Sin in Soft Focus

Sin in Soft Focus: Pre-Code Hollywood
by Mark A. Vieira

Sin in Soft Focus showcases a scintillating era in film history-"pre-Code Hollywood"-that boldly creative period in the early 1930s when defiant producers flouted the restrictions of the censors, who tried-but failed-to ban everything from sex, profanity, and excessive violence to racial mingling, drugs, and even "lustful kissing." Lavishly illustrated with film stills, many of them rare, the book captures the stunning artistry and bravura of the era's controversial films. Here are Joan Crawford, Clara Bow, and Marlene Dietrich portraying powerful women of questionable character; here too are James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, and Paul Muni rising to fame as gangsters, gamblers, and debauched criminals. The first book to treat the pre-Code films as a discrete body of work, this lively volume is both substantive and appealing.

Stanley Kubrick: Interviews

Stanley Kubrick: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series)
by Gene D. Phillips

Kubrick, the American who made his home in London, England, to create films without influence from Hollywood, had expertise in cinematography unlike Stone and Huston. On many of his films, he operated the camera in some scenes. His concern with the visual aspects of filmmaking is apparent from such works as A Clockwork Orange , 2001: A Space Odyssey , and Barry Lyndon . But all three directors could operate in multiple filmmaking roles, hence the label auteur; and Kubrick personifies the label, though he never won an Oscar. Some of the interesting pieces include Colin Young's article in Film Quarterly in 1959, a piece from the book The Movie Makers (1973), and the last interview by Tim Cahill in Rolling Stone in 1987.

Martin Scorsese: Interviews

Martin Scorsese: Interviews (Interviews With Filmmakers Series)
by Peter Brunette

From the moment he captured the film world's attention with Mean Streets (1973), a portrait of life at the fringes of the Mob, it was clear that a dazzling cinematic talent had arrived on the scene. With Robert DeNiro, one of the most talented young actors from this film, Scorsese went on to make some of the greatest American films of the postwar period, including Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), and Goodfellas (1990). A Scorsese film seldom fails to stir controversy, for his devotion to realism has led him to forthrightly depict violence and its frightening randomness in the modern world. His biblical film also created quite a stir. This adaptation of Kazantzakis's The Last Temptation of Christ generated outrage among conservative religious leaders.

Scorsese, however, has not limited himself to contemporary, violent urban dramas or new interpretations of biblical subjects. Other widely heralded Scorsese films include Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore (1974), New York, New York (1977), The Last Waltz (1978), The King of Comedy (1983), After Hours (1985), The Color of Money (1986), Cape Fear (1991), The Age of Innocence (1993), Casino (1995), and Kundun (1998).

These interviews begin with conversations about the highly autobiographical Mean Streets (1973), which first brought Scorsese serious attention, and end with conversations about Kundun, an overtly political biography of the Dalai Lama of Tibet, released in early 1998.

"I look for a thematic idea running through my movies, he says, and I see that it's the outsider struggling for recognition. I realize that all my life I've been an outsider, and above all, being lonely but never realizing it."

A Personal Journey Through American Movies

A Personal Journey Through American Movies
by Martin Scorsese

An engaging and lavishly illustrated look at American film, from the master director. Based on the scripts of two documentaries on American film by Scorsese and writer/director Wilson, this is less a history than a catalogue raisonn‚ of the films that have shaped Scorsese's own works. He is a notoriously devoted film buff, and his knowledge of cinema is both encyclopedic and deeply, even humbly, practical: ``The more pictures I make, the more I realize that I really don't know. I'm always looking for something or someone that I can learn from.'' One of the rewards of this book is the number of filmmakers, such as Boetticher and Ulmer, and films, such as Silver Lode, that Scorsese retrieves from obscurity--the filmography at the end is not to be missed. As a director, he is understandably a strong proponent of the auteur theory and its emphasis on films as personal expressions. In fact, this book is organized around various modes and manners of directing, from the ``Director as Storyteller'' to the ``Director as Smuggler'' to the ``Director as Illusionist.'' Scorsese and Wilson's discussion of the difference between directors who worked subversively within the system (smugglers such as Fritz Lang) and those who worked against the system (iconoclasts such as Orson Welles) is particularly revealing, as is their analysis of the three uniquely American genres: musicals, Westerns, and gangster films. However, in line with this work's coffee table aspirations, Scorsese and Wilson often tend to favor ``let's go to the highlights'' film appreciation over rigorous film criticism. This book also suffers from its screenplay origins--it doesn't read nearly as well as it plays--but it is a worthy albeit idiosyncratic window on American film and its shaping influence on a major director.

King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino

King Pulp: The Wild World of Quentin Tarantino
by Paul A. Woods

Quentin Tarantino, director of Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction, and writer of True Romance, Natural Born Killers and From Dusk Till Dawn, is undeniably the cult director of the decade. Here, Paul Woods traces the life, films and influences of the self-confessed 'movie geek' who has become the film stylist of the nineties, and one of Hollywood's hottest properties. Fully updated to include Tarantino's latest hit movie, Jackie Brown.

Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files

Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files
by Paul A. Woods

For the first time since Hitchcock, moviegoers have embraced a film director whose name is synonymous with his own genre — a culmination of the crime, gangster, and film noir genres that both celebrates and comments ironically upon itself. Part of the Ultrascreen series, Quentin Tarantino: The Film Geek Files charts the controversial success of Tarantino's self-directed films and screenplays. From Reservoir Dogs, True Romance, and Pulp Fiction to Natural Born Killers, Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill, Tarantino has created a unique aesthetic drawing on pop-culture icons and ideals gleaned from movies, TV shows, comic strips, and old Top Ten records. This definitive, illustrated book provides the most essential interviews, essays, and reviews of Tarantino's career — from geekish video-store clerk to a cult figure of rock-star status. Aimed at a young, literate, moviegoing audience, Quentin Tarantino is a colorful guide to the brash, media-saturated world that spawned the premier filmmaker of his generation. Includes 70 black-and-white illustrations.

Quentin Tarantino: Interviews

Quentin Tarantino: Interviews
(Conversations With Filmmakers Series)
by Gerald Peary

Not since Martin Scorsese in the mid-1970s has a young American filmmaker made such an instant impact on international cinema as Quentin Tarantino, whose PULP FICTION won the Cannes Film Festival's Grand Prix Award. A manic talker, Tarantino obsesses about American pop culture and his favorite movies and movie makers.

Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies

Quentin Tarantino: The Man and His Movies
by Jami Bernard

A premature biography, shallow and uninspired. Quentin Tarantino might be a talented filmmaker. He has written a few well-received scripts and directed two clever though overhyped films - Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction - but he has nothing approaching an oeuvre to his name. His career is still inchoate, even fetal, and the history of Hollywood is heavy with talents that quickly crashed and burned, sometimes justly, sometimes not. Bernard may be a movie critic for New York's Daily News, but she writes like an amateur gossip columnist. Despite a palsy-walsy "Quentin" tone, she wallows in trivial scandal, chronicling Tarantino's every spat and unkindness as he climbed the greasy pole of success from video-store clerk to film director. In Bernard's portrait he emerges as an ego-driven ingrate, breaking promises, betraying friends, all of which, of course, have almost nothing to do with his talent. More usefully, Bernard illuminates Tarantino's substantial "borrowings." In a manner that transcends mere postmodern art-about-art, Tarantino's work is fundamentally rooted in and derived from other films. Sometimes it is just a gesture here, a line there. And then there is Reservoir Dogs, for example, a great deal of which is "inspired" by a Hong Kong action movie, City on Fire. As T.S. Eliot once wrote, "Minor poets borrow. Great poets steal." Where Tarantino fits in this formulation is far from certain yet. Patience is its own reward. Perhaps Tarantino will one day merit a biography; it certainly won't be this one.

Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas

Skywalking: The Life And Films Of George Lucas, Updated Edition
by Dale Pollock

Though Pollock makes much of the notion that a near-fatal teenage car accident is the secret behind director/producer Lucas' super-success ("From a close encounter with death grew a fanatical commitment to hard work and artistic excellence"), the emphasis in this rather overblown, essentially adoring biography is on detailed movie-making. With lots of interview-quotes, Lucas is followed from skinny Modesto adolescence through his echt-1950s phase to the USC film school and wife Marcia. (She's a major quote-source throughout, and the only one "brave enough to take Lucas on in a head-to-head dispute and occasionally emerge victorious.") There's the colleague-ship with Coppola, their anti-studio Zoetrope film company, their split after arguments about American Graffiti profits. Then, of course: "The Agony and the Ecstasy of Star Wars" - with almost day-by-day accounts of the shooting, the problems, the special effects. . . and the oh-wow popularity. ("Marcia and George drove to a Hamburger Hamlet that just happened to be across the street from the Chinese Theater, where there was an immense traffic jam and crowds of people.") And, after similar treatment for Empire Strikes Back and somewhat briefer attention to Raiders of the Lost Ark, there's a day-in-the-life ("he crawls out of bed at 6:00, as the morning sun makes its first assault on the fog that blankets San Francisco Bay and San Anselmo") and a preview of Return of the Jedi. A cut or two above fan-mag gush - and definitely of interest to Star Wars aficionados.

Steven Spielberg

Steven Spielberg: A Biography
by Joseph Mcbride

Writing a biography is tough enough when the subject is dead and the biographer must rely on a paper trail and recollections of contemporaries to relate the essence of the man or woman's life. When the subject still lives--and especially when he is as powerful as Steven Spielberg--a whole new set of problems emerge. For one thing, it's difficult to find anyone willing to criticize a man who pulls as many strings in the film industry as Spielberg; for another, how does one evaluate a career that is still in progress? If the definitive Spielberg biography cannot yet be written, Joseph McBride's Steven Spielberg: A Biography will suffice in the interim. Though certainly affected by the aforementioned constraints, McBride still creates an impressive portrait of the man behind Schindler's List, E.T., Jurassic Park, and many, many more.

McBride is especially effective at limning the contours of Spielberg's childhood. Born in 1946 to Arnold and Leah Spielberg, the young Steven endured both frequent moves and his parents' unhappy domestic life. These factors, combined with the anti-Semitism he encountered as a teenager, drove the introverted Spielberg to seek approval through filmmaking. In addition to exploring Spielberg's private life, McBride offers some perceptive criticism of his work. Anyone interested in the film industry and Spielberg's place in it will find Joseph McBride's Steven Spielberg a valuable resource.

Steven Spielberg: Interviews

Steven Spielberg: Interviews
(Conversations With Filmmakers Series)
by Lester D. Friedman

Steven Spielberg has become a brand name and a force that extends far beyond the movie screen. Phrases like "phone home" and the music score from Jaws are now part of our cultural script, appearing in commercials, comedy routines, and common conversation.

Yet few scholars have devoted time to studying Spielberg's vast output of popular films despite the director's financial and aesthetic achievements. Spanning twenty-five years of Spielberg's career, Steven Spielberg: Interviews explores the issues, the themes, and the financial considerations surrounding his work. The blockbuster creator of E.T., Jaws, and Schindler's List talks about dreams and the almighty dollar.

"I'm not really interested in making money," he says. "That's always come as the result of success, but it's not been my goal, and I've had a tough time proving that to people."

Ranging from Spielberg's twenties to his mid-fifties, the interviews chart his evolution from a brash young filmmaker trying to make his way in Hollywood, to his spectacular blockbuster triumphs, to his maturation as a director seeking to inspire the imagination with meaningful subjects.

The Steven Spielberg who emerges in these talks is a complex mix of businessman and artist, of arrogance and insecurity, of shallowness and substance. Often interviewers will uncover the director's human side, noting how changes in Spielberg's personal life -- marriage, divorce, fatherhood, remarriage -- affect his movies. But always the interviewers find keys to the story-telling and filmmaking talent that have made Spielberg's characters and themes shape our times and inhabit our dreams.

"Every time I go to a movie, it's magic, no matter what the movie's about," he says. "Whether you watch eight hours of Shoah or whether it's Ghostbusters, when the lights go down in the theater and the movie fades in, it's magic."

This is Orson Welles

This is Orson Welles
by Peter Bogdanovich

Innovative film and theater director, radio producer, actor, writer, painter, narrator, and magician, Orson Welles (1915–1985) was the last true Renaissance man of the twentieth century. From such great radio works as "War of the Worlds" to his cinematic masterpieces Citizen Kane, The Magnificent Ambersons, Othello, Macbeth, Touch of Evil, and Chimes at Midnight, Welles was a master storyteller, as expansive as he was enigmatic. This Is Orson Welles, a collection of penetrating and witty conversations between Welles and Peter Bogdanovich, includes insights into Welles's radio, theater, film, and television work; Hollywood producers, directors, and stars; and almost everything else, from acting to magic, literature to comic strips, bullfighters to gangsters. Now including Welles's revealing memo to Universal about his artistic intentions for Touch of Evil, (of which the "director's edition" was released in Fall 1998) this book, which Welles ultimately considered his autobiography, is a masterpiece as unique and engaging as the best of his works.

Rebel Without A Crew: Or how a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player

Rebel Without A Crew: Or how a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player
by Robert Rodriguez

In his own witty and straight-shooting style, Robert Rodriguez discloses all the strategies and innovative techniques he used to make El Mariachi on the cheap—including filming before noon so he wouldn't have to buy the actors lunch. You'll witness Rodriguez's whirlwind, 'Mariachi-style' filmmaking, where creativity—not money—is used to solve problems. Culminating in his "Ten-Minute Film School," this book may render conventional film-school programs obsolete. Rodriguez also offers an insider's view of the amazing courtship he enjoyed with Hollywood's A-list. It's an entertaining tour of Hollywood's deal-making machine as he navigates you through studio meetings, pitch sessions, and power lunches. Candidly divulging all the tactics and tempting lures the warring studios used to win him over, he admits that he barely escaped with his movie and his soul intact. Exploding the conventional wisdom that you need at least a million dollars to make a feature film, this nuts-and-bolts account features the full "El Mariachi" shooting script, postproduction tips, film festival anecdotes, and publicity blitz secrets. He demonstrates the countless ways to do for free what the pros spend thousands (or more) on without a second thought. "Rebel Without a Crew" is both one man's remarkable story and the essential guide for anyone who has a celluloid story to tell and the determination to see it through.