In Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Anderson’s entire career—from Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017) to his music videos for Radiohead to his early short films—is examined in illustrated detail for the first time.   Anderson’s influences, his style, and the recurring themes of alienation, reinvention, ambition, and destiny that course through his movies are analyzed and supplemented by firsthand interviews with Anderson’s closest collaborators—including producer JoAnne Sellar, actor Vicky Krieps, and composer Jonny Greenwood—and illuminated by film stills, archival photos, original illustrations, and an appropriately psychedelic design aesthetic. Masterworks is a tribute to the dreamers, drifters, and evil dentists who populate his world.

    Starring WillFerrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah,and Emma Thompson, Stranger Than Fiction is a heartfelt film,perhaps a comedy, perhaps a tragedy, about love and literatureand death and taxes.

    But look closer. Lester Burnham's wife, Carolyn, regards him with contempt, his daughter, Jane, thinks he's a loser, and his boss is positioning him for the ax.Captivated by Jane's sultry high school friend Angela, Lester decides to make a few changes in his mere existence—changes that are less mid-life crisis than a life reclaimed. The freer he gets, the happier he gets, which is even more maddening to his wife and daughter. Complicating matters, Lester finds an unexpected ally in Ricky, the teenage son of the new next-door neighbors, who sees life through a camera lens that has lately focused on Jane Burnham.In pursuit of his new vision of the American dream, Lester is about to learn that the ultimate freedom comes at the ultimate price.The 1999 winner of five Academy Awards®, including Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay, American Beauty boasts an accomplished cast led by two-time Academy Award® Best Actor winner Kevin Spacey (The Usual Suspects) and Oscar® nominee Annette Bening (The Grifters). The ensemble cast also includes Thora Birch (Ghost World), Wes Bentley (The Claim), Mena Suvari (American Pie), Peter Gallagher (Mr. Deeds), Allison Janney (NBC's The West Wing), Scott Bakula (NBC's Quantum Leap), Sam Robards (A.I.: Artificial Intelligence), and Chris Cooper (Adaptation).American Beauty marks the feature film directorial debut of award-winning theater director Sam Mendes (The Blue Room, Cabaret). The film is produced by Dan Jinks (Nothing to Lose) and Bruce Cohen (The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas) from an original screenplay by Alan Ball (HBO's Six Feet Under). Stan Wlodkowski (One Hour Photo) and Alan Ball are the co-producers.

    Includes the Academy Award winning screenplay. The original controversial ending of the novel. Many exclusive photos never published before.

    In 25 years, Kaufman, along with partner Michael Herz, has built Troma Studios up from a company struggling to find its voice in a field crowded with competitors to its current--and legendary--status as a lone survivor, a bastion of true cinematic independence, and the world's greatest collection of camp on film.As entertaining and funny as it is informative and insightful, Make Your Own Damn Movie! places Kaufman's radically low-budget, independent-studio style of filmaking directly in the reader's hands. Thus we learn how to: develop and write a knock-out screenplay; raise funding; find locations and cast actors; hire a crew; obtain equipment, permits, and music rights (all for little or no money); make incredible special effects for $0.79 each; charm, schmooze, and network while on the film-festival circuit; and, finally, make a bad actor act so bad it's actually good.From scriptwriting and directing to financing and marketing, this book is brimming with utterly off-the-wall, decidedly maverick, yet consistently proven advice on how to fully develop one's idea for an independent film.

    Set against the splendor and barbarity of the Roman Empire in AD 180, Gladiator tells an epic story of courage and revenge: The great Roman general Maximus (Russell Crowe) has been forced into exile and slavery by the jealous heir to the throne, Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix). Trained as a gladiator, Maximus returns to Rome, intent on avenging the murder of his family by Commodus, now emperor. The one power stronger than that of the emperor is the will of the people, and Maximus knows he can attain his revenge only by becoming the greatest hero in all the Empire. Russell Crowe heads up an international cast that includes Joaquin Phoenix, Connie Nielson, Oliver Reed, Derek Jacobi, Djimon Hounsou, and Richard Harris. Directed by Ridley Scott from a script by David Franzoni and John Logan, Gladiator is produced by Franzoni, Douglas Wick, and Branko Lustig, with Walter F. Parkes serving as executive producer.This is the official full-color companion book, featuring excerpts from the screenplay, historical sidebars and illustrations, details on period costumes and epic set designs, behind-the-scenes photographs from the location filming, and interviews with the screenwriters, actors, and director.

    Illustrated.

    Sometime partner of the eccentric Howard Hughes, drinking buddy of William Faulkner and Ernest Hemingway, an inveterate gambler and a notorious liar, Hawks was the most modern of the great masters and one of the first directors to declare his independence from the major studios. He played Svengali to Lauren Bacall, Montgomery Clift, and others, but Hawks's greatest creation may have been himself.As The Atlantic Monthly noted, "Todd McCarthy . . . has gone further than anyone else in sorting out the truths and lies of the life, the skills and the insight and the self-deceptions of the work." "A fluent biography of the great director, a frequently rotten guy but one whose artistic independence and standards of film morality never failed." -- The New York Times Book Review; "Hawks's life, until now rather an enigma, has been put into focus and made one with his art in Todd McCarthy's wise and funny Howard Hawks." -- The Wall Street Journal; "Excellent . . . a respectful, exhaustive, and appropriately smartass look at Hollywood's most versatile director." -- Newsweek.

    When he died recently, he left behind an incredible celluloid legacy. Sunset Boulevard, Some Like It Hot, Double Indemnity, The Apartment, The Lost Weekend, Sabrina and other Wilder films have become a part of our shared experience and collective memory. In Nobody's Perfect, Billy Wilder speaks for himself, in what is as close to an autobiography as there ever will be. Charlotte Chandler, author of authorized bios on Groucho Marx and Federico Fellini, met Wilder in the mid-1970s and began a friendship that continued until his death. Over the course of more than 20 years, she interviewed not only Wilder, but many of the actors and other creative people who worked with him. The result is this remarkable book, a very personal look at one of filmdom's true creative geniuses. In a life as dramatic as his films, Wilder survived World War I and escaped the Holocaust. His great gift as a screenwriter soon became apparent, as did his easy rapport with actors. As a writer-director, he worked with such stars as Greta Garbo, William Holden, Tony Curtis, Barbara Stanwyck, Marlene Dietrich, Ginger Rogers, Gloria Swanson, Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Jack Lemmon, Walter Matthau and Marilyn Monroe - most of whom were interviewed for this book. This revealing and vastly entertaining book is a wonderful, timely tribute to this great writer-director, a legacy of Wilder's wit, insight and remarkable wisdom.

    George. Elaine. Kramer. We've followed their misadventures for nearly ten years on Thursday nights. Here, finally, are the scripts of the first two seasons that will take you back to the beginning of Seinfeld.Featuring the first 17 episodes ever aired, The Seinfeld Scripts contains all the great lines that have kept us laughing for years: the pilot episode, "The Seinfeld Chronicles," where it all began; George introduces his importer/exporter altar ego Art Vanderlay in "The Stakeout"; Kramer becomes obsessed with cantaloupe in "The Ex-Girlfriend"; Jerry and George meet Elaine's dad in "The Jacket"; is Jerry responsible for a poor Polish woman's death when he makes "The Pony Remark"?; Jerry and Elaine decide to become intimate again in "The Deal"; what will George do when he is banned from the executive bathroom in "The Revenge"?; and Jerry, George, and Elaine wait for a table in "The Chinese Restaurant."It's all here: the award-winning writing of Seinfeld, "the defining sitcom of our age". Created by Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld.Elaine: My roommate has Lyme disease. Jerry: Lyme disease? I thought she had Epstein-Barr syndrome? Elaine: She has this in addition to Epstein-Barr. It's like Epstein-Barr with a twist of Lyme disease. George: She calls me up at my office she says, "We have to talk." Jerry: The four worst words in the English language. Kramer: What a body. Yeeaaah...that's for me. Jerry: Yeah and you're just what she's looking for, too--a stranger, leering through a pair of binoculars ten floors up.

    For the past ten years he has been attempting to decode the numerical pattern beneath the ultimate system of ordered chaos-the stock market. As Max verges on a solution, chaos is swallowing the world around him. He is pursued by an aggressive Wall Street firm set on financial domination as well as by a Kabbalah sect intent on unlocking the secrets behind its ancient holy texts. Max races to crack the code, hoping to defy the madness that looms before him. In succeeding, he uncovers a secret everyone is willing to kill for.Also included with the screenplay is a full journal of how Darren Aronofsky made this award-winning film on a minuscule budget of $60,000, providing practical advice and inspiration to film students and offering film buffs rare insight into how an independent film is made.

    Did screenwriter Danny Rubin know what he was doing when he wrote it? That it would star Bill Murray and become a hit? That it would become a touchstone for major religions? That psychologists would come to prescribe the movie to their patients? Follow this unique screenplay's exciting journey through agents, directors, studios, stars and the writer's own confused brain to emerge as one of the most delightful and profoundly affecting comedies of all time. For movie lovers and screenwriters alike, "How To Write Groundhog Day" includes the original screenplay, notes, scene sketches, and a personal tour of the Hollywood writing process from this popular screenwriting teacher.

    In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows, first on premium cable channels like HBO and then basic cable networks like FX and AMC, dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and artistic ambition. No longer necessarily concerned with creating always-likable characters, plots that wrapped up neatly every episode, or subjects that were deemed safe and appropriate, shows such as The Wire, The Sopranos, Mad Men, Deadwood, The Shield, and more tackled issues of life and death, love and sexuality, addiction, race, violence, and existential boredom. Just as the Big Novel had in the 1960s and the subversive films of New Hollywood had in 1970s, television shows became the place to go to see stories of the triumph and betrayals of the American Dream at the beginning of the twenty-first century. This revolution happened at the hands of a new breed of auteur: the all-powerful writer-show runner. These were men nearly as complicated, idiosyncratic, and “difficult” as the conflicted protagonists that defined the genre. Given the chance to make art in a maligned medium, they fell upon the opportunity with unchecked ambition. Combining deep reportage with cultural analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of a genre that represents not only a new golden age for TV but also a cultural watershed. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players, including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), Matthew Weiner and Jon Hamm (Mad Men), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), and Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), in addition to dozens of other writers, directors, studio executives, actors, production assistants, makeup artists, script supervisors, and so on. Martin takes us behind the scenes of our favorite shows, delivering never-before-heard story after story and revealing how cable TV has distinguished itself dramatically from the networks, emerging from the shadow of film to become a truly significant and influential part of our culture.

    One of the chapters, for example, answers which race Kevin Costner was able to white savior the best, because did you know that he white saviors Mexicans in McFarland, USA, and white saviors Native Americans in Dances with Wolves, and white saviors Black people in Black or White, and white saviors the Cleveland Browns in Draft Day? Another of the chapters, for a second example, answers what other high school movie characters would be in Regina George's circle of friends if we opened up the Mean Girls universe to include other movies (Johnny Lawrence is temporarily in, Claire from The Breakfast Club is in, Ferris Bueller is out, Isis from Bring It On is out...). Another of the chapters, for a third example, creates a special version of the Academy Awards specifically for rom-coms, the most underrated movie genre of all. And another of the chapters, for a final example, is actually a triple chapter that serves as an NBA-style draft of the very best and most memorable moments in gangster movies. Many, many things happen in Movies (And Other Things), some of which funny, others of which are sad, a few of which are insightful, and all of which are handled with the type of care and dedication to the smallest details and pockets of pop culture that only a book by Shea Serrano can provide.

    Mankiewicz and Orson Welles --Notes on the shooting script / prepared by Gary Carey --RKO cutting continuity of the Orson Welles production, Citizen Kane.