radio, television, movies, stage shows, and nightclubs. Martin and Lewis were a national craze, an American institution. The millions (and the women) flowed in, seemingly without end—and then, on July 24, 1956, ten years from the day when the two men joined forces, it all ended.After that traumatic day, the two wouldn’t speak again for twenty years. And while both went on to forge triumphant individual careers—Martin as a movie and television star, recording artist, and nightclub luminary (and charter member of the Rat Pack); Lewis as the groundbreaking writer, producer, director, and star of a series of hugely successful movie comedies—their parting left a hole in the national psyche, as well as in each man’s heart.In a memoir by turns moving, tragic, and hilarious, Jerry Lewis recounts with crystal clarity every step of a fifty-year friendship, from the springtime, 1945 afternoon when the two vibrant young performers destined to conquer the world together met on Broadway and Fifty-fourth Street, to their tragic final encounter in the 1990s, when Lewis and his wife ran into Dean Martin, a broken and haunted old man.In Dean and Me, Jerry Lewis makes a convincing case for Dean Martin as one of the great — and most underrated — comic talents of our era. But what comes across most powerfully in this definitive memoir is the depth of love Lewis felt, and still feels, for his partner, and which his partner felt for him: truly a love to last for all time.
The Making of Gone With The Wind
Steve Wilson - 2014
To commemorate its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2014, The Making of Gone With The Wind presents more than 600 items from the archives of David O. Selznick, the film’s producer, and his business partner John Hay “Jock” Whitney, which are housed at the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin. These rarely seen materials, which are also being featured in a major 2014 exhibition at the Ransom Center, offer fans and film historians alike a must-have behind-the-camera view of the production of this classic.Before a single frame of film was shot, Gone With The Wind was embroiled in controversy. There were serious concerns about how the film would depict race and violence in the Old South during the Civil War and Reconstruction. While Clark Gable was almost everyone’s choice to play Rhett Butler, there was no clear favorite for Scarlett O’Hara. And then there was the huge challenge of turning Margaret Mitchell’s Pulitzer Prize–winning epic into a manageable screenplay and producing it at a reasonable cost. The Making of Gone With The Wind tells these and other surprising stories with fascinating items from the Selznick archive, including on-set photographs, storyboards, correspondence and fan mail, production records, audition footage, gowns worn by Vivien Leigh as Scarlett, and Selznick’s own notoriously detailed memos.This inside view of the decisions and creative choices that shaped the production reaffirm that Gone With The Wind is perhaps the quintessential film of Hollywood’s Golden Age and illustrate why it remains influential and controversial decades after it was released.
Tim Burton: Interviews
Kristian Fraga - 2005
When it became a surprise blockbuster, studios began to trust him with larger budgets and the whims of his expansive imagination. Mixing gothic horror, black comedy, and oddball whimsy, Burton's movies veer from childlike enchantment to morbid melancholy, often with the same frame.His beautifully designed and highly stylized films-including Batman, Edward Scissorhands, Beetlejuice, Big Fish, Sleepy Hollow, and Ed Wood-are idiosyncratic, personal visions that have found commercial success. In Tim Burton: Interviews, the director discusses how animation and art design affect his work, how old horror films have deeply influenced his psyche, why so many of his protagonists are outcasts, and how he's managed to make personal films within the Hollywood system. He gives tribute to writers he's worked with, his favorite actors-including Johnny Depp and Vincent Price-and talks enthusiastically about pulp horror fiction and the works of Edgar Allan Poe.These interviews show his progression from an inarticulate young director to a contemplative and dry-witted artist over the course of twenty years. In later interviews, he opens up about being in therapy and how his childhood fantasies still affect his art. Tim Burton: Interviews reveals a man who has managed to thrive inside Hollywood while maintaining the distinctive quirks of an independent filmmaker.Kristian Fraga, New York City, wrote and directed the award-winning PBS documentary The Inside Reel: Digital Filmmaking. He is a founding partner of Sirk Productions, LLC, a Manhattan-based film and television production company.
Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
Larry McMurtry - 1987
His experiences and thoughts on screenwriting, adapting novels, adapting one's own novels (a bad idea), and on the craft itself contain more useful information than a pile of how-to manuals. As in his novels, McMurtry is by turns witty, acerbic, and thoughtful; the pieces are surprisingly stylish in that the bulk of them (17 out of 21) were spun off on monthly deadlines (for American Film magazine, in 1975-77), and McMurtry admittedly can't remember writing most of them. A fine collection, from a fine writer.No Clue: Or Learning to Write for the Movies. --The Hired Pen. --The Deadline Syndrome. --The Telephone Booth Screenwriter. --The Fun of It All. --All the President's Men, Seven Beauties, History, Innocence, Guilt, Redemption, and the Star System. --The Screenplay as Non-Book: A Consideration. --Pencils West: Or a Theory for the Shoot-'Em Up. --"Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman" and the Movie-Less Novelists. --O Ragged Time Knit Up Thy Ravell'd Sleave. --The Situation in Criticism: Reviewers, Critics, Professors. --Character, the Tube, and the Death of Movies. --The Disappearance of Love. --Woody Allen, Keith Carradine, Lily Tomlin, and the Disappearance of Grace. --The Last Picture Shows. --The Seasons of L.A.. --The Last Movie Column. --The Last Picture Show: A Last Word. --Approaching Cheyenne ... Leaving Lumet. Oh, Pshaw!. --Movie-Tripping: My Own Rotten Film Festival. --A Walk in Pasadena with Di-Annie and Mary Alice
The Battle of Brazil: Terry Gilliam V. Universal Pictures in the Fight to the Final Cut
Jack Mathews - 2000
The totally restored, revamped and researched blow-by-blow recounting of the most spectacular title bout in the blood-soaked history of Hollywood. "This book documents in rare detail the back-room haggling and the attempted ego-bashing that is part of the movie business." Gene Siskel; "Told with the passion of an advocate yet with the objectivity of a crack reporter, The Battle of Brazil is a chilling, inevitably hilarious account of a great film that almost got away." USA Today.