"A first rate book and a joy to read...It's doubtful that a complete understanding of the director's artistry can be obtained without reading this book...Also indispensable for budding directors are the addenda, in which Kurosawa lays out his beliefs on the primacy of a good script, on scriptwriting as an essential tool for directors, on directing actors, on camera placement, and on the value of steeping oneself in literature, from great novels to detective fiction."—Variety"For the lover of Kurosawa's movies...this is nothing short of must reading...a fitting companion piece to his many dynamic and absorbing screen entertainments."—Washington Post Book World

    Illustrated throughout with behind-the-scenes photos.

    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.

    Mark Cousins’s chronological journey through the worldwide history of film is told from the point of view of filmmakers and moviegoers. Weaving personalities, film technology, and production with engaging descriptions of groundbreaking scenes, Cousins uses his experience as film historian, producer, and director to capture the shifting trends of movie history. We learn how filmmakers influenced each other; how contemporary events influenced them; how they challenged established techniques and developed new technologies to enhance their medium. Striking images reinforce the reader’s understanding of cinematic innovation, both stylistic and technical. The images reveal astonishing parallels in global filmmaking, thus introducing the less familiar worlds of African, Asian, and Middle Eastern cinema, as well as documenting the fortunes of the best Western directors. The Story of Film presents Silent (1885-1928), Sound (1928-1990), and Digital (1990-present), spanning the birth of the moving image; the establishment of Hollywood; the European avant-garde movements, personal filmmaking; world cinema; and recent phenomena like Computer Generated Imagery and the ever-more “real” realizations of the wildest of imaginations. The Story of Film explores what has today become the world’s most popular artistic medium.

    This revised edition contains material on GoodFellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and other projects up to Casino.

    From those conversations stemmed this enlightened, affectionate book -- a mine of wonderful, surprising observations and information about editing, writing and literature, music and sound, the I-Ching, dreams, art and history.The Conversations is filled with stories about how some of the most important movies of the last thirty years were made and about the people who brought them to the screen. It traces the artistic growth of Murch, as well as his friends and contemporaries -- including directors such as Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, Fred Zinneman and Anthony Minghella -- from the creation of the independent, anti-Hollywood Zoetrope by a handful of brilliant, bearded young men to the recent triumph of Apocalypse Now Redux.Among the films Murch has worked on are American Graffiti, The Conversation, the remake of A Touch of Evil, Julia, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather (all three), The Talented Mr. Ripley, and The English Patient."Walter Murch is a true oddity in Hollywood. A genuine intellectual and renaissance man who appears wise and private at the centre of various temporary storms to do with film making and his whole generation of filmmakers. He knows, probably, where a lot of the bodies are buried."

    The rest is breathtaking, record-breaking box-office history. Now comes an all-new Indiana Jones feature film: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. Here’s your chance to go on location for an up-close, all-access tour of the year’s most eagerly anticipated blockbuster, as well as the classics. The Complete Making of Indiana Jones is a crash course in movie magic-making–showcasing the masters of the craft and served up by veteran entertainment chroniclers J. W. Rinzler and Laurent Bouzereau. Inside you’ll find:• exclusive on-set interviews with the entire cast and crew of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, including Harrison Ford, Shia LaBeouf, Cate Blanchett, Ray Winstone, and John Hurt–plus director Steven Spielberg, executive producer George Lucas, screenwriter David Koepp, and the incredible production team that built some of the most fantastic sets ever.• hundreds of full-color images–from storyboards, concept paintings, and set design schematics to still photos from all four films with candid action shots of the productions in progress• an in-depth chronicle of the making of the first three Indiana Jones movies–Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, and Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade–including transcripts of the original concept meetings, cast and crew anecdotes, production photos, and information on scenes that were cut from the final films• never-before-seen artwork and archival gems from the Lucasfilm Archives• and much more!Don’t miss the thrilling new movie or this definitive making-of opus. It’s as essential to fans as that trusty bullwhip is to Indy!

    Clarke created this cinematic masterpiece.Regarded as a masterpiece today, 2001: A Space Odyssey received mixed reviews on its 1968 release. Despite the success of Dr. Strangelove, director Stanley Kubrick wasn’t yet recognized as a great filmmaker, and 2001 was radically innovative, with little dialogue and no strong central character. Although some leading critics slammed the film as incomprehensible and self-indulgent, the public lined up to see it. 2001’s resounding commercial success launched the genre of big-budget science fiction spectaculars. Such directors as George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, and James Cameron have acknowledged its profound influence.Author Michael Benson explains how 2001 was made, telling the story primarily through the two people most responsible for the film, Kubrick and science fiction legend Arthur C. Clarke. Benson interviewed Clarke many times, and has also spoken at length with Kubrick’s widow, Christiane; with visual effects supervisor Doug Trumbull; with Dan Richter, who played 2001’s leading man-ape; and many others.A colorful nonfiction narrative packed with memorable characters and remarkable incidents, Space Odyssey provides a 360-degree view of this extraordinary work, tracking the film from Kubrick and Clarke’s first meeting in New York in 1964 through its UK production from 1965-1968, during which some of the most complex sets ever made were merged with visual effects so innovative that they scarcely seem dated today. A concluding chapter examines the film’s legacy as it grew into it current justifiably exalted status.

    For Deleuze, philosophy cannot be a reflection of something else; philosophical concepts are, rather, the images of thought, to be understood on their own terms. Here he puts this view of philosophy to work in understanding the concepts—or images—of film.Cinema, to Deleuze, is not a language that requires probing and interpretation, a search for hidden meanings; it can be understood directly, as a composition of images and signs, pre-verbal in nature. Thus he offers a powerful alternative to the psychoanalytic and semiological approaches that have dominated film studies.Drawing upon Henri Bergson’s thesis on perception and C. S. Peirce’s classification of images and signs, Deleuze is able to put forth a new theory and taxonomy of the image, which he then applies to concrete examples from the work of a diverse group of filmmakers—Griffith, Eisenstein, Pasolini, Rohmer, Bresson, Dreyer, Stroheim, Buñuel, and many others. Because he finds movement to be the primary characteristic of cinema in the first half of the twentieth century, he devotes this first volume to that aspect of film. In the years since World War II, time has come to dominate film; that shift, and the signs and images associated with it, are addressed in Cinema 2: The Time-Image.

    Eight autobiographical essays by Brooks, on topics ranging from her childhood in Kansas and her early days as a Denishawn and Ziegfeld Follies dancer to her friendships with Martha Graham, Charles Chaplin, W. C. Fields, Humphrey Bogart, and others are collected here. Originally published: New York: Knopf, 1982.

    Rather, it is a wide-ranging narrative about the movies and their signal role in modern life. The celebrated film authority David Thomson takes us around the globe, through time, and across many media to tell the complex, gripping, paradoxical story of the movies. He tracks the ways we were initially enchanted by movies as imitations of life—the stories, the stars, the look—and how we allowed them to show us how to live. At the same time, movies, offering a seductive escape from everyday reality and its responsibilities, have made it possible for us to evade life altogether. The entranced audience has become a model for powerless and anxiety-ridden citizens trying to pursue happiness and dodge terror by sitting quietly in a dark room.Does the big screen take us out into the world or merely mesmerize us? That is Thomson's question in this grand adventure of a book, vital to anyone trying to make sense of the age of screens—the age that, more than ever, we are living in.

    Originally published in Paris, this is a collection of Hollywood's darkest and best kept secrets from the pen of Kenneth Anger, a former child movie actor who grew up to become one of America's leading underground film-makers.

    He was a notoriously private man, rarely granting interviews. For the first time, his life will be portrayed in over 200 images from film, photographs, and the words and full-color paintings of Christiane Kubrick, his wife for over 42 years.Never before seen photographs offer a unique perspective on a man, his times, and his films -- from his very first, Day of Flight (1950), through to his last and unrealized project, finished by Steven Spielberg, A.I. (2001)."Stanley Kubrick": A Life in Pictures explores the many and varied aspects of its subject -- the director, the producer, the photographer, the writer and, not least of all, the man himself.

    He recounts, in every gory detail, how enormous hubris, unbridled ambition, artistic hauteur, and bad business sense on the parts of Tinsel Town wheeler-dealers and superstars such as Elizabeth Taylor, Clint Eastwood, and Francis Ford Coppola, conspired to engender some of the worst films ever.

    In The Oxford History of World Cinema, an international team of film historians traces the history of this enduringly popular entertainment medium. Covering all aspects of its development, stars, studios, and cultural impact, the book celebrates and chronicles over one hundred years of diverse achievement from westerns to the New Wave, from animation to the avant-garde, and from Hollywood to Hong Kong. The Oxford History of World Cinema tells the story of the major inventions and developments in the cinema business, its institutions, genres, and personnel, and they outline the evolution of national cinemas round the world--the varied and distinctive film traditions that have developed alongside Hollywood. A unique aspect of the book are the special inset features on the film-makers and personalities--Garbo and Godard, Keaton and Kurosawa, Bugs Bunny and Bergman--who have had an enduring impact in popular memory and cinematic lore. With over 280 illustrations, a full bibliography, and an extensive index, this is the buff's ultimate guide to cinema worldwide.