In the animator's own words, accompanied by hundreds of previously unpublished photographs, sketches, and storyboards from his personal archive, this book details Harryhausen's entire film career, from 20 Million Miles to Earth and Earth vs. The Flying Saucers to Clash of the Titans and Jason and the Argonauts. In words and images, this book explains the basics of special effects and stop-motion animation, along the way telling entertaining tales of working with the film stars of the day, such as Laurence Olivier, Maggie Smith, and Lionel Jeffries. Film buffs will relish such revelations as how Raquel Welch was picked up by a flying dinosaur in One Million Years B.C., why the octopus in Mysterious Island was really only a sixtopus, and what Medusa's blood was made from in Clash of the Titans.

    Written in Noble’s absorbing voice, Show Don’t Tell illustrates how to develop a dramatic framework using similes and metaphors, a focused point of view, steady pacing, increasing tension, and an appeal to the senses to create solid dramatic impact. In other words, how to show, not tell!Perfect for novelists, short story writers, and those interested in writing creative nonfiction.

    Rashomon, which won both the Venice Film Festival's grand prize and an Academy Award for best foreign-language film, helped ignite Western interest in the Japanese cinema. Seven Samurai and Yojimbo remain enormously popular both in Japan and abroad. In this newly revised and expanded edition of his study of Kurosawa's films, Stephen Prince provides two new chapters that examine Kurosawa's remaining films, placing him in the context of cinema history. Prince also discusses how Kurosawa furnished a template for some well-known Hollywood directors, including Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas.Providing a new and comprehensive look at this master filmmaker, The Warrior's Camera probes the complex visual structure of Kurosawa's work. The book shows how Kurosawa attempted to symbolize on film a course of national development for post-war Japan, and it traces the ways that he tied his social visions to a dynamic system of visual and narrative forms. The author analyzes Kurosawa's entire career and places the films in context by drawing on the director's autobiography--a fascinating work that presents Kurosawa as a Kurosawa character and the story of his life as the kind of spiritual odyssey witnessed so often in his films. After examining the development of Kurosawa's visual style in his early work, The Warrior's Camera explains how he used this style in subsequent films to forge a politically committed model of filmmaking. It then demonstrates how the collapse of Kurosawa's efforts to participate as a filmmaker in the tasks of social reconstruction led to the very different cinematic style evident in his most recent films, works of pessimism that view the world as resistant to change.

    He also made comedies, musical fantasies, detective films, and documentaries. He was an exceptionally versatile artist who won almost every major prize in cinema, including a lifetime achievement Oscar in 1992. This is the best-known biography of the film giant, based on extensive interviews with Ray himself, his actors, collaborators, and a deep knowledge of Bengali culture. This second edition contains extensive new material covering Ray's final three films made in 1989-1991, a discussion of his artistic legacy, and the most comprehensive bibliography of Ray's own writings.

    Spirited Away, directed by the veteran anime film-maker Hayao Miyazaki, is Japan’s most successful film, and one of the top-grossing ‘foreign language’ films ever released.  Set in modern Japan, the film is a wildly imaginative fantasy, at once personal and universal.  It tells the story of a listless little girl who stumbles into a magical world where gods relax in a palatial bathhouse; where there are giant babies and hard-working soot sprites, and where a train runs across the sea. Andrew Osmond’s insightful study describes how Miyazaki wrote, storyboarded and directed Spirited Away with a degree of creative control undreamt of in most popular cinema, using the film’s delightful, freewheeling visual ideas to explore issues ranging from personal agency and responsibility to what Miyazaki sees as the lamentable state of modern Japan.  Osmond unpacks the film’s visual language, which many Western (and some Japanese) audiences find both beautiful and sometimes bewildering.  He traces connections between Spirited Away and Miyazaki’s prior body of work, and provides an account of the film’s production and the creative differences between Miyazaki and his collaborators, arguing that Spirited Away uses the cartoon medium to create a compellingly immersive drawn world.

    Scene 2: Hollywood creates Jean Harlow.Scene 3: Her legend lives forever.At last, the story of how Hollywood shaped a myth and determined a young woman's reality. A town, a remarkable town, became the backdrop for one of Hollywood's most incredible stories, a life rife with glamour, pleasure, power, and--in the end--utter sorrow. Her story lives in the pages and breathtaking pictures of Harlow in Hollywood. When Jean Harlow became the Blonde Bombshell, it was all Hollywood's doing. She was the first big-screen sex symbol, the Platinum Blonde, the mold for every famous fair-haired superstar who would emulate her.

    Sixteen Candles, The Breakfast Club, Weird Science, Pretty in Pink, Ferris Bueller's Day Off, and Some Kind of Wonderful are timeless tales of love, angst, longing, and self-discovery that illuminated and assuaged the anxieties of an entire generation. Fondly nostalgic, filled with wit and surprising insights, don't you forget about me contains original essays from a skillfully chosen crop of novelists and essayists on the films' far-reaching effects on their own lives -- an irresistible read for anyone who came of age in the eighties (or just wishes they did). Featuring new writing from: Steve Almond * Julianna Baggott * Lisa Borders * Ryan Boudinot * T Cooper * Quinn Dalton * Emily Franklin * Lisa Gabriele * Tod Goldberg * Nina de Gramont * Tara Ison * Allison Lynn * John McNally * Dan Pope * Lewis Robinson * Ben Schrank * Elizabeth Searle * Mary Sullivan * Rebecca Wolff * Moon Unit Zappa

    The beautiful and talented actress recounts her professional and personal life, from her childhood in England, through her three broken marriages and love affairs, to her daughter's accident and recovery.

    It has suffered the dubious distinction of being wiped off the political map in 1795, to be resurrected after the First World War, to suffer seeming annihilation during the Second World War, reduction to satellite status of the Soviet Union after 1945, only to emerge during the 1980s. It is presently a contender for membership in the European Union. The only general introduction to the politics of Polish history in English, The Concise History of Poland covers medieval times to the present. The authors describe how Polish society developed under foreign rule in the 19th century and how it was altered by and responded to 45 years of communism, and developments since its collapse. Primarily a political outline of Poland's turbulent and complex past, it traces the process of its rise and fall from the middle ages, from a dynastic realm to a remarkable constitutional experiment in multinational, consensual politics, embracing much of Lithuania, Ukraine, and Belarus. Jerzy Lukowski is Senior Lecturer in Modern History, School of Historical Studies, at the University of Birmingham, UK. He is also the author of, The Partitions of Poland (Addison Wesley, 1998), and Liberty's Folly (Routledge, 1991), and many journal articles. Herbert Zawadzki is Teacher of History at Abingodn School, in Abingdon, UK. He spent the first ten years of his life in various Polish resettlement camps across the length and breadth of Britain, eventually settling near Stratford-on-Avon. He has since traveled extensively in Poland, Belarus, and Lithuania. He has written for several journals and contributed to the Cambridge Encyclopedia of Russia and the former Soviet Union (1994).

    In his films, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky defined a new way of looking at the world. His non-realistic, highly-charged images are a continuing source of inspiration - not only for a new generation of film-makers, but also for poets, musicians and painters. This volume collects his great works for the first time in one volume, as well as three of his unproduced screenplays. This material provides a unique glimpse into the way Tarkovsky's vision evolved from the printed text to its final form on celluloid. The book also contains an extended essay by film critic and historian Ian Christie, who places Tarkovsky's work in the context of Soviet film-making practice.

    Set against the Hollywood industry where Toddy worked and played--an industry infiltrated by the Mob. 21 photos.

    Sharon Tate: Recollection is a celebration of her life and career, her influence as a fashion icon throughout the world, and presents a sociological portrait of 1960s Hollywood. All of this comes from the one-of-a-kind perspective of her sister, Debra Tate, and through stunning images and stories from those who knew her best.In this impressive photo book, Sharon Tate’s story emerges through quotes and short essays—�Recollections”—by Debra Tate, as well as by those who knew her personally and who have been influenced by her. An all-star cast contributing memories and thoughts on Sharon includes Jack Nicholson, Warren Beatty, Robert Evans, Mia Farrow, Raquel Welch, Hugh Hefner, Michelle Phillips, Patty Duke, and Barbara Parkins. And the book is filled with hundreds of rare and unpublished photos of Sharon Tate taken by the likes of Milton Greene, Richard Avedon, Bert Stern, Norman Parkinson, Philippe Halsman, John Engstead, and more.Unlike all other books on Sharon Tate that focus on her tragic death in one of the most notorious crimes of the twentieth century, Sharon Tate: Recollection is a stunningly gorgeous tribute to her life.

    Joseph McBride’s Searching for John Ford surpasses all previous biographies of the filmmaker in its depth, originality, and insight. Encompassing and illuminating Ford’s myriad complexities and contradictions, McBride traces the trajectory of Ford’s life from his beginnings as “Bull” Feeney, the nearsighted, football-playing son of Irish immigrants in Portland, Maine, to his recognition, after a long, controversial, and much-honored career, as America’s national mythmaker. Blending lively and penetrating analyses of Ford’s films with an impeccably documented narrative of the historical and psychological contexts in which those films were created, McBride has at long last given John Ford the biography his stature demands.

    From his early days as a taxi dancer in New York City to his near apotheosis as the ultimate Hollywood heartthrob, Rudolph Valentino (often to his distress) occupied a space squarely at the center of controversy. In this thoughtful retelling of Valentino' s short and tragic life–the first fully documented biography of the star–Emily W. Leider looks at the Great Lover' s life and legacy, and explores the events and issues that made him emblematic of the Jazz Age. Valentino's androgynous sexuality was a lightning rod for fiery and contradictory impulses that ran the gamut from swooning adoration to lashing resentment. He was reviled in the press for being too feminine for a man; yet he also brought to the screen the alluring, savage lover who embodied women's darker, forbidden sexual fantasies.In tandem, Leider explores notions of the outsider in American culture as represented by Valentino's experience as an immigrant who became a celebrity. As the silver screen's first dark-skinned romantic hero, Valentino helped to redefine and broaden American masculine ideals, ultimately coming to represent a graceful masculinity that trumped the deeply ingrained status quo of how a man could look and act.

    The arc of Lyle Talbot’s career is in fact the story of American entertainment. Born in 1902, Lyle left his home in small-town Nebraska in 1918 to join a traveling carnival. From there he became a magician’s assistant, an actor in a traveling theater troupe, a romantic lead in early talkies, then an actor in major Warner Bros. pictures with stars such as Humphrey Bogart and Carole Lombard, then an actor in cult B movies, and finally a part of the advent of television, with regular roles on The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and Leave It to Beaver. Ultimately, his career spanned the entire trajectory of the industry.In her captivating, impeccably researched narrative—a charmed combination of Hollywood history, social history, and family memoir—Margaret Talbot conjures warmth and nostalgia for those earlier eras of ’10s and ’20s small-town America, ’30s and ’40s Hollywood. She transports us to an alluring time, simpler but also exciting, and illustrates the changing face of her father’s America, all while telling the story of mass entertainment across the first half of the twentieth century.