Movie Directors Books - Page 3

Scorsese on Scorsese: Revised Edition

David Thompson

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 7 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Answers Scorsese Fans' FAQS 5 out of 5 stars.
5 of 7 people found this review helpful.

This reader felt almost privileged to read these interviews, lectures, and conversations with Martin Scorsese. He simply shares everything, and indeed he is, if nothing else, a true fan of movies!

The insightful words of Scorsese, arranged to parallel his filmography up through New York Stories, are annotated by the redoubtable editors Thompson and Christie. Scorsese is arguably the greatest postmodern artist, (and I would have to say the only postmodernist I unhesitatingly adore -with possible exception of Matt Groening), and the reader really gets to see how Scorsese constructs a film. His inspirations are as predictable as directors Pasolini and Powell, yet as diverse as Mahatma Ghandi and Little Richard. He loves all with equanimity and enthusiasm.

That's the joy of this book... the guy loves movies, loves making them, and all that energy just shines through.

Extremely valuable resource for the student of film, but good fun for the humble film buff, too. Bonus: interesting black and white photos you won't find elsewhere. Excellent (though naturally out-of-date) filmography appendix.

Editorial Review:

Martin Scorsese's challenging and often controversial films are a record of the most personal achievement in modern American cinema. Mean Streets, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, Gooodfellas--these titles conjure up a world and a style of filmmaking that he has made his own, one of a savage beauty of great intensity and truth.

The interviews which make up this book chart the journey that Scorsese has taken across the years in search of new subjects to engage and absorb him, and in the process reveal a man who, like Michael Powell and Francios Truffaut, has an unbridled passion for film--a passion which is evident in every frame of his work.

This new, revised edition includes chapters on Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and other projects up to Casino, thus bringing up to date the story of America's most exciting and articulate contemporary filmmaker.

The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock

Donald Spoto

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Scandal-Ridden Junk 3 out of 5 stars.
5 of 13 people found this review helpful.

Of course, in 2005 we're accustomed to knowing a lot more about celebrities than we really ought to. When this book was first published twenty years ago, this fixation had not quite gotten to where it is today.

No - instead, on the heels of Spoto's "The Art of Alfred Hitchcock," which gave Spoto free access to the late director and to his archives, Spoto insists that knowing way too much information about Hitch's private life is essential, somehow, to understanding his art.

To a certain extent, that's the case. But some of this stuff is simply gratiutous. How relevant to art is the "Marnie" incident with Tippi Hedren? What possible addition to an important body of knowledge does that story make?

If you want gossip, it's here. If you want to gain some insight into our greatest director's artistic character, it's promised here but maybe not delivered.

Editorial Review:

This is the definitive life story of Alfred Hitchcock, the enigmatic and intensely private director of Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds, and more than forty other films. While setting forth every stage of Hitchcock’s long life and brilliant career, Donald Spoto also explores the roots of the director’s obsessions with blondes, food, murder, and idealized love—and he traces the incomparable, bizarre genius from Hitchcock’s English childhood through the golden years of his career in America as one of the greatest directors in the history of filmmaking.

X Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmmaker

Alex Cox

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Great but how to get it? 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 7 people found this review helpful.

I just updated my order for Alex Cox's "X-Films: True Confessions of a Radical Filmaker" as planned to be published in the USA by Soft Skull Press with ISBN-13: 978-1593761936 because of a delay in publication.

Originally it was to be released in the USA this month (June 2008) simultaneously with this UK publication by I.B. Tauris with ISBN-13 978-1845115661. The other USA product page and update of my order now indicate Soft Skull retards its USA release by three months, until September.

I would prefer to purchase the UK edition as it will be published on time, and appears to have thirty more pages. Also an e-mail I just received from the author himself indicates he has not heard from the USA publisher Soft Skull in some time, and so publication at all is in serious doubt.

This product page of the UK edition indicates release this month but provides absolutely no way to order it. The USA edition is in doubt, and at best delayed, at worst x-ed out for cancellation!

This book is essential for any student of modern film.

Alex Cox of course is the director of the seminal Repo Man (Special Edition), which presents the inspiration for many other films, including of all things Napoleon Dynamite. Cox also filmed Sid & Nancy - Criterion Collection for which the main star Oldham suffered a starvation diet in order to play the part of Sid Vicious. Cox is also the brilliant director of the spaghetti western update Straight to Hell, currently only available in The Alex Cox Collection (Straight to Hell/Repo Man/Death and the Compass/Three Businessmen) which also includes the brilliant Tale of the Magi globalization update Three Businessmen, and the modernization of Borges's short story. Straight to Hell inspired the Samuel L. Jackson role in Tarrantino's Pulp Fiction, among other pioneering and inspirational aspects. Cox also went to Sandinista Nicaragua during the Reagan regime's illegal and inhuman genocidal invasion and serial killing of teachers nurses and eletrical engineers to film the great Walker - Criterion Collection which must not be missed. Cox is also well known for his updating of the Jacobean tragicomedy Revengers Tragedy which merits repeated viewing under our current economic injustices and grossly divided classes.

Unsurprisingly the USA edition of his memoirs is delayed to be cancelled under the present Bush regime. Inscrutably amazon cannot provide us the UK edition even for eagerly ready money. This is a book not to be missed. May it soon be available, soon and very soon. See his films in the meantime. Has anyone seen his Searchers II?

Editorial Review:

Filmmaker Alex Cox's thoughtful autobiography examines his craft and influences, as well as providing his insights into many of his favorite films. Sometimes called a radical, Cox is a quintessential auteur, as well as an internationally focused, insightful critic and writer whose passion for film has gripped him since childhood. In addition to being a captivating look into Cox's process, this book also encourages and instructs would-be independent filmmakers, guiding the next generation of film pioneers through the arduous journey of creation. Cox weaves his own "confessions" with his notes to the new guard, including thoughts on new forms of digital distribution and his radical views on intellectual property — the result is a readable, startling treatise on both the film innovations of today and the thrilling potential of future filmmaking.

Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light

Patrick Mcgilligan

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 17 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Best ever Biography? 5 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

This has to rank as one of the best biographies of a film maker ever written. Rich in detail, both personal as well as professional, the book is a joy to read, sending me happily back to my collection of Hitch's movies for yet another look, but with eyes opened wider than ever before. A book I shall treasure forever.

Editorial Review:

In a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock became the most widely recognized director who ever lived. His films -- including The 39 Steps, Notorious, Rear Window, Vertigo, Psycho, and The Birds -- set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling élan. Since his death, Hitchcock has become crystallized in the public imagination as the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable biography draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man -- the ingenious craftsman, the avid collaborator, the constant trickster, provocateur, and romantic. Like Hitchcock's best films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliff-hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.

How I Made A Hundred Movies In Hollywood And Never Lost A Dime

Roger Corman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Very interesting read for pop culture, film and business buffs 4 out of 5 stars.
4 of 4 people found this review helpful.

I'm not sure of how I happened upon this biography, but I'm glad I did. I'm not particularly a Roger Corman fan, having seen perhaps three or four of his films without really noticing that Corman had a part in their making.

Corman's life is interesting. Not only was he probably the most successful independent filmaker in history, he was also mentor and first-chance for many of today's leading producers, directors, writers and stars.

Remarkably down to earth and honest, Corman admits that his life has not been totally fulfilling: like many successful people, success is never enough - there's always one more challenge down the road and more than one challenge left unexplored in the past.

Corman engages in some, but not deep, analysis of his films, explains his evolving political philosophy and provides snippets that from another author might be construed as name-dropping. But Corman was there and it's his interactions with these people he's talking about, so it's not in the least obnoxious.

Above all, the value of Corman's book may not be to film buffs, but to business people, especially small scale entrepreneurs. Corman's management methods and his approach to filmaking were true nose-to-the-grindstone. He knew his market; he studied his market; he created his product to appeal to his market and he kept costs down to a minimum in order to reduce his risk of loss.

Quite a guy and his biography is worth the couple of hours it takes to read it.

Jerry

Editorial Review:

"A splendidly instructive and entertaining contribution to film history and a quick lesson on the efficient showstring style of filmmaking by a maverick genius of innovation and exploitation. . . . Corman teaches, as well as delights".--"Choice". 39 photos.

Orson Welles: Hello Americans

Simon Callow

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

From Citizen Kane to Macbeth, Simon Callow’s brilliant biography of Orson Welles explores the breakdown of his Hollywood career.

When Citizen Kane, his first film, opened in 1941, Welles was universally acclaimed as the most audacious filmmaker alive. But instead of marking the beginning of a triumphant career in Hollywood, the film proved to be an exception in Welles’s life and work. He found it increasingly impossible to function within Hollywood’s system. Project after project foundered, either abandoned incomplete, or was released in very different form from the one he intended. Finally, in 1947, he left America for Europe where for the best part of twenty years he lived in self-imposed exile, occasionally and briefly returning to stage a play, make a film or shoot a television drama.

Hello Americans reveals the immense complexities of Welles’s temperament as well as some of the monstrous personalities with whom he had to contend. At the same time, the book gives full weight to the almost bewildering range of his activities beyond Hollywood. The thread that runs through this apparently incoherent blur of activity is an often-frustrated engagement with his native land, its faults, its arts, its history. But by 1947, he had said all that he had to say to his fellow citizens; it was Goodbye Americans for two decades of experimental, innovative but essentially European work.

Goldwyn: A Biography

A. Scott Berg

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Total reviews: 6 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Rags to riches 5 out of 5 stars.
17 of 17 people found this review helpful.

What a story! A remarkably easy to read account of Sam Goldwyn's rags-to-riches life. Did you know "Goldwyn" was not his real name? Did you know he was thrown out of the MGM company after a few years?! Goldwyn worked at some stage or other with just about every famous name in the business, and also fell out with just about everybody he ever met. A cantankerous and perverse character who loved contradicting people. When people quit because he made their lives intolerable, he sometimes felt personally attacked and betrayed. The book is full of colourful characters, and Scott Berg has done a wonderful job of using quotations and dialogues to really bring these people alive: Gary Cooper, Marlon Brando, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford, Lillian Hellman, William Wyler, Billy Wilder, and the remarkable Hilda Berl. It reads like a movie! By tracing Goldwyn's history, the book also covers the story of many of the other famous movie companies that are still famous today: United Artists, Universal, Paramount, Warner Brothers, RKO and of course MGM. Goldwyn also came across many young actors and actresses before they were stars: Vivien Leigh, Laurence Olivier, David Niven, Marlon Brando, John Wayne, etc. And of course the famous Goldwyn malapropisms are here, though limited to the ones actually traceable (as far as possible) to Goldwyn himself: "Anyone who sees a psychiatrist should have their head examined! Include me out! A verbal agreement isn't worth the paper it's written on," to pick just a few.

A remarkably well-written and well-researched biography that brings this vigorous, infuriating, yet oddly attractive ugly duckling to vibrant life. This must rank amongst the best biographies, up there with Ron Chernow's book about the Morgans. Anyone at all interested in movies and movie history will enjoy this.

Editorial Review:

Samuel Goldwyn was the premier dream-maker of his era, and in this lavishly-praised biography, the author of Lindbergh and Max Perkins: Editor of Genius offers a life story as rich with drama as anything found on the silver screen...

Polanski: A Biography

Christopher Sandford

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Total reviews: 3 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

This dramatic account weaves together the rich and complex life of the celebrated and controversial film director, Holocaust survivor, and exile, based on a wealth of sources and new material. New revelations about Polanski's life include:

• The connection between his mother’s death in Auschwitz and wife Sharon Tate’s murder by the Manson family—both women were pregnant
• His radical transition from childhood poverty in a Krakow ghetto to a glamorous Hollywood life among socialites
• The psychological complexity and central thread of sexuality that runs throughout his films and his relationships with younger women
• A culmination of tragedies in Polanski’s life, from the Holocaust to the Manson murders to his sexual assault charges and subsequent exile from the U.S.
• The unique humor of the “rascal genius” that keeps the world watching and awaiting his new projects

Acclaimed biographer Sandford draws on dozens of interviews with actors who have worked with Polanski, as well as previously sealed transcripts of his criminal hearings, testimony before the California grand jury following the accusations that led to his exile, and personal reflections on the murders of Sharon Tate and other friends of the couple. Polanski’s films from 1962 to 2005 are contextualized within his life, including such highlights as Rosemary’s Baby, Chinatown, and the Oscar-winning The Pianist. Roman Polanski turns 75 in 2008, and his work, with two upcoming feature films including the political thriller Ghost, continues to receive more and more attention. Sandford's fascinating biography illuminates the life and work of one of the most important careers in modern cinema.

Conversations with Wilder

Cameron Crowe

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Total reviews: 27 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.

Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today's best-known writer-directors, about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood, and about screenwriting and camera work, set design and stars, his peers and their movies, the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka. Here are Wilder's sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, and Ace in the Hole, among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious, but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script, everybody's lines, never a fault, never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna, working as a journalist in Berlin, rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit, tough-minded romanticism, and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilder's films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.

Victor Fleming: An American Movie Master

Michael Sragow

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Editorial Review:

The full-length, definitive biography of the legendary director of Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz.

Victor Fleming was the most sought-after director in Hollywood’s golden age, renowned for his ability to make films across an astounding range of genres–westerns, earthy sexual dramas, family entertainment, screwball comedies, buddy pictures, romances, and adventures. Fleming is remembered for the two most iconic movies of the period, Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz, but the more than forty films he directed also included classics like Red Dust, Test Pilot, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Captains Courageous. Paradoxically, his talent for knowing how to make the necessary film at the right time, rather than remaking the same movie in different guises, has resulted in Victor Fleming’s relative obscurity in our time.

Michael Sragow restores the director to the pantheon of our greatest filmmakers and fills a gaping hole in Hollywood history with this vibrant portrait of a man at the center of the most exciting era in American filmmaking. The actors Fleming directed wanted to be him (Fleming created enduring screen personas for Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, and Gary Cooper), and his actresses wanted to be with him (Ingrid Bergman, Clara Bow, and Norma Shearer were among his many lovers).

Victor Fleming not only places the director back in the spotlight, but also gives us the story of a man whose extraordinary personal style was as thrilling, varied, and passionate as the stories he brought to the screen.