Book picks similar to
Richard III by Ian McKellen


shakespeare
plays
film
historial-fiction

All This Intimacy


Rajiv Joseph - 2010
    In an unprecedented (for him) run of promiscuity, Ty has managed to impregnate three women in the span of one week: His ex-girlfriend, his 40-something married next-door neighbor, and his 18 year-old student. In this edgy comedy by playwright Rajiv Joseph, Ty's problems illuminate every triumph and failure of his life, and as the women

York Notes On Shakespeare's "Othello" (York Notes Advanced)


Rebecca Warren - 2003
    

The Pain and the Itch


Bruce Norris - 2007
    Someone - or something - is leaving bite marks in the avocados, Clay and Kelly's little daughter has an itch, and Carol can't remember who played Gandhi. This work takes a look at phoney liberal values.

Blade Runners, Deer Hunters & Blowing the Bloody Doors Off: My Life in Cult Movies


Michael Deeley - 2008
    Producer Michael Deeley, an urbane Englishman in Hollywood, had to fight wars to get these movies made, from defending the legendary sex scene of Don't Look Now from a disapproving Warren Beatty to seizing control of Convoy from a cocaine-ridden Sam Peckinpah. This is a no-holds-barred look at the true stories behind some of the greatest cult movies ever made.

Woody Allen: A Biography


John Baxter - 1998
    It also explores the real Woody Allen, the critically acclaimed filmmaker from the Upper East Side, and his amusing movie persona of a neurotic and lovable loser.Shrewdly and effectively deconstructing Woody, John Baxter's biography illuminates Allen's preoccupation with sex and mortality, his personal quirks and obsessions, his manipulation of celebrity, and his cinematic achievement as chronicler and court jester of Manhattan's intellectual elite."A splendidly written, exhaustive account and a major achievement" - The Observer"Astute and highly entertaining biography" - Daily Telegraph"A bracing corrective to the usual po-faced, sycophantic studies of the cult of Woody" - Mail on Sunday"Full of interesting information for cinema enthusiasts" - The Spectator"The saga [of Woody and Mia] makes compulsive reading" - The Guardian

Spielberg, Truffaut & Me: An Actor's Diary


Bob Balaban - 1978
    Since all journalists and writers were barred from the shooting of the movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind, actor Bob Balaban's diary is a rare on-the-spot account of the making of Steven Spielberg's classic sci-fi film.

On Kubrick


James Naremore - 2007
    This book argues that in several respects Kubrick was one of the cinema's last modernists.

Once more, with feeling


Victoria Coren - 2002
    Vicky and Charlie are best friends who used to co-review hardcore porn movies. After a year of fat lechers, bored hookers and clunky dialogue, they said, "Hang on, we could make a better film than this ourselves." What was to stop them? Only their conservative families, stammering English reserve, and total lack of experience. They set off at once. This is the extraordinary and hilarious story of their journey from a sofa in North London, through the heart of the sex industry in California, to their own film set in Amsterdam. What happens when a 'nice girl' falls in love with a rent-boy, and a vicar's son attempts to film a gang-bang? Vicky and Charlie learned to see the world through new eyes, and the sex-workers learned how to play cribbage. And together they produced perhaps the most baffling skinflick in history.

Trash Trio: Three Screenplays


John Waters - 1988
    Screenplays for Pink Flamingos and Desperate Living, and the unmade sequel Flamingos Forever.

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.

Notes from a Black Woman's Diary: Selected Works of Kathleen Collins


Kathleen Collins - 2019
    The compilation is anchored by more of Collins’s short stories, which, striking and powerful in their brevity, reveal the ways in which relationships are both formed and come undone. Also collected here is the work Collins wrote for the screen and stage: the screenplay of her film Losing Ground, in which a professor discovers that the student film she’s agreed to act in has uncomfortable parallels to her own life; and the script for The Brothers, a play about the potent effects of sexism and racism on a midcentury middle-class black family. And finally, it is in Collins’s raw and prescient diaries that her nascent ideas about race, gender, marriage, and motherhood first play out on the page.Kathleen Collins’s writing brings to life vibrant characters whose quotidian concerns powerfully illuminate the particular joys, challenges, and heartbreaks rendered by the African-American experience. By turns empowering, exuberant, sexy, and poignant, Notes from a Black Woman’s Diary is a brilliant compendium of an inimitable talent, and a rich portrait of a writer hard at work.

Moe Howard & The 3 Stooges: The Pictorial Biography of the Wildest Trio in the History of American Entertainment


Moe Howard - 1960
    

My Life with Groucho: A Son's Eye View


Arthur Marx - 1954
    The author shares his memories of his father and provides an overview of Groucho's career, his family life, and the turmoil of his final years.

Kishore Kumar: Method in Madness


Derek Bose - 2004
    He was a singer by choice, an actor by compulsion, a filmmaker by conviction...a writer, music composer, lyricist and above all, a supreme impresario. He was known to be a miser, a madman and a troublemaker who could never be trusted. And then, there are those who knew him well who insist that he was as sober as a monk. So who was the real Kishore Kumar? This book attempts to provide an answer with a well-rounded picture of his personality and rare and lively pictures to supplement the text.

The Rainman's Third Cure: An Irregular Education


Peter Coyote - 2015
    For Coyote, the twin forces Dylan identifies as Texas Medicine and Railroad Gin – represent the competing forces of the transcendental, inclusive, and ecstatic world of love with the competitive, status-seeking world of wealth and power. The Rainman’s Third Cure is the tale of a young man caught between these apparently antipodal options and the journey that leads him from the privileged halls of power to Greenwich Village jazz bars, to jail, to the White House, lessons from a man who literally held the power of life and death over others, to government service and international success on stage and screen.Expanding his frame beyond the wild ride through the 1960’s counterculture that occupied so much of his lauded debut memoir, Sleeping Where I Fall, Coyote provides readers intimate portraits of mentors that shaped him—a violent, intimidating father, a be-bop Bass player who teaches him that life can be improvised, a Mafia consiglieri, who demonstrates to him that men can be bought and manipulated, an ex game-warden who initates him into the laws of nature, a gay dancer in Martha Graham’s company who introduces him to Mexico and marijuanas, beat poet Gary Snyder, who introduces him to Zen practice, and finally famed fashion designer Nino Cerruti who made the high-stakes world of haute monde Europe available to him.What begins as a peripatetic flirtation with Zen deepens into a life-long avocation, ordination as a priest, and finally the road to Transmission---acknowledgement from his teacher that he is ready to be an independent teacher. Through Zen, Coyote discovers a third option that offers an alternative to both the worlds of Love and Power’s correlatives of status seeking and material wealth. Zen was his portal, but what he discovers on the inside is actually available to all humans. In this energetic, reflective and intelligent memoir, The Rainman’s Third Cure is the way out of the box. The way that works.