Movie Directors Books - Page 6

Escape Artist: The Life and Films of John Sturges (Wisconsin Studies in Film)

Glenn Lovell

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Editorial Review:

Escape Artist—based on Glenn Lovell’s extensive interviews with John Sturges, his wife and children, and numerous stars including Clint Eastwood, Robert Duvall, and Jane Russell—is the first biography of the director of such acclaimed films as The Magnificent Seven, The Great Escape, and Bad Day at Black Rock. Lovell examines Sturges’s childhood in California during the Great Depression; his apprenticeship in the editing department of RKO Pictures, where he worked on such films as Gunga Din and Of Human Bondage; his service in the Army Air Corps in World War II; and his emergence as one of the first independent producer-directors in Hollywood. Chronicling the filmmaker’s relationships with such luminaries as Spencer Tracy, James Garner, Yul Brynner, and Frank Sinatra, Escape Artist interweaves biography with critical analyses of Sturges’s hits and misses. Along the way, Lovell addresses the reasons why Sturges has been overlooked in the ongoing discussion of postwar Hollywood and explores the director’s focus on masculinity, machismo, and male-bonding in big-budget, ensemble action films. Lovell also examines Sturges’s aesthetic sensibility, his talent for composing widescreen images, and his uncanny ability to judge raw talent—including that of Steve McQueen, Charles Bronson, and James Coburn, all of whom began their careers in Sturges’s movies.             This long overdue study of a major Hollywood director will find a welcome home in the libraries of film scholars, action movie buffs, and anyone interested in the popular culture of the twentieth century.

Print the Legend: The Life and Times of John Ford

Scott Eyman

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 19 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Comprehensive almost to a fault... 4 out of 5 stars.
7 of 8 people found this review helpful.

Unless you are old like me and remember many John Ford movies from their original 50's release dates, or you have a semi-professional interest in film directing, this book offers more than one needs to know about a complex, often unlikeable, sometimes generous, routinely selfish genius. It isn't just a bio of John Ford, respected director with a 40-year career...it also functions as a partial history of movie-making itself, since Ford began before 1920, when films were silent, and ended up in the mid-60's, when wide screens, technicolor, blatant sex and violence and changes in how movies were financed stranded him in a very different professional atmosphere. To a person with a more casual interest in Ford and his films, like me, the book had many surprises. Ford was cruel on the set to many actors whom he befriended away from the cameras, John Wayne and Hank Fonda included. Ford was a binge drinker, and kept his sprees separate from his duties until the mid-1950's, rather late in his progressive alcoholism. Ford was capable of great kindness, generosity and loyalty, but also held grudges for decades. He was not only personally brave in World War II while filming the real battle of Midway, he was tuned in enough to have joined the Navy and prepared for documenting the war on film a full year before Pearl Harbor. He also showed courage in standing up to the Communist witch-hunts in the early 50's. He was sometimes a liberal Democrat, sometimes a conservative Republican. His final decade was full of illness and idleness and loneliness and undoubtedly some bitterness. If you are a lover of "American" movies, John Ford's story will be essential for you. I'm glad I read it, but I don't think I'll ever need to read it a second time, or keep the book in my personal collection.

Editorial Review:

Brilliant, stubborn, witty, rebellious, irascible, and contradictory, John Ford remains an enduring symbol of Hollywood's Golden Age and one of its most respected directors. Through a career that spanned decades and 140 films -- among them such American masterpieces as The Searchers, The Grapes of Wrath, Stagecoach, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance -- John Ford left a cinematic legacy that few filmmakers will ever equal. Yet Ford himself was famously reticent about his personal life, often fabricating details and events. In this definitive look at the life and career of one of America's greatest directors, Scott Eyman offers a remarkable portrait of the man behind the legend that reveals how a saloon keeper's son from Maine helped to shape Hollywood's idea of America.

Remembering Walt

Amy Boothe Green, Howard E. Green, Ray Bradbury

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

The finest tribute to a great man 5 out of 5 stars.
2 of 3 people found this review helpful.

I was very happy while reading this book. I found all the things Walt's aquaintances had to say about him very interesting and credible. Very little seemed sugar coated (as Disney personel seem to be sometimes). I would make the assumption that Walt's personality was portrayed correctly by the many people that knew him. Throughout the course of reading this book I kept thinking about the quote that one amazon reviewer said that made me buy this book in the first place, "makes me wish I knew that man."

Editorial Review:

Larger than life, Disney has become synonymous with brilliant animation and magnificent theme parks. But what about the man himself? In this collection of remembrances, more than one hundred people recall the ways their lives were touched by this complex, remarkable man: animators who trained under him; directors inspired by his vision; actors who sought him out for advice and support; and family members who knew him best of all. There are many revealing insights about a man whose energy and imagination sparked a million ideas.

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again

Julia Phillips

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 37 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Oscar-winning producer Julia Phillips's work on Taxi Driver, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and The Sting made her famous. This is the memoir that made her infamous-a downfall chronicle of a private hell that could only have been written by someone with nothing left to lose.

"The hottest book of the year." (Newsweek)

"A hell of a story." (San Francisco Chronicle)

"One of the most honest books ever written about one of the most dishonest towns ever created." (Boston Globe)

"Gossip too hot even for the National Enquirer...(If your name's in here, take two Valium and read on)." (Los Angeles Magazine)

"A blistering look at la la land. A biting tale." (USA Today)

"Fuel-injected dishing." (New York Newsday)

"This no-holds-barred autobiography dissects Hollywood...in scathing detail...will no doubt bring Hollywood to its knees." (Mirabella)

"The ultimate Hollywood chronicle...the story of a life at the top." (Anne Rice)

Roger Corman: Blood-Sucking Vampires, Flesh-Eating Cockroaches, and Driller Killers

Beverly Gray

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Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

A pioneer of independent cinema, Roger Corman is a fascinating study in contrasts. As the original King of the Exploitation Film, he has filled his movies with images of blood-sucking vampires, rampaging biker gangs, vigilante strippers, and abducting aliens, all while producing each of his four-hundred-plus films on a shoestring budget and making a profit on nearly every one. In the process, Corman became the role model for today's independent filmmaker. This guru with a vision has also demonstrated an uncanny eye for talent, being among the first to recognize and employ the abilities of Jack Nicholson, Peter Fonda, Dennis Hopper, Francis Ford Coppola, Martin Scorsese, Jonathan Demme, Joe Dante, Ron Howard, John Sayles, and James Cameron to name but a few. Through interviews with eighty of Corman's friends and associates and photographs, Beverly Gray takes you behind the cameras and into the heart of Cormanville for a firsthand, insider's look at the man and the mogul, providing a compelling private and public perspective on this soft-spoken giant of the cinema.

Phallic Frenzy: Ken Russell and His Films (Cappella Books)

Joseph Lanza

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Ken Russell has made some of the most daring, disturbing, and beautifully photographed films of all time. Drawing from a wealth of historic and literary references, Russell’s subjects are astounding: deranged Ursuline nuns in a 17th-century French province, the inner demons of Mary Shelley and Lord Byron, the sexual angst of Tchaikovsky, the emotionally drained life of Rudolph Valentino, the messianism of a pinball wizard, the fury of lesbian vampires, the introspections of prostitutes. Russell’s movies offer not just brazen sensationalism but food for thought; they horrify yet inspire. And through it all, Russell maintains a simultaneously impish and intellectual sense of humor.

            The first full biography of the director, Phallic Frenzy is far from a dry, film-by-film analysis. It shows how Russell’s real life has often been as engaging and vibrant as his film scenarios. Here you’ll learn how Alan Bates and Oliver Reed compared their penis sizes for the nude wrestling scene in Women in Love; how Russell disfigured Paddy Chayevsky’s script for Altered States by having the actors holler out the lines as fast as possible, accompanied by spewed food and streams of spittle; and how Russell was slated to direct Evita, starring Liza Minnelli, and the “creative differences” that ensued. A madcap tale full of wild ideas, surreal situations, and a cavalcade of colorful personalities, Phallic Frenzy is as thrilling a ride as any Ken Russell film.

Images: My Life In Film

Ingmar Bergman

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Great Help for understanding Bergman 5 out of 5 stars.
16 of 16 people found this review helpful.

I took an Ingmar Bergman class, and I therefore had to watch a lot of Bergman films as well as analyze and write about them. Many of Bergman films as many know are sometimes very hard to understand. However this book cleared up so many things for me in the films. The fact the book is mostly Bergman commenting on his own films is great, so you don't have someone else trying to interpret someone else's mind. I you need or want to better understand and enjoy Bergman's works, get this book!!

Editorial Review:

Following the success of his bestselling autobiography The Magic Lantern, the most influential film director of our time shares his wisdom and insig hts about himself and his cinematic work. Bergman's career spanned 40 years and produced over 50 films, many of which are considered classics. Over 200 photos.

The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA, and the Hidden History of Hollywood

Dennis Mcdougal

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Total reviews: 15 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

The reviewer of the Boston Globe said point blank: "Over the years, I've read hundreds of books on Hollywood and the movie business, and this one is right at the top." As the elusive, tyrannical head of the Music Corporation of America (MCA) until the 1990s, Lew Wasserman was the most powerful and feared man in show business for more than half a century. His career spanned the entire history of the movies, from the silent era to the present, and he was guru to Alfred Hitchcock, Marilyn Monroe, Marlon Brando, and Jimmy Stewart, and to a new generation of filmmakers beginning with Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. For more than four years, Dennis McDougal interviewed over 350 people who knew the man with the giant dark horn-rimmed glasses—colleagues, relatives, rivals—and drew on tens of thousands of pages of documents to produce this extraordinary and first-ever portrait of a legend and his times, a book that the New York Times Book Review called "thoroughly reported and engrossing" and that the Daily News called, simply, "a bombshell."

If They Move . . . Kill 'Em!: The Life and TImes of Sam Peckinpah

David Weddle

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Total reviews: 11 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

The only major biography of Sam Peckinpah in print, David Weddle's If They Move...Kill 'Em! tells the wild story of Peckinpah's life with novelistic verve and does justice to one of the most important bodies of work in American cinema. Born into a clan of lumberjacks, ranchers, and frontier lawyers, David Samuel Peckinpah served in the Marines and then made his way to Hollywood, where he worked on a string of low-budget features before being hired as a writer for Gunsmoke in 1955. Quickly becoming the hottest writer in television, Peckinpah went on to direct a phenomenal series of features, including Ride the High Country, Straw Dogs, The Getaway, Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, and The Wild Bunch. The life he led -- glamorous, wild, and beset by personal demons -- is as vivid as his films. A hopeless romantic and a grim nihilist, inspiration to such luminaries as DePalma, Scorsese, and Tarantino, Sam Peckinpah was an audacious American original. If They Move...Kill 'Em! is his wild and woolly story.

Sam Peckinpah: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series)

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Editorial Review:

Sam Peckinpah (1925-1984), an accomplished writer and director of television westerns, did not attract media attention until the release of his second feature-length film, the award-winning Ride the High Country. Peckinpah revealed in early interviews his deep knowledge of film history, an uncompromising aesthetic, and an intolerance for any crew members who did not share his capacity for hard work. As his career progressed, he began having increasingly difficult times with producers who did not share his vision. His problems with them emerge as a major focus of his interviews.

Sam Peckinpah: Interviews features the combustible director discussing his best-known films, including the gory western The Wild Bunch, the unsettling and controversial Straw Dogs (which Pauline Kael described as "the first American film that is a fascist work of art"), and the crime thriller The Getaway. In these conversations, Peckinpah's candor--about himself, filmmaking, studios, male/female relations, violence, and contemporary politics--provides a thoughtful portrait of a polarizing filmmaker.

Kevin J. Hayes is professor of English at the University of Central Oklahoma. His previous books include Poe and the Printed Word, Folklore and Book Culture, and An American Cycling Odyssey, 1887, among others. He edited Charlie Chaplin: Interviews and Conversations with Jack Kerouac, both from University Press of Mississippi.