Colin McGinn–“an ingenious philosopher who thinks like a laser and writes like a dream,” according to Steven Pinker–enhances our understanding of both movies and ourselves in this book of rare and refreshing insight.

    He writes to comics, corporations, children, presidents, and even his daughter's boyfriend. Here is Groucho swapping photos with T. S. Eliot (”I had no idea you were so handsome!”); advising his son on courting a rich dame (”Don't come out bluntly and say, 'How much dough have you got?' That wouldn't be the Marxian way”); crisply declining membership in a Hollywood club (”I don't care to belong to any social organization that will accept me as a member”); reacting with utmost composure when informed that he has been made into a verb by James Joyce (”There's no reason why I shouldn't appear in Finnegans Wake . I'm certainly as bewildered about life as Joyce was”); responding to a scandal sheet (”Gentleman: If you continue to publish slanderous pieces about me, I shall feel compelled to cancel my subscription”); describing himself to the Lunts (”I eat like a vulture. Unfortunately the resemblance doesn't end there”); and much, much more. That mobile visage, that look of wild amazement, and that weaving cigar are wholly captured, bound but untamed, in The Groucho Letters.

    This striking assertion is at the heart of Rebecca Solnit’s new book, which weaves together biography, history, and fascinating insights into art and technology to create a boldly original portrait of America on the threshold of modernity. The story of Muybridge—who in 1872 succeeded in capturing high-speed motion photographically—becomes a lens for a larger story about the acceleration and industrialization of everyday life. Solnit shows how the peculiar freedoms and opportunities of post–Civil War California led directly to the two industries—Hollywood and Silicon Valley—that have most powerfully defined contemporary society.

    Strangelove to A Clockwork Orange, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and others, has always been depicted by the media as the Howard Hughes of filmmakers, a weird artist obsessed with his work and privacy to the point of madness. But who was he really? Emilio D'Alessandro lets us see. A former Formula Ford driver who was a minicab chauffeur in London during the Swinging Sixties, he took a job driving a giant phallus through the city that became his introduction to the director. Honest, reliable, and ready to take on any task, Emilio found his way into Kubrick's neurotic, obsessive heart. He became his personal assistant, his right-hand man and confidant, working for him from A Clockwork Orange until Kubrick's death in 1999.Emilio was the silent guy in the room when the script for The Shining was discussed. He still has the coat Jack Nicholson used in the movie. He was an extra on the set of Eyes Wide Shut, Kubrick's last movie. He knew all the actors and producers Kubrick worked with; he observed firsthand Kubrick's working methods down to the smallest detail. Making no claim of expertise in cinematography but with plenty of anecdotes, he offers a completely fresh perspective on the artist and a warm, affecting portrait of a generous, kind, caring man who was a perfectionist in work and life.

    When he was seventeen years old, his demons led him to a Massachusetts mental institution where he confronted them the only way he knew how, by writing his first songs. Thirty years later, Taylor's songs are among the most popular in the annals of music, but the demons are still with him. But unlike many of his contemporaries who faced a similar struggle, Taylor managed to emerge as an inspirational figure. Fire and Rain traces this remarkable path, including his troubled marriage to pop star Carly Simon and the premature alcoholism-related death of his brother: Taylor's ten-month stay in the exclusive private psychiatric institution where he finished high school; His self-imposed exile to England where he submitted some of his music to the Beatles' Apple Records, which signed him to his first record contract in 1968. Paul McCartney mentored Taylor's early career; The story behind his second album, Sweet Baby James, which contained the song "Fire and Rain" about the hopelessness of mental illness and suicide; As Taylor's fame increased, so did his problems with heroin, alcohol, and mental illness. In the seventies, the singer nearly fell over the edge many times.

    She is arguably the most important teacher of acting in American history. Over her long career, both in New York and Hollywood, she offered her vast acting knowledge to generations of actors, including Marlon Brando, Warren Beatty, and Robert De Niro. The great voice finally ended in the early Nineties, but her decades of experience and teaching have been brilliantly caught and encapsulated by Howard Kissel in the twenty-two lessons in this book.

    Internationally-renowned directing coach Weston demonstrates what constitutes a good performance, what actors want from a director, what directors do wrong, script analysis and preparation, how actors work, and shares insights into the director/actor relationship.

    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.

    She writes about learning the art and craft of acting, about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honour, about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Woody Allen, Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Francis Ford Coppola and Stephen Frears. She writes movingly and beautifully about the death of her father, the legendary director John Huston and her marriage to sculptor Robert Graham.

    Bresson on Bresson collects the most significant interviews that Bresson gave (carefully editing them before they were released) over the course of his forty-year career to reveal both the internal consistency and the consistently exploratory character of his body of work. Successive chapters are dedicated to each of his fourteen films, as well as to the question of literary adaptation, the nature of the sound track, and to Bresson’s one book, the great aphoristic treatise Notes on the Cinematograph. Throughout, his close and careful consideration of his own films and of the art of film is punctuated by such telling mantras as “Sound...invented silence in cinema,” “It’s the film that...gives life to the characters—not the characters that give life to the film,” and (echoing the Bible) “Every idle word shall be counted.” Bresson’s integrity and originality earned him the admiration of younger directors from Jean-Luc Godard and Jacques Rivette to Olivier Assayas. And though Bresson’s movies are marked everywhere by an air of intense deliberation, these interviews show that they were no less inspired by a near-religious belief in the value of intuition, not only that of the creator but that of the audience, which he claims to deeply respect: “It’s always ready to feel before it understands. And that’s how it should be.”

    Morris' classes. Foreword by Jack Nicholson.

    He’s climbed all the way to head of production at newly merged Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer and is determined to transform Leo the Lion into an icon of the most successful studio in town.The harder he works, the higher he soars. But at what cost? The more he achieves, the closer he risks flying into oblivion. A frail and faulty heart shudders inside this chest that blazes with ambition. Thalberg knows that his charmed life at the top of the Hollywood heap is a dangerous tightrope walk: each day—each breath, even—could be his last. Shooting for success means risking his health, friendships, everything. Yet, against all odds, the man no one thought would survive into adulthood almost single-handedly ushers in a new era of filmmaking.This is Hollywood at its most daring and opulent—the Sunset Strip, premieres at Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, stars like Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Jean Harlow, Joan Crawford—and Irving is at the center of it all.From the author of the Hollywood’s Garden of Allah novels comes a mesmerizing true-life story of the man behind Golden Age mythmaking: Irving Thalberg, the prince of Tinseltown.Martin Turnbull's Hollywood’s Garden of Allah novels have been optioned for the screen by film & television producer, Tabrez Noorani.

    Thomas Nelson's perceptive and comprehensive study of Kubrick rescues him from the hostility of auteurist critics and discovers the roots of a Kubrickian aesthetic, which Nelson defines as the "aesthetics of contingency."After analyzing how this aesthetic develops and manifests itself in the early works, Nelson devotes individual chapters to Lolita, Dr. Stangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, A Clockwork Orange, Barry Lyndon, and The Shining.For this expanded edition, Nelson has added chapters on Full Metal Jacket and Eyes Wide Shut, and, in the wake of the director's death, reconsidered his body of work as a whole. By placing Kubrick in a historical and theoretical context, this study is a reliable guide into--and out of--Stanley Kubrick's cinematic maze.

    But long before he put on the deputy's star, he grew up in Nigeria, where his experiences were equally unforgettable. In THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES, LawDog chronicles his encounters with everything from bush pilots, 15-foot pythons, pygmy mongooses, brigadier-captains, and Peace Corp hippies to the Nigerian space program. THE LAWDOG FILES: AFRICAN ADVENTURES are every bit as hilarious as the previous volume, as LawDog relates his unforgettable experiences in a laconic, self-deprecating manner that is funny in its own right. Africa wins again, and again, and again, but, so too does the reader in this sobering, but hilarious collection of true tales from the Dark Continent.

    With candor he takes us behind the scenes on the set of Three's Company, and behind the sets of his hugely successful film comedies. And he shares bittersweet memories of The Mayberry Reunion, and affectionate recollections of his professional and personal relationships with such legends as Andy Griffith, Jack Benny, Red Skelton, Orson Welles, Lou Costello, and Arthur Godfrey.