Brando Unzipped: A Revisionist and Very Private Look at America's Greatest Actor


Darwin Porter - 2005
    Brando Unzipped is the definitive gossip guide to the late, great actor's life New York Daily News. Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, and certainly worth reading, it's one of the best show-biz biographies of the year. London's Sunday Times. Brando Unzipped received an Honorable Mention from Foreword Magazine in its Book of the Year competition, and it won a Silver Ippy award for Best Biography from the Independent Publisher's Association."

The Unkindest Cut: How a Hatchet-Man Critic Made His Own $7000 Movie and Put It All On His Credit Card


Joe Queenan - 1996
    Following in the maverick mold of Quentin Tarentino, Spike Lee, and Richard Rodriguez, Joe Queenan becomes an auteur and, in the process, funnier than ever, as he tries to master the art of writing, directing, scoring, casting, and marketing a movie--all by himself.

The Independent Film Producer's Survival Guide: A Business and Legal Sourcebook


Gunnar Erickson - 2002
    In this comprehensive guidebook, three experienced entertainment lawyers tell you everything you need to know to produce and market an independent film-from the development process to deal making, financing, setting up the production, hiring directors and actors, distributing and marketing your film.

Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro


Jai Arjun Singh - 2010
    Some of the country s finest theatre and film talents all at key stages in their careers participated in its creation, but the journey was anything but smooth. Among other things, it involved bumping off disco killers and talking gorillas, finding air-conditioned rooms for dead rats, persuading a respected actor to stop sulking and eat his meals, and resisting the temptation to introduce logic into a madcap script. In the end, it was worth it.Kundan Shah s Jaane Bhi Do Yaaro is now a byword for the sort of absurdist, satirical humour that Hindi cinema just hasn t seen enough of. This is the story of how it came to be despite incredible odds and what it might have been. Jai Arjun Singh s engaging take on the making of the film and its cult following is as entertaining as the film itself.

Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How "The Graduate" Became the Touchstone of a Generation


Beverly Gray - 2017
    . . The book as a whole offers a fascinating look at how this movie tells a timeless story.” —The Washington PostMrs. Robinson, you’re trying to seduce me. Aren’t you? When The Graduate premiered in December 1967, its filmmakers had only modest expectations for what seemed to be a small, sexy art-house comedy adapted from an obscure first novel by an eccentric twenty-four-year-old. There was little indication that this offbeat story—a young man just out of college has an affair with one of his parents’ friends and then runs off with her daughter—would turn out to be a monster hit, with an extended run in theaters and seven Academy Award nominations. The film catapulted an unknown actor, Dustin Hoffman, to stardom with a role that is now permanently engraved in our collective memory. While turning the word plastics into shorthand for soulless work and a corporate, consumer culture, The Graduate sparked a national debate about what was starting to be called “the generation gap.” Now, in time for this iconic film’s fiftieth birthday, author Beverly Gray offers up a smart close reading of the film itself as well as vivid, never-before-revealed details from behind the scenes of the production—including all the drama and decision-making of the cast and crew. For movie buffs and pop culture fanatics, Seduced by Mrs. Robinson brings to light The Graduate’s huge influence on the future of filmmaking. And it explores how this unconventional movie rocked the late-sixties world, both reflecting and changing the era’s views of sex, work, and marriage.

Trier on Von Trier


Stig Björkman - 2000
    His own brilliant directing career has been marked by similarly grand ambitions, and he is unique in having premiered all of his features - from the highly styled The Element of Crime to the digital-video-originated The Idiots - at the Cannes Film Festival. Trier is a rare item in contemporary cinema, a restless innovator and polemicist, as his participation in the back-to-basics Dogme95 movement attests; and these conversations with Stig Bjorkman, author of Bergman on Bergman and Woody Allen on Woody Allen, trace the evolution of his career and thought in a manner that is both astonishingly detailed and engagingly humorous.

Conversations with Marilyn: Portrait of Marilyn Monroe


Marilyn Monroe - 1977
    

Pulp Fiction


Dana Polan - 2000
    He shows how broad Tarantino's points of reference are, and analyzes the narrative accomplishment and complexity. In addition, Polan argues that macho attitudes celebrated in film are much more complex than they seem.

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.

Best Movies of the 70s (Taschen 25)


Jürgen Müller - 2004
    As war raged on in Vietnam and the cold war continued to escalate, Hollywood began to heat up, recovering from its commercial crisis with box-office successes such as Star Wars, Jaws, The Exorcist, and The Godfather. Thanks to directors like Spielberg and Lucas, American cinema gave birth to a new phenomenon: the blockbuster. Meanwhile, across the Atlantic, while the Nouvelle Vague died out in France, its influence extended to Germany, where the New German Cinema of Fassbinder, Wenders, and Herzog had its heyday. The sexual revolution made its way to the silver screen (cautiously in the US, more freely in Europe) most notably in Bertolucci's steamy, scandalous Last Tango in Paris. Amidst all this came a wave of nostalgic films (The Sting, American Graffiti) and Vietnam pictures (Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter), the rise of the anti-hero (Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman), and the prestigious short-lived genre, blaxploitation.

Scarlett, Rhett And A Cast Of Thousands


Roland Flamini - 1975
    

Johnny Depp


Paul Duncan - 2009
    Few are so angelically androgynous and masculine in the same breath. From teen hearth-throb to an accomplished actor who has worked with art house directors such as Emir Kusturica, Terry Gilliam, Roman Polanski, Jim Jarmusch, and John Waters, Depp has built himself wildly successful and unconventional career. Movie Icons is a series of photo books that feature the most famous personalities in the history of cinema. These 192-page books are visual biographies of the stars.

Tarantino: A Retrospective


Tom Shone - 2017
    The script for his first movie took him four years to complete: My Best Friend’s Birthday, a seventy-minute film in which he both acted and directed. The script for his second film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), took him just under four weeks to complete. When it debuted, he was immediately hailed as one of the most exciting new directors in the industry. Known for his highly cinematic visual style, out-of-sequence storytelling, and grandiose violence, Tarantino’s films have provoked both praise and criticism over the course of his career. They’ve also won him a host of awards—including Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards—usually for his original screenplays. His oeuvre includes the cult classic Pulp Fiction, bloody revenge saga Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and historical epics Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, and The Hateful Eight . This stunning retrospective catalogs each of Quentin Tarantino’s movies in detail, from My Best Friend’s Birthday to The Hateful Eight. The book is a tribute to a unique directing and writing talent, celebrating an uncompromising, passionate director’s enthralling career at the heart of cult filmmaking.

Eyes Wide Shut


Michel Chion - 2002
    To appreciate this, though it is necessary to look at what happens on the screen without bringing preconceptions to bear.

Once Upon a Time in Italy: The Westerns of Sergio Leone


Christopher Frayling - 2005
    With an American TV actor named Clint Eastwood and a script based on a samurai epic, Leone wound up creating "A Fistful of Dollars", the first in a trilogy of films (with "For a Few Dollars More" and "The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly") that was violent, cynical, and visually stunning. Along with his later masterpiece, "Once Upon a Time in the West", these films came to define the Spaghetti Western