He leads, people follow. He takes new paths -- praised if he`s successful, derided if he fails. But then somebody has to do the job. Somebody has to invent for the others to reinvent. Somebody has to stand up for our fifty six year old philosophy -- for the people, by the people, to the people. Shah Rukh Khan did just that. He invades areas where no actor has ever been. A clear brand philosophy and a brilliant understanding of mass psyche has been the strength of the SRK product. He is probably the best brand ever churned out by Indian industry...

    After a mysterious stranger visits them, Mo tells Meggie they must go into hiding. But why? - and from whom?

    In My Lucky Stars Shirley MacLaine talks candidly and personally about her four decades in Hollywood, especially about the men and women--her "lucky stars"--who touched and challenged her life.

    From Billy Wilder, Douglas Sirk, Robert Aldrich, and Howard Hawkes to Martin Scorsese, Roman Polanski, and Paul Schrader, the noir themes of dread, paranoia, steamy sex, double-crossing women, and menacing cityscapes have held a fascination. The features that make Burt Lancaster, Joan Crawford, Robert Mitchum, and Humphrey Bogart into noir heroes and heroines are carefully detailed here, as well as those camera angles, lighting effects, and story lines that characterize Fritz Lang, Samuel Fuller, and Orson Welles as noir directors.For the current rediscovery of film noir, this comprehensive history with its list of credits to 112 outstanding films and its many illustrations will be a valuable reference and a source of inspiration for further research.

    38 photographs.

    Decades after their release, his movies remain unsurpassed marvels of comic invention and mechanical timing. In Buster Keaton Remembered, a unique illustrated survey of Keaton's career, Eleanor Keaton, his wife of 26 years, and film historian Jeffrey Vance provide a personal account of this icon of American cinema.Drawing on professional papers, screenplays, studio records, and scrapbooks, the authors trace Keaton's beginnings in vaudeville, where he perfected his gags; his first silent shorts with Roscoe "Fatty" Arbuckle; the brilliant features he conceived, directed, produced, and performed in; and his later sound films for M-G-M and others. Fresh prints of classic film stills and never-before-published photos from the Margaret Herrick Library of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, together with a lively, anecdotal text, offer a behind-the-scenes look at how Keaton came up with his hilarious ideas, choreographed his elaborate stunts, and crafted his films.

    Here are the outrageous memoirs of an American original whose life was every bit as outlandish as his movies. Photographs. Filmography.

    A History of the French New Wave Cinema offers a fresh look at the social, economic, and aesthetic mechanisms that shaped French film in the 1950s, as well as detailed studies of the most important New Wave movies of the late 1950s and early 1960s.Richard Neupert first tracks the precursors to New Wave cinema, showing how they provided blueprints for those who would follow. He then demonstrates that it was a core group of critics-turned-directors from the magazine Cahiers du Cinéma—especially François Truffaut, Claude Chabrol, and Jean-Luc Godard—who really revealed that filmmaking was changing forever. Later, their cohorts Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Jacques Doniol-Valcroze, and Pierre Kast continued in their own unique ways to expand the range and depth of the New Wave. In an exciting new chapter, Neupert explores the subgroup of French film practice known as the Left Bank Group, which included directors such as Alain Resnais and Agnès Varda. With the addition of this new material and an updated conclusion, Neupert presents a comprehensive review of the stunning variety of movies to come out of this important era in filmmaking.

    

    The film tells the story of an African American sea-island family preparing to come to the mainland at the turn of the century. In her richly textured, highly visual, lyrical portrayal of the day of the departure, Julie Dash evokes the details of a persisting African culture and the tensions between tradition and assimilation. Daughters of the Dust: The Making of an African American Woman’s Film, which includes Dash’s complete screenplay, describes the story of her extraordinary sixteen-year struggle to complete the project.

    This is a book about the business of managing your screenwriting career, from advice on choosing an agent to tips on juggling three deal-making breakfasts a day. Prescriptive and useful, Breakfast with Sharks is a real guide to navigating the murky waters of the Hollywood system.Unlike most of the screenwriting books available, here’s one that tells you what to do after you’ve finished your surefire-hit screenplay. Written from the perspective of Michael Lent, an in-the-trenches working screenwriter in Hollywood, this is a real-world look into the script-to-screen business as it is practiced today.Breakfast with Sharks is filled with useful advice on everything from the ins and outs of moving to Los Angeles to understanding terms like “spec,” “option,” and “assignment.” Here you’ll learn what to expect from agents and managers and who does what in the studio hierarchy. And most important, Breakfast with Sharks will help you nail your pitch so the studio exec can’t say no.Rounded out with a Q&A section and resource lists of script competitions, film festivals, trade associations, industry publications, and more, Breakfast with Sharks is chock-full of “take this and use it right now” information for screenwriters at any stage of their careers.

    A woman who played children, wide-eyed and gamine. Skipping around in frills and cute curls. That’s how most people remember Mary Pickford. In reality, as Eileen Whitfield makes clear, Mary Pickford is a towering figure in movie history.Born in Toronto in 1892, Pickford began acting as a child, helping support her family after her father’s accidental death. She switched from stage to film at age 17, joining D.W. Griffith’s Biograph company, and became almost unimaginably popular. This allowed her to develop her own production company at Adolph Zukor’s Famous Players, and in 1919 she co-founded (along with D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, and her husband Douglas Fairbanks) United Artists, seizing not only creative control but also the marketing and distribution of her films.Eileen Whitfield recreates Pickford’s life in meticulously researched detail, from her trying days in turn-of-the-century Toronto to her reign as mistress of Pickfair, the legendary Los Angeles estate at which she and Fairbanks entertained the world’s elite, to her sadly moving demise. Along the way, Whitfield explores the intricate psychology that tied Pickford to her mother throughout her life, and analyzes Pickford’s brilliant innovations in the art of film acting; her profound influence on the movie business (paving the way for such powerful Hollywood women as Jodie Foster and Whoopi Goldberg); and her role in the history of fame (she was the object of a mass adoration that prefigured today’s cult of celebrity).Eight years in the making, Pickford: The Woman Who Made Hollywood is definitive biography. It brings Pickford to life as a complex knot of contradictions and establishes her as a ground-breaking genius, casting new light on one of the influential – and least understood – artists in the history of popular culture.Pickford was the subject of lengthy, appreciative features in The New Yorker and Film Comment, and was the basis of two television documentaries: on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation’s “Life and Times” and on the History Channel.

    Illustrated throughout with behind-the-scenes photos.

    Ranging from D. W. Griffith's The Birth of a Nation to Spike Lee's Do the Right Thing, and ending with an epilogue on digital media, Closely Watched Films focuses on exemplary works of fourteen film directors whose careers together span the history of the narrative film. Lively and down-to-earth, this concise introduction provides a broad, complete, and yet specific picture of visual narrative techniques that will increase readers' excitement about and knowledge of the possibilities of the film medium.Shot-by-shot analyses of short passages from each film ground theory in concrete examples. Fabe includes original and well-informed discussions of Soviet montage, realism and expressionism in film form, classical and modern sound theory, the classic Hollywood film, Italian neorealism, the French New Wave, auteur theory, modernism and postmodernism in film, political cinema, feminist film theory and practice, and narrative experiments in new digital media. Encompassing the earliest silent films as well as those that exploit the most recent technological innovations, this book gives us the particulars of how film—arguably the most influential of contemporary forms of representation—constitutes our pleasure, influences our thoughts, and informs our daily reality.

    Ever since Godzilla (or, Gojira, as he is known in Japan) crawled out of his radioactive birthplace to cut a swath of destruction through Tokyo, he has claimed a place alongside King Kong and others in the movie monster pantheon. He is the third most recognizable Japanese celebrity in the United States, and his fan base continues to grow as children today prove his enduring appeal. Now, Bill Tsutsui, a life-long fan and historian, takes a light-hearted look at the big, green, radioactive lizard, revealing how he was born and how he became a megastar. With humorous anecdotes, Godzilla on My Mind explores his lasting cultural impact on the world. This book is sure to be welcomed by pop culture enthusiasts, fans, and historians alike.