Writers on Film

A crossover episode as I talk with Martin Woessner the author of Terrence Malick and the Examined Life, one of the best books written on the visionary filmmaker. We talk about the book before settling in to a discussion of Knight of Cups, Malick's seventh film.

Martin's book is available here.

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Buy the book here, or here.

Revolution in 35mm: Political Violence and Resistance in Cinema from the Arthouse to the Grindhouse, 1960–1990 examines how political violence and resistance was represented in arthouse and cult films from 1960 to 1990.

This historical period spans the Algerian war of independence and the early wave of postcolonial struggles that reshaped the Global South, through the collapse of Soviet Communism in the late 1980s. It focuses on films related to the rise of protest movements by students, workers, and leftist groups, as well as broader countercultural movements, Black Power, the rise of feminism, and so on. The book also includes films that explore the splinter groups that engaged in violent, urban guerrilla struggles throughout the 1970s and 1980s, as the promise of widespread radical social transformation failed to materialize: the Weathermen and the Black Liberation Army in the United States, the Red Army Faction in West Germany and Japan, and Italy’s Red Brigades. Many of these movements were deeply connected to culture, including cinema, and they expressed their values through it. 

Twelve authors, including film critics and academics, deliver a diverse examination of how filmmakers around the world reacted to the political violence and resistance movements of the period and how this was expressed on screen. This includes looking at the production, distribution, and screening of these films, audience and critical reaction, the attempted censorship or suppression of much of this work, and how directors and producers eluded these restrictions.

Including over two hundred illustrations, the book examines filmmaking movements like the French, Japanese, German, and Yugoslavian New Waves; subgenres like spaghetti westerns, Italian poliziotteschi, Blaxploitation, and mondo movies; and films that reflect the values of specific movements, including feminists, Vietnam War protesters, and Black militants. The work of influential and well-known political filmmakers such as Costa-Gavras, Gillo Pontecorvo, and Glauber Rocha is examined alongside grindhouse cinema and lesser-known titles by a host of all-but-forgotten filmmakers, including many from the Global South that deserve to be rediscovered.

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This interview with Jack Fisk was recorded as part of my research for the book The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick. As such it was never meant for broadcast but with Jack's permission I'm presenting this edited version. Jack picks up from part one to talk about his later collaborations with Malick on The Thin Red Line and The New World, as well as his work on the Weightless Trilogy.

My book is now available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

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I'm joined by Walter Chaw to talk Walter Hill and his book A Walter Hill Film as well as look back on the year of 2024.

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Terrence Malick's 6th film premiered at the Venice Film Festival and starred Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko as a pair of lovers watching their relationship fall apart.

My biography of Terrence Malick The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

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Terrence Malick's fifth film was a culmination of decades of work: The Tree of Life. It won the Palme d'Or and boasted his most intimate and cosmic vision.

Shane Hazen worked on the film, first as an intern before finishing the film as one of the last editors on board.

My biography of Terrence Malick The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

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Die Hard - is it a Christmas movie? or not? Do we care? Did we ever?

But it's a good excuse to talk to Brian Abrams about his brilliant book Die Hard: an Oral History, available here.

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Joseph McBride - film historian and one time actor for Orson Welles - talks about his new book George Cukor's People: Acting for a Master Director. It is available as an e-book now and will be published the first week of January, 2025, in hardback. For more information click HERE.

From the publisher:

"The director of classic films such as Sylvia Scarlett, The Philadelphia Story, Gaslight, Adam’s Rib, A Star Is Born, and My Fair Lady, George Cukor is widely admired but often misunderstood. Reductively stereotyped in his time as a “woman’s director”—a thinly veiled, disparaging code for “gay”—he brilliantly directed a wide range of iconic actors and actresses, including Cary Grant, Greta Garbo, Spencer Tracy, Joan Crawford, Marilyn Monroe, and Maggie Smith. As Katharine Hepburn, the star of ten Cukor films, told the director, “All the people in your pictures are as goddamned good as they can possibly be, and that’s your stamp.”

"In this groundbreaking, lavishly illustrated critical study, Joseph McBride provides insightful and revealing essayistic portraits of Cukor’s actors in their most memorable roles. The queer filmmaker gravitated to socially adventurous, subversively rule-breaking, audacious dreamers who are often sexually transgressive and gender fluid in ways that seem strikingly modern today. McBride shows that Cukor’s seemingly self-effacing body of work is characterized by a discreet way of channeling his feelings through his actors. He expertly cajoled actors, usually gently but sometimes with bracing harshness, to delve deeply into emotional areas they tended to keep safely hidden. Cukor’s wry wit, his keen sense of psychological and social observation, his charm and irony, and his toughness and resilience kept him active for more than five decades in Hollywood. George Cukor’s People gives him the in-depth, multifaceted examination his rich achievement deserves."

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Terrence Malick's third film The Thin Red Line (1998) was a stunning return after a hiatus of 20 years. Writer Jeremy Arnold joins me to talk through the film.

My biography of Terrence Malick The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fspn It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! -

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Jack Fisk was Terrence Malick's production designer for almost his entire career. The two first met on Badlands and here Jack talks with me about his first two films with Malick. The second part of the interview will be released soon. The interview has been edited and condensed.

My biography of Terrence Malick The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fspn It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! -

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Terrence Malick's second film Days of Heaven (1978) was an immersive and visionary piece of work. Writer and documentary filmmaker Ian Nathan joins me to talk through the film.

My biography of Terrence Malick The Magic Hours: The Films and Hidden Life of Terrence Malick is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

Get NordVPN 2Y plan + 4 months extra here ➼ https://nordvpn.com/fspn It’s risk-free with Nord’s 30-day money-back guarantee! -

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Zombies want brains. Vampires want blood. Cannibals want human flesh. All monsters need feeding.

Horror has been embraced by mainstream pop culture more than ever before, with horror characters and aesthetics infecting TV, music videos and even TikTok trends. Yet even with the commercial and critical success of The Babadook, Hereditary, Get Out, The Haunting of Hill House, Yellowjackets and countless other horror films and TV series over the last few years, loving the genre still prompts the question: what's wrong with you? Implying, of course, that there is something not quite right about the people who make and consume it.

In Feeding the Monster, Anna Bogutskaya dispels this notion once and for all by examining how horror responds to and fuels our feelings of fear, anxiety, pain, hunger and power.

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Terrence Malick's first film Badlands (1973) introduced the world to a new visionary talent. Tom Shone joins me to talk through the film.

The biography The Magic Hours is available from all good book shops and online sources, including here.

Camille Saint-Saëns: Le Carnaval des Animaux

Performers

Pianos: Neil and Nancy O'Doan

Orchestra: Seattle Youth Symphony, conducted by Vilem Sokol.

Composed 1886; recorded c. 1980.

Source The Al Goldstein collection in the Pandora Music repository at ibiblio.org.

Used under the license.

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Dr. Sheri Chinen Biesen is Professor of Film History at Rowan University and author of Through a Noir Lens: Adapting Film Noir Visual Style (Columbia University Press, 2024), Blackout: World War II and the Origins of Film Noir (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), Music in the Shadows: Noir Musical Films (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014), and Film Censorship: Regulating America’s Screen (Columbia University Press, 2018). She received her Ph.D. at the University of Texas at Austin, M.A. and B.A. at the University of Southern California School of Cinema-Television and has taught at USC, University of California, University of Texas, and in England. She has contributed to the BBC documentary The Rules of Film Noir, Turner Classic Movies’ Public Enemies, NPR, Warner Bros. Gangster Collection, Film Criticism, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, Film and History, Film Noir: The Directors, The Netflix Effect: Technology and Entertainment in the 21st Century, Hollywood on Location, Literature/Film Quarterly, Netflix Nostalgia, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Film Noir: The Encyclopedia, Gangster Film Reader, Film Noir Reader 4, The Historian, Television and Television History, Popular Culture Review, served as Secretary of the Literature/Film Association, Founding Chair of the ‘Stars & Screen’ Film & Media History Conference, serves on the editorial board of Film Criticism, and edited The Velvet Light Trap.

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Steven Cohan talks about his new book: On Audrey Hepburn: an Opinionated Guide

Provides an original take on fashion in her films and shows how it was key to her popularity

Focuses on Hepburn's abilities and craft as an actress; Offers a substantive and critical analysis of her “Cinderella” films as a discernible cycle; Argues that her striking success and popularity as a movie star was not only due to her unique physical features but to specific factors of postwar culture in the 1950s.

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I talk to Professor Jie Li, the winner of the Kraszna-Krausz Prize Moving Image Book Award.

Please note she will be delivering a lecture in London later in November, details below.

Friday 29th November, 6pm

Venue: BLOC, ArtsOne, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road London E1 4NS

Free to attend, booking essential

Click here to book

The Foundation is delighted to be collaborating with Queen Mary University, London to present an evening celebrating the winner of this year’s Moving Image Book Award Professor Jie Li, for her book ‘Cinematic Guerrillas Propaganda, Projectionists, and Audiences in Socialist China‘ (Columbia University Press).

Featuring: Jie Li, Professor of East Asian Languages and Civilizations, Harvard University and Dr. Kiki Tianqi Yu, Senior Lecturer in Film Studies at Queen Mary University of London.

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In all his films, Wes Anderson turns the mundane into magic by building distinctive and eccentric worlds. But how well do you know the man behind the camera? Discover the inspirations of one of our most revered auteurs with The Worlds of Wes Anderson.

Anderson’s playful and vibrant aesthetic is universally admired – but how has he managed to create such a recognisable identity?

From Hitchcock and Spielberg to Truffaut and Varda, there are countless homages and references scattered throughout Anderson’s filmography, while his cultural anchor points go far beyond film and into the worlds of art and literature.

Evocations of place and time underpin his work, from mid-century Paris in The French Dispatch to grand pre-war Europe in The Grand Budapest Hotel, while cultural institutions – such as Jacques Cousteau and The New Yorker magazine – are other touchstones.

For Wes Anderson fans and cinephiles alike, this is an essential insight into the creative process of one of the world’s most unique filmmakers.

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The first major biography of the French filmmaker hailed by Martin Scorsese as “one of the Gods of cinema.”

Over the course of her sixty-five-year career, the longest of any female filmmaker, Agnès Varda (1928–2019) wrote and directed some of the most acclaimed films of her era, from her tour de force Cléo from 5 to 7 (1962), a classic of modernist cinema, to the beloved documentary The Gleaners and I (2000) four decades later. She helped to define the French New Wave, inspired an entire generation of filmmakers, and was recognized with major awards at the Cannes, Berlin, and Venice Film Festivals, as well as an honorary Oscar at the Academy Awards.

In this lively biography, former Philadelphia Inquirer film critic Carrie Rickey explores the “complicated passions” that informed Varda’s charmed life and indelible work. Rickey traces Varda’s three remarkable careers―as still photographer, as filmmaker, and as installation artist. She explains how Varda was a pioneer in blurring the lines between documentary and fiction, using the latest digital technology and carving a path for women in the movie industry. She demonstrates how Varda was years ahead of her time in addressing sexism, abortion, labor exploitation, immigrant rights, and race relations with candor and incisiveness. She makes clear Varda’s impact on contemporary figures like Ava DuVernay, Greta Gerwig, Barry Jenkins, the Safdie brothers, and Martin Scorsese, who called her one of the Gods of cinema. And she delves into Varda’s incredibly rich social life with figures such as Harrison Ford, Jean-Luc Godard, Jim Morrison, Susan Sontag, and Andy Warhol, and her nearly forty-year marriage to the celebrated director Jacques Demy.

A Complicated Passion is the vibrant biography that Varda, regarded by many as the greatest female filmmaker of all time, has long deserved.

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Jason Solomons has been a film critic, one of the first film podcasters, an author and is now moving into a new role as a film producer with his company Movie Love Productions. He's currently working on adapting and bringing the brilliant best-selling memoir A Waiter in Paris to cinemas; and on the folk horror comedy The King of the Witches, based on a true story that’s never been told.

His book Woody Allen: Film by Film is available where all good books are sold.

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Jez Conolly is the author of the Devil's Advocate edition of his book The Thing (available here) as well as an essay in Volume 3 of Scarred for Life (see here).

Consigned to the deep freeze of critical and commercial reception upon its release in 1982, The Thing has bounced back spectacularly to become one of the most highly regarded productions from the 1980s 'Body Horror' cycle of films, experiencing a wholesale and detailed reappraisal that has secured its place in the pantheon of modern cinematic horror. Thirty years on, and with a recent prequel reigniting interest, Jez Conolly looks back to the film's antecedents and to the changing nature of its reception and the work that it has influenced. The themes discussed include the significance of The Thing's subversive antipodal environment, the role that the film has played in the corruption of the onscreen monstrous form, the qualities that make it an exemplar of the director's work and the relevance of its legendary visual effects despite the advent of CGI. Topped and tailed by a full plot breakdown and an appreciation of its notoriously downbeat ending, this exploration of the events at US Outpost 31 in the winter of 1982 captures The Thing's sub-zero terror in all its gory glory.

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John Bleasdale talks about Paul Verhoeven, the Coen Brothers, Paul Thomas Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, David Fincher and film bros with Adam Nayman, author of Paul Thomas Anderson Masterworks and The Coen Brothers. Adam talks about his beginnings as film critic in Toronto. He also tells John his thoughts on the current state of film criticism, including the impact on social media on the film discourse. Adam's recommended film book is Un-American Psycho: Brian De Palma and the Political Invisible by Chris Dumas.

Buy Adam's latest book here.

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Chris Calogero became a viral sensation with his videos skewering movie clichés, so I had to get him on the podcast to talk police lieutenants and filthy coroners.

His new comedy album HUSKY BOY can be ordered here and all the information you want is available from his site, here.

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John Bleasdale talks to Michael Benson on his book Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C Clarke and the Making of a Masterpiece.

Buy the Book Here.

The definitive story of the making of 2001: A Space Odyssey , acclaimed today as one of the greatest films ever made, and of director Stanley Kubrick and writer Arthur C. Clarke- "a tremendous explication of a tremendous film....Breathtaking" ( The Washington Post ).

Fifty years ago a strikingly original film had its premiere. Still acclaimed as one of the most remarkable and important motion pictures ever made, 2001: A Space Odyssey depicted the first contacts between humanity and extraterrestrial intelligence. The movie was the product of a singular collaboration between Stanley Kubrick and science fiction visionary Arthur C. Clarke. Fresh off the success of his cold war satire Dr. Strangelove, Kubrick wanted to make the first truly first-rate science fiction film. Drawing from Clarke's ideas and with one of the author's short stories as the initial inspiration, their bold vision benefited from pioneering special effects that still look extraordinary today, even in an age of computer-generated images.

In Space Odyssey , author, artist, and award-winning filmmaker Michael Benson "delivers expert inside stuff" ( San Francisco Chronicle ) from his extensive research of Kubrick's and Clarke's archives. He has had the cooperation of Kubrick's widow, Christiane, and interviewed most of the key people still alive who worked on the film. Drawing also from other previously unpublished interviews, Space Odyssey provides a 360-degree view of the film from its genesis to its legacy, including many previously untold stories. And it features dozens of photos from the making of the film, most never previously published.

"At last! The dense, intense, detailed, and authoritative saga of the making of the greatest motion picture I've ever seen ... Michael Benson has done the Cosmos a great service" (Academy Award-winning actor Tom Hanks).

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Ehsan Khoshbakht, curator of the Retrospective: “How to tell the story of a leading Hollywood studio while both teasing out the nuances and stressing the significance of canonical titles worthy of continued celebration? This has been the main challenge for our 40-title retrospective mapping Columbia Pictures’ glorious rise from Poverty Row to major force in Hollywood. ‘Lady with the Torch’ is an unofficial history of Columbia Pictures that celebrates big names, Oscar winners, and era-defining films but pays equal attention to the B-unit and yet to be discovered masters. Think the fast-talking career women of screwball comedies or think existentialist cowboys, prophetic anti-fascist quickies or unsettling ‘problem pictures’. Sony's generosity means we will bring to Locarno new restorations of films by John Ford and Phil Karlson, among many other gems. Once upon a time there was a brilliant exchange between art and commerce, between the system and the artist, and this Retrospective will celebrate that.”

Visit the site here.

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Lawrence Kasdan has created some of the most influential films in Hollywood history. He is the screenwriter of such beloved blockbusters as The Empire Strikes Back (1980), Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981), The Bodyguard (1992), and The Force Awakens (2015). Simultaneously, he has gained critical acclaim as the director of pictures that dissect contemporary American society: Body Heat (1981), The Big Chill (1983), The Accidental Tourist (1988), and Grand Canyon (1991).

Brett Davies is Associate Professor of English at Meiji University, Tokyo

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The book was also the basis for the podcast series The Plot Thickens which you can listen to here.

“So much better, so much more fun, than the movie it is about that one must be thankful to the filmmakers for producing such a spectacle, if only so that this book could be written.”—Vogue

When film director Brian De Palma invited author Julie Salamon to follow him on the set of The Bonfire of the Vanities, he had no idea that the fifty-million-dollar movie would become one of Hollywood’s biggest flops. The Devil’s Candy is the juicy, bestselling exposé that sent Hollywood honchos running for cover. Who was responsible for the last-minute casting change that cost four million dollars? Who knew that Melanie Griffith would show up halfway through the filming with a new set of breasts? Settle down in your front-row seat for a story that has more drama, hilarity, greed, folly, and ego than the movie that eventually ended up on the screen. Expertly reported and elegantly written, The Devil’s Candy is irresistible fun, a classic insider’s look at the movie business.

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John Bleasdale talks to author Mark Harris about his books Pictures from the Revolution and his recent biography of Mike NIchols.

Mark's recommended book is Jason Bailey's Fun City Cinema, available here.

Here's the blurb to Mark's most recent book:

An instant New York Times Bestseller!

A magnificent biography of one of the most protean creative forces in American entertainment history, a life of dazzling highs and vertiginous plunges--some of the worst largely unknown until now--by the acclaimed author of Pictures at a Revolution and Five Came Back

Mike Nichols burst onto the scene as a wunderkind: while still in his twenties, he was half of a hit improv duo with Elaine May that was the talk of the country. Next he directed four consecutive hit plays, won back-to-back Tonys, ushered in a new era of Hollywood moviemaking with Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and followed it with The Graduate, which won him an Oscar and became the third-highest-grossing movie ever. At thirty-five, he lived in a three-story Central Park West penthouse, drove a Rolls-Royce, collected Arabian horses, and counted Jacqueline Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, Leonard Bernstein, and Richard Avedon as friends.

Where he arrived is even more astonishing given where he had begun: born Igor Peschkowsky to a Jewish couple in Berlin in 1931, he was sent along with his younger brother to America on a ship in 1939. The young immigrant boy caught very few breaks. He was bullied and ostracized--an allergic reaction had rendered him permanently hairless--and his father died when he was just twelve, leaving his mother alone and overwhelmed.

The gulf between these two sets of facts explains a great deal about Nichols's transformation from lonely outsider to the center of more than one cultural universe--the acute powers of observation that first made him famous; the nourishment he drew from his creative partnerships, most enduringly with May; his unquenchable drive; his hunger for security and status; and the depressions and self-medications that brought him to terrible lows. It would take decades for him to come to grips with his demons. In an incomparable portrait that follows Nichols from Berlin to New York to Chicago to Hollywood, Mark Harris explores, with brilliantly vivid detail and insight, the life, work, struggle, and passion of an artist and man in constant motion. Among the 250 people Harris interviewed: Elaine May, Meryl Streep, Stephen Sondheim, Robert Redford, Glenn Close, Tom Hanks, Candice Bergen, Emma Thompson, Annette Bening, Natalie Portman, Julia Roberts, Lorne Michaels, and Gloria Steinem.

Mark Harris gives an intimate and evenhanded accounting of success and failure alike; the portrait is not always flattering, but its ultimate impact is to present the full story of one of the most richly interesting, complicated, and consequential figures the worlds of theater and motion pictures have ever seen. It is a triumph of the biographer's art.

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Movies Go Fourth is a celebration of the fourth movies in the most popular film franchises of all time. It offers behind-the-scenes stories of fourth films from such beloved series as Star Wars, Star Trek, and James Bond. It also explores infamous fourth films, including Jaws: The Revenge, Superman IV: The Quest for Peace, and Batman & Robin. This riveting book reveals the inside scoop on some of the biggest films in horror (Halloween, Nightmare on Elm Street), sci-fi (Highlander, Terminator, Planet of the Apes), action (James Bond, Die Hard, Rambo) and comedy (Police Academy, Home Alone). Author Mark Edlitz also examines notable unmade fourth films, such as Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather: Part IV and Sam Raimi's Spider-Man 4.

Film trilogies used to signify a movie's success. Today, studios prefer to make never-ending stories. So what happens when the trilogy is over and the filmmakers or the studios want to make a fourth movie? Do they stick with the original story or create invent new characters who chart a new story? How do they honor what came first while inventing something new? And what happens when the artist and the studio come into conflict? This book answers those questions and many others.

Through exclusive and revealing interviews, Movies Go Fourth delves deeply into making some of the most popular film franchises of all time. Based on candid interviews from the filmmakers themselves, Movies Go Fourth reveals what happens when art and commerce collide.

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I talk to esteemed film critic and friend Rafa Sales Ross (find her work here), Noaz Deshe about his new film Xoftex and Christos Nikou about Apples, Apple and Fingernails.

The Karlovy Vary International Film Festival is the largest film festival in the Czech Republic and the most prestigious such festival in Central and Eastern Europe. It is one of the oldest A-list film festivals (i.e., non-specialized festivals with a competition for feature-length fiction films), a category it shares with the festivals in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Locarno, San Sebastian, Montreal, Shanghai, and Tokyo. Among filmmakers, buyers, distributors, sales agents, and journalists, KVIFF is considered the most important event in all of Central and Eastern Europe.

Every year, the festival presents some 200 films from around the world, and regularly hosts famous and important filmmakers. The Karlovy Vary festival is intended for both film professionals and the general public, and offers visitors a carefully designed programme, excellent facilities and a broad range of other services.

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Roger Lewis comes back to the pod to talk about his small masterpiece of biographical investigation, and fitting testament to a comic genius whose place in British cultural history is now assured. Charles Hawtrey, the skinny one with the granny glasses, was everybody's favourite in the Carry Ons - but who exactly was he? Up to now the man has remained a mystery.

Examining Hawtrey's origins as a child star and performer in revue and the Will Hay films, this wonderful little book looks at his career in radio and television, and then to the sad and slow decline of a belligerent recluse on the Kent coast. The high camp exuberance of his acting gave way to bitterness and alcoholism and if you asked Hawtrey for an autograph he'd be more likely to call the police instead.

Roger Lewis's short life of Hawtrey opens out like a Chinese box to address such issues as the nature of fame, neglect, loss, sexual confusion, Drambuie, betrayal, marine bandsmen, and fine cambric knickers trimmed with lace and blue ribbon. Its moral would seem to be that you don't necessarily turn out as the person you thought you'd become.

Buy HERE.

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Ramsey Campbell is an English horror fiction writer, editor and critic who has been writing for well over fifty years. He is the author of over 30 novels and hundreds of short stories, many of them winners of literary awards. Three of his novels have been adapted into films. He is also the author of Ramsey's Rambles, a book of film criticism and Six Stooges and Counting, a study of the famous comedy team the 3 Stooges.

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The behind-the-scenes story of the iconic film, featuring new interviews with the cast and crew.

An unflinching confrontation of humanity’s dark side, Brian De Palma’s crime drama film Scarface gave rise to a cultural revolution upon its release in 1983. Its impact was unprecedented, making globe-spanning waves as a defining portrait of the gritty Miami street life. From Al Pacino’s masterful characterization of Tony Montana to the iconic “Say hello to my little friend,” Scarface maintains its reputation as an unwavering game changer in cult classic cinema.

With brand-new interviews and untold stories of the film’s production, long-time film critic Glenn Kenny takes us on an unparalleled journey through the making of American depictions of crime. The World Is Yours highlights the influential characters and themes within Scarface, reflecting on how its storied legacy played such a major role in American culture.

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A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER * LOS ANGELES TIMES BESTSELLER * USA TODAY BESTSELLER

This heartfelt and wry career memoir from the director of Blood Diamond, The Last Samurai, Legends of the Fall, About Last Night, and Glory, creator of the show thirtysomething, and executive producer of My So-Called Life, gives a dishy, behind-the-scenes look at working with some of the biggest names in Hollywood.

“I’ll be dropping a few names,” Ed Zwick confesses in the introduction to his book. “Over the years I have worked with self-proclaimed masters-of-the-universe, unheralded geniuses, hacks, sociopaths, savants, and saints.”

He has encountered these Hollywood types during four decades of directing, producing, and writing projects that have collectively received eighteen Academy Award nominations (seven wins) and sixty-seven Emmy nominations (twenty-two wins). Though there are many factors behind such success, including luck and the contributions of his creative partner Marshall Herskovitz, he’s known to have a special talent for bringing out the best in the people he’s worked with, especially the actors. In those intense collaborations, he’s sought to discover the small pieces of connective tissue, vulnerability, and fellowship that can help an actor realize their character in full.

Talents whom he spotted early include Brad Pitt, Matt Damon, Denzel Washington, Claire Danes, and Jared Leto. Established stars he worked closely with include Leonardo DiCaprio, Anthony Hopkins, Tom Cruise, Julia Roberts, Anne Hathaway, Daniel Craig, Jake Gyllenhaal, Bruce Willis, Demi Moore, and Jennifer Connelly. He also sued Harvey Weinstein over the production of Shakespeare in Love—and won. He shares personal stories about all these people, and more.

Written mostly with love, sometimes with rue, this memoir is also a meditation on working, sprinkled throughout with tips for anyone who has ever imagined writing, directing, or producing for the screen. Fans with an appreciation for the beautiful mysteries—as well as the unsightly, often comic truths—of crafting film and television won’t want to miss it.

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This fifth edition of Film, Form, and Culture by Robert P Kolker and Marsha Gordon offers a lively introduction to both the formal and cultural aspects of film.

Additional resources for students and teachers can be found on the eResource, which includes case studies, discussion questions, and links to useful websites.

Get the book HERE.

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MURDER! MOTHERS! MEN ON THE RUN!

Film fans know these are just a few key ingredients of Alfred Hitchcock’s movies. When Hitchcock fused these elements with his innovative directorial approach, that blend of familiar themes and stylistic ingenuity became known as ‘Hitchcockian’. In a refreshingly original way, HITCHOLOGY considers how Hitchcock used these narrative tropes and formal flourishes to create some of cinema’s most unforgettable experiences.

Alongside unique takes on every film and TV episode Hitchcock directed, HITCHOLOGY also examines his collaborators, his cameos, other films in the Hitchcock cinematic universe, and more. Passionately written with wit and warmth, HITCHOLOGY is an accessible introduction for newcomers to Hitchcock, and an insightful companion for devoted fans.

Buy the book HERE.

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Stephen's book is availble here.

Across his directorial films, American filmmaker Dennis Hopper used music and sound to propel the narrative, signpost the era in which the films were made, and delineate the characters’ place within American culture. This book explores five of Hopper’s films to show how this deep engagement with music to build character and setting continued throughout his career, as Hopper used folk, punk, hip-hop, and jazz to shape the worlds of his films in ways that influenced other filmmakers and foreshadowed the advent of the music video format.

The author traces Hopper’s distinctive approach to the use of music through films from 1969 to 1990, including his innovative use of popular rock, pop, and folk in Easy Rider, his blending of diegetic performances of folk and Peruvian indigenous music in The Last Movie, his use of punk rock in Out of the Blue, incorporation of hip-hop and rap in Colors, and commissioning of a jazz/blues soundtrack by Miles Davis and John Lee Hooker for The Hot Spot. Uncovering the film soundtrack as a vital piece of the narrative, this concise and accessible book offers insights for academic readers in music and film studies, as well as all those interested in Hopper’s work.

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The definitive biography of the creator of 2001: A Space Odyssey, The Shining, and A Clockwork Orange, presenting the most in-depth portrait yet of the groundbreaking film-maker.

The enigmatic and elusive filmmaker Stanley Kubrick has not been treated to a full-length biography in over twenty years.

Stanley Kubrick: An Odyssey fills that gap. This definitive book is based on access to the latest research, especially Kubrick's archive at the University of the Arts, London, as well as other private papers plus new interviews with family members and those who worked with him. It offers comprehensive and in-depth coverage of Kubrick’s personal, private, public, and working life. Stanley Kubrick: An Odyssey investigates not only the making of Kubrick's films, but also about those he wanted (but failed) to make like Burning Secret, Napoleon, Aryan Papers, and A.I.

Revealingly, this immersive biography will puncture the controversial myths about the reclusive filmmaker who created some of the most important works of art of the twentieth century.

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Screen Deep:How film and TV can solve racism and save the world  is a book about the immense potential of screen storytelling to defeat an evil both historic and urgently topical: racism. Everyone watches TV and movies. Everyone has an interest in building a more just and equitable world. Screen Deep goes beyond the many film books and anti-racist manuals by demonstrating the connection between these two aspects of modern life.

In Screen Deep Ellen E. Jones combines her personal experience as a mixed-race woman who cares about racism with her professional expertise as a film and TV journalist of twenty years standing, to ask – and answer – several questions: Is there such a thing as an Indigenous western? Is race comedy ‘cancelled’? Where are all the films for white people? And most importantly: Can you still fight the good fight with a mouthful of popcorn?

The book is available from Faber here.

Valerie Complex's Deadline article mentioned on the show is available here.

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From Harper Collins:

A Best Book of 2023

The author of the New York Times bestseller Her Again: Becoming Meryl Streep returns with a lively history of the Academy Awards, focusing on the brutal battles, the starry rivalries, and the colorful behind-the-scenes drama.

America does not have royalty. It has the Academy Awards. For nine decades, perfectly coiffed starlets, debonair leading men, and producers with gold in their eyes have chased the elusive Oscar. What began as an industry banquet in 1929 has now exploded into a hallowed ceremony, complete with red carpets, envelopes, and little gold men. But don’t be fooled by the pomp: the Oscars, more than anything, are a battlefield, where the history of Hollywood—and of America itself—unfolds in dramas large and small. The road to the Oscars may be golden, but it’s paved in blood, sweat, and broken hearts.

In Oscar Wars, Michael Schulman chronicles the remarkable, sprawling history of the Academy Awards and the personal dramas—some iconic, others never-before-revealed—that have played out on the stage and off camera. Unlike other books on the subject, each chapter takes a deep dive into a particular year, conflict, or even category that tells a larger story of cultural change, from Louis B. Mayer to Moonlight. Schulman examines how the red carpet runs through contested turf, and the victors aren't always as clear as the names drawn from envelopes. Caught in the crossfire are people: their thwarted ambitions, their artistic epiphanies, their messy collaborations, their dreams fulfilled or dashed.

Featuring a star-studded cast of some of the most powerful Hollywood players of today and yesterday, as well as outsiders who stormed the palace gates, this captivating history is a collection of revelatory tales, each representing a turning point for the Academy, for the movies, or for the culture at large.

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From Simon and Schuster:

A deep-dive into the unique connections between the two titans of the British cultural psyche—the Beatles and the Bond films—and what they tell us about class, sexuality, and our aspirations over sixty dramatic years.

The Beatles are the biggest band in the history of pop music. James Bond is the single most successful movie character of all time. They are also twins. Dr No, the first Bond film, and Love Me Do, the first Beatles record, were both released on the same day: Friday 5 October 1962. Most countries can only dream of a cultural export becoming a worldwide phenomenon on this scale. For Britain to produce two iconic successes on this level, on the same windy October afternoon, is unprecedented.

Bond and the Beatles present us with opposing values, visions of the British culture, and ideas about sexual identity. Love and Let Die is the story of a clash between working class liberation and establishment control, and how it exploded on the global stage. It explains why James Bond hated the Beatles, why Paul McCartney wanted to be Bond, and why it was Ringo who won the heart of a Bond Girl in the end.

Told over a period of sixty dramatic years, this is an account of how two outsized cultural phenomena continue to define American aspirations, fantasies, and our ideas about ourselves. Looking at these two touchstones in this new context will forever change how you see the Beatles, the James Bond films, and six decades of cross-Atlantic popular culture.

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The behind-the-scenes story of the action heroes who ruled 1980s and ’90s Hollywood and the beloved films that made them stars, including Die Hard, First Blood, The Terminator, and more.

“This book takes you so close to the action that you can smell the sweat, cigar smoke, and bad cologne that brought these movies to life.”—Paul Scheer

A NEWSWEEK BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR

The Last Action Heroes opens in May 1990 in Cannes, with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone waltzing together, cheered on by a crowd of famous faces. After years of bitter combat—Stallone once threw a bowl of flowers at Schwarzenegger’s head, and the body count in Schwarzenegger’s Commando was increased so the film would “have a bigger dick than Rambo”—the world’s biggest action stars have at last made peace.

In this wildly entertaining account of the golden age of the action movie, Nick de Semlyen charts Stallone and Schwarzenegger’s carnage-packed journey from enmity to friendship against the backdrop of Reagan’s America and the Cold War. He also reveals fascinating untold stories of the colorful characters who ascended in their wake: high-kickers Chuck Norris and Jackie Chan, glowering tough guys Dolph Lundgren and Steven Seagal, and quipping troublemakers Jean-Claude Van Damme and Bruce Willis. But as time rolled on, the era of the invincible action hero who used muscle, martial arts, or the perfect weapon to save the day began to fade. When Jurassic Park trounced Schwarzenegger’s Last Action Hero in 1993, the glory days of these macho men—and the vision of masculinity they celebrated—were officially over.

Drawing on candid interviews with the action stars themselves, plus their collaborators, friends, and foes, The Last Action Heroes is a no-holds-barred account of a period in Hollywood history when there were no limits to the heights of fame these men achieved, or to the mayhem they wrought, on-screen and off.

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The New York Times bestselling author of Fifth Avenue, Five A.M. and The Big Goodbye returns with the definitive account of Academy Award-winning director Francis Ford Coppola’s decades-long dream to reinvent American filmmaking, if not the entire world, through his production company American Zoetrope.

 Francis Ford Coppola is one of the great American dreamers, and his most magnificent dream is American Zoetrope, the production company he founded in San Francisco years before his gargantuan success, when he was only thirty. Through Zoetrope’s experimental, communal utopia, Coppola attempted to reimagine the entire pursuit of moviemaking. Now, more than fifty years later, despite myriad setbacks, the visionary filmmaker’s dream persists, most notably in the production of his decades in the making film and the culmination of his utopian ideals, Megalopolis.

Granted total and unprecedented access to Coppola’s archives, conducting hundreds of interviews with the artist and those who have worked closely with him, Sam Wasson weaves together an extraordinary portrait. Here is Coppola, charming, brilliant, given to seeing life and art in terms of family and community, but also plagued by restlessness, recklessness and a desire to operate perpetually at the extremes.

As Wasson makes clear, the story of Zoetrope is also the story of Coppola’s wife, Eleanor Coppola, and their children, and of personal lives inseparable from artistic passion. It is a story that charts the divergent paths of Coppola and his co-founder and onetime apprentice, George Lucas, and of their very different visions of art and commerce. And it is a story inextricably bound up in the making of one of the greatest, quixotic masterpieces ever attempted, Apocalypse Now, and of what Coppola found in the jungles of the Philippines when he walked the razor’s edge. That story, already the stuff of legend, has never been fully told, until this extraordinary book.

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Jeremy Arnold is the author of Christmas in the Movies (Revised & Expanded Edition): 35 Classics to Celebrate the Season (Turner Classic Movies)

Now revised and expanded with more beloved films and loads of special features and photos across 70+ pages of new content, this is the must-have viewing guide for the holidays, showcasing the greatest and most beloved Christmas movies of all time.

Nothing brings the spirit of the season into our hearts quite like a great holiday movie. Turner Classic Movies' Christmas in the Movies showcases the very best among this uniquely spirited strain of cinema. Each film is profiled on what makes it a "Christmas movie," along with behind-the-scenes stories of its production, reception, and legacy. Complemented by a trove of full-color and black-and-white photos, this volume is a glorious salute to a collection of the most treasured films of all time.

Among the 35 films included: The Shop Around the Corner, Holiday Inn, Meet Me in St. Louis, It's a Wonderful Life, Miracle on 34th Street, White Christmas, A Christmas Story, National Lampoon's Christmas Vacation, Die Hard, Home Alone, Little Women, The Preacher's Wife, Love Actually, The Nightmare Before Christmas, and many more.

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The first chapter of a new series CONNERY - A Fiction.

Connery was written by John Bleasdale, performed by Cai Ross with music by Two Minute Noodles. Their music is available here.

Further episodes are available from wherever you get your podcasts.

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John Bleasdale talks to Paul Cronin about his books on Werner Herzog and Abbas Kiarostami and his work on Alexander MacKendrick. We also talk story structure, the history of the Faber Film Books and screenwriting. In many ways this becomes a much broader conversation and encompasses much about storytelling and what makes a film a film.

Check out Paul's website here

His recommended book is Amos Vogel's Film as Subversive Art and Alexander McKendrick's On Filmmaking.

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Cai Ross along with Chris Bainbridge is the author of Free for All and the co-host of the podcast of the same name, exploring all things The Prisoner related.

He is also the voice of the new podcast written by Writers on Film host John Bleasdale Connery.

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Jem Duducu talks Ridley Scott's new film Napoleon, starring Joaquin Phoenix and Virginia Kirkby. Jem is the host of the Condensed Histories podcast, the author of Hollywood and History and The Napoleonic Wars in a Hundred Facts.

Jem’s first love has always been history, ever since he saw the Sutton Hoo helmet as a small boy. He now works as a freelance trainer which has allowed him to hone his presentation and communications skills and has been posting articles about history online since 2012. He has been writing history books for Amberley Publishing since 2013. His style has been described as an historical guide; as he says “I take the reader/viewer on an introductory journey on a topic they may know little to nothing about”. The list of books include: The Busy Person’s Guide to British History, The British Empire in 100 facts, Deus Vult a Concise History of the Crusades, The Napoleonic Wars in 100 facts, The Romans in 100 Facts, Forgotten History Unbelievable Moments from the Past, & The American Presidents in 100 Facts.

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John Bleasdale talks to actor, producer, director and author Gabriel Byrne about his autobiography.

Walking with Ghosts is the stunningly evocative memoir by Irish actor and Hollywood star, Gabriel Byrne.

'Dreamy, lyrical and utterly unvarnished' – Colm Tóibín

As a young boy growing up in the outskirts of Dublin, Gabriel Byrne sought refuge in a world of imagination among the fields and hills near his home, at the edge of a rapidly encroaching city. Born to working-class parents and the eldest of six children, he harboured a childhood desire to become a priest. When he was eleven years old, Byrne found himself crossing the Irish Sea to join a seminary in England. Four years later, Byrne had been expelled and he quickly returned to his native city. There he took odd jobs as a messenger boy and a factory labourer to get by. In his spare time he visited the cinema, where he could be alone and yet part of a crowd. It was here that he could begin to imagine a life beyond the grey world of ’60s Ireland.

He revelled in the theatre and poetry of Dublin’s streets, populated by characters as eccentric and remarkable as any in fiction, those who spin a yarn with acuity and wit. It was a friend who suggested Byrne join an amateur drama group, a decision that would change his life forever and launch him on an extraordinary forty-year career in film and theatre. Moving between sensual recollection of childhood in a now almost vanished Ireland and reflections on stardom in Hollywood and on Broadway, Byrne also courageously recounts his battle with addiction and the ambivalence of fame.

Walking with Ghosts is by turns hilarious and heartbreaking as well as a lyrical homage to the people and landscapes that ultimately shape our destinies.

‘Make no mistake about it: this is a masterpiece . . . poetic, moving and very funny’ – Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin

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Endlessly fascinating, dark and bright, The Red Shoes (1948) employs every branch of the cinematic arts to sweep the audience off its feet, invigorated by the transcendence of art itself, only to leave them with troubling questions. Representing the climax of Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's celebrated run of six exceptional feature films, the film remains a beloved, if unsettling and often divisive, classic.

Pamela Hutchinson's study of the film examines its breathtaking use of Technicolor, music, choreography, editing and art direction at the zenith of Powell and Pressburger's capacity for 'composed cinema'. Through a close reading of key scenes, particularly the film's famous extended ballet sequence, she considers the unconventional use of ballet as uncanny spectacle and the feminist implications of the central story of female sacrifice.

Hutchinson goes on to consider the film's lasting and wide-reaching influence, tracing its impact on the film musical genre and horror cinema, with filmmakers such as Joanna Hogg, Sally Potter, Martin Scorsese and Brian De Palma having cited the film as an inspiration.

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The definitive story of Hollywood's most famous couple.

He was a tough-guy Welshman softened by the affections of a breathtakingly beautiful woman; she was a modern-day Cleopatra madly in love with her own Mark Antony. For nearly a quarter of a century, Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton were Hollywood royalty, and their fiery romanceoften called "the marriage of the century"was the most notorious, publicized, and celebrated love affair of its day.

For the first time, Vanity Fair contributing editor Sam Kashner and acclaimed biographer Nancy Schoenberger tell the complete story of this larger-than-life couple, showing how their romance and two marriages commanded the attention of the world. Also for the first time, in exclusive access given to the authors, Elizabeth Taylor herself gives never-revealed details and firsthand accounts of her life with Burton.

Drawing upon brand-new information and interviewsand on Burton's private, passionate, and heartbreaking letters to TaylorFurious Love sheds new light on the movies, the sex, the scandal, the fame, the brawls, the booze, the bitter separations, and, of course, the fabled jewels. It offers an intimate glimpse into Elizabeth and Richard's privileged world and their elite circle of friends, among them Princess Grace, Montgomery Clift, the Duke and Duchess of Windsor, Peter O'Toole, Michael Caine, Marlon Brando, Rex Harrison, Mike Nichols, Laurence Olivier, Robert Kennedy, Tennessee Williams, Noël Coward, John Huston, Ava Gardner, the Rothschilds, Maria Callas, and Aristotle Onassis. It provides an entertaining, eye-opening look at their films, their wildly lucrative reign in Europe and in Hollywoodand the price they paid for their extravagant lives.

Shocking and unsparing in its honesty, Furious Love explores the very public marriage of "Liz and Dick" as well as the private struggles of Elizabeth and Richard, including Le Scandale, their affair on the set of the notorious epic Cleopatra that earned them condemnation from the Vatican; Burton's hardscrabble youth in Wales; the crippling alcoholism that nearly destroyed his career and contributed to his early death; the medical issues that plagued both him and Elizabeth; and the failed aspirations and shame that haunted him throughout their relationship. As Kashner and Schoenberger illuminate the events and choices that shaped this illustrious couple's story, they demonstrate how the legendary pair presaged America's changing attitudes toward sex, marriage, morality, and celebrity. Yet ultimately, as the authors show, Elizabeth and Richard shared something priceless beyond the drama: enduring love.

Addictive and entertaining, Furious Love is more than a celebrity biography; it's an honest yet sympathetic portrait of a man, a woman, and a passion that shocked and mesmerized the world.

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Buy a copy of Carol's book here.

Go behind the scenes with the producer of Father of the Bride to learn all the skills necessary to be a top Hollywood producer

As former co-president of Dolly Parton's production company, Sandollar, and as a successful independent producer, Carol Baum is an expert in the art of film production. Creative Producing provides a crash course in the frequently misunderstood producer's role and the many skills needed to survive and thrive in Hollywood. Readers receive a master class in production––from pitching, script development, and packaging, to working with stars, directors, and difficult executives. Enhanced with behind-the-scenes stories from Baum's illustrious career, Creative Producing offers an intimate look behind the Hollywood curtain to give film students, cinephiles, aspiring executives, and industry insiders a must-have guide to understanding film development from successful pitch to hit picture.

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1971 was a great year for cinema. Woody Allen, Robert Altman, Dario Argento, Ingmar Bergman, Stanley Kubrick, Sergio Leone, George Lucas, Sam Peckinpah, Roman Polanski, Nicolas Roeg and Steven Spielberg, among many others, were behind the camera, while the stars were also out in force. Warren Beatty, Marlon Brando, Michael Caine, Julie Christie, Sean Connery, Faye Dunaway, Clint Eastwood, Jane Fonda, Dustin Hoffman, Steve McQueen, Jack Nicholson, Al Pacino and Vanessa Redgrave all featured in films released in 1971.

The remarkable artistic flowering that came from the ‘New Hollywood’ of the ’70s was just beginning, while the old guard was fading away and the new guard was taking over. With a decline in box office attendances by the end of the ’60s, along with a genuine inability to come up with a reliable barometer of box office success, studio heads gave unprecedented freedom to young filmmakers to lead the way.

Featuring interviews with cast and crew members, bestselling author Robert Sellers explores this landmark year in Hollywood and in Britain, when this new age was at its freshest, and where the transfer of power was felt most exhilaratingly.

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Mean Streets was Martin Scorsese's third feature film, and the one that confirmed him as a major new talent. On its premiere at the New York Film Festival in 1973, the critic Pauline Kael hailed the film as 'a true original of our period, a triumph of personal film-making'. The tale of combative friends and small-time crooks is set amid the bars, pool halls, tenements and streets of Manhattan's Little Italy. Scorsese has said of his childhood neighbourhood, 'its very texture was interwoven with organised crime', and this quality would dramatically inform the tone and restless energy of his seminal film.

Demetrios Matheou's insightful study considers Mean Streets' production history in the context of the New Hollywood period of American cinema, noting also the key roles played by John Cassavetes and Roger Corman. He analyses the importance of Scorsese's background to the film's characters and themes, including preoccupations with guilt, redemption and criminal subcultures; the development of the director's film-making process and signature style; the way in which he both drew upon and invigorated the crime genre; his relationship with emerging stars Robert De Niro and Harvey Keitel, and the film's reception and legacy.

Matheou argues that while Taxi Driver (1976) and Raging Bull (1980) are regarded as Scorsese's greatest films of the period, Mean Streets is the more influential achievement. With it, Scorsese not only paved the way for a new kind of crime movie, not least his own GoodFellas (1990), but also inspired generations of independently-minded film-makers.

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Clint Eastwood is Hollywood’s elder statesman and its conscience. He is the standard by which other films and filmmakers are judged. He represents both classical Hollywood and an entirely modern, uncompromising and unfussy directorial presence.

There are those who adore him as a cowboy, a superstar, the rugged, unyielding yet introspective face of American machismo. There are those who read him as a great American auteur fashioning uncompromising, fascinating, intellectual films about his country, about life, about whatever the hell takes his fancy.

No single figure in all of Hollywood, operates so freely outside of the strictures of commercial pressure. And yet, or perhaps that is because, he makes hit after hit.

Separation of actor and director is almost impossible. They are intimately related, cross pollinating, but in the latter half of his career he has come to be viewed as one of the great American artists. While drawing connections from his wider work as an actor, and those who have influenced him, it is his identity as a director that this book will celebrate.

This is not a career — it is a landscape.

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Jem Duducu talks Hollywood v History. Buy his new book here.

And listen to his podcast here.

Here's the blurb of his book:

There is no shortage of Hollywood films about historical events, but what do the movies actually get right, and why do they get so much wrong?

Hollywood loves a story: good guys versus bad guys, heroes winning the day, and the guy gets the girl. But we all know real life isn’t exactly like that, and this is even more true when we look at history. Rarely do the just prevail and the three-act story cannot exist over continents and decades of human interaction. So, when Hollywood decides to exploit history for profit, we end up with a wide array of films. Some are comedies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail, others are little more than action films playing dress up like Gladiator, and many are Oscar contenders burdened with an enormous sense of self-importance. But very few are historically accurate.

From Cleopatra to Da 5 Bloods, the reality is no matter what Hollywood’s intentions are, almost all historical films are an exaggeration or distortion of what really happened. Sometimes the alterations are for the sake of brevity, as watching a movie in real time about the Hundred Years War would literally kill you. Other additions may be out of necessity, since nobody thought to write down the everyday conversations between King Henry VIII and his second wife, Anne Boleyn, for The Other Boleyn Girl. And some projects twist the facts to suit a more sinister purpose.

In Hollywood and History, Jem Duducu takes readers through thousands of years of global history as immortalized and ultimately fictionalized by Hollywood, exploring many facets of the representation of history in movies from the medieval times to the wild west and both World Wars. Along the way, readers will also better understand Hollywood’s own history, as it evolved from black and white silent shorts to the multiplex CGI epics of today. As studios and audiences have matured through the years, so too have their representations of history. Armies will clash, leaders will be slain, empires will fall, and a few historical inaccuracies will be pointed out along the way. A must-read for film and history fans alike.

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Lawrence Grobel is a freelance writer who has written 31 books and for numerous national magazines and newspapers, including the New York Times, Newsday, Rolling Stone, Entertainment Weekly, Reader's Digest, American Way, Parade, Details, TV Guide, Redbook, Cosmopolitan, Penthouse, Diversion, Writer's Digest, and AARP. He has been a contributing editor at Playboy, Movieline, Hollywood Life, Autograph, New Zealand's World, Bulgaria's Ego, and Poland's Trendy magazines. Playboy called him "the Interviewer's Interviewer" after his interview with Marlon Brando for their 25th anniversary issue.

Visit his Amazon Page here.

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James Peaty and John Bleasdale talk about the summer release and particularly the success of Christopher Nolan's Oppenheimer.

Peaty has written for publishers including Marvel Comics, DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics in the US as well as Rebellion Publishing and Titan Comics in the UK. During that time he has written for titles including The Batman Strikes!, X-Men Unlimited, Green Arrow. Supergirl, Justice League Unlimited and Doctor Who. For 2000AD he wrote and co-created Skip Tracer (with artist Paul Marshall), while for The Judge Dredd Megazine he wrote and co-created Diamond Dogs (with artist Warren Pleece).

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Clint Eastwood called her “Truly one of my favorite people.” Her former students include Michael Bay, Joss Whedon, Laurence Mark, Akiva Goldsman, Paul Weitz, Marc Shmuger and Alex Kurtzman. She's written a dozen books and recently co-authored Hollywood: An Oral History with Sam Wasson (friend of the podcast, read his essay on Jeanine here). Jeanine Basinger is legendary and it is a true honor to have her on Writers on Film.

Buy here books here.

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Bur the book here.

In this incendiary mash-up of horror and suspense, a notorious slasher film is remade…and the curse that haunted it is reawakened.

Arriving in L.A. to visit the set of a new streaming horror series, journalist Laura Warren witnesses a man jumping from a bridge, landing right behind her car. Here we go, she thinks. It’s started. Because the series she’s reporting on is a remake of a ’90s horror flick. A cursed ’90s horror flick, which she starred in as a child—and has been running from her whole life.

    In The Guesthouse, Laura played the little girl with the terrifying gift to tell people how the Needle Man would kill them. When eight of the cast and crew died in ways that eerily mirrored the movie’s on-screen deaths, the film became a cult classic—and ruined her life. Leaving it behind, Laura changed her name and her accent, dyed her hair, and moved across the Atlantic. But some scripts don’t want to stay buried.

    Now, as the body count rises again, Laura finds herself on the run with her aspiring actress sister and a jaded psychic, hoping to end the curse once and for all—and to stay out of the Needle Man’s lethal reach.

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Nothing To Fear: Alfred Hitchcock And The Wrong Men

To buy click on this link.

Alfred Hitchcock is not often associated with a social justice movement. But in 1956, the world’s most famous director focused his lens on an issue that cuts to the heart of our criminal justice system: the risk of wrongful conviction. The result was The Wrong Man, a wrenching and largely overlooked drama based on the real-life arrest of Queens musician Christopher “Manny” Balestrero for two robberies he did not commit. 

With documentary-like authenticity, Hitchcock and his team meticulously re-created Manny’s journey through the corridors of justice and the devastating effect of the arrest on his wife, Rose. In so doing, the director cast a damning light on New York’s history of mistaken identity cases. The Balestreros fell victim to the same rush to judgment and suggestive eyewitness identification procedures that had doomed innocent defendants in earlier cases. Their ordeal is part of a larger story of the state’s failure to reckon with its role in other wrongful prosecutions in the first half of the twentieth century. 

Attorney Jason Isralowitz tells this story in a revelatory book that situates both the Balestrero case and its cinematic counterpart in their historical context. Drawing from archival records, Isralowitz delivers a gripping account of Manny’s trial and new insights into an errant prosecution. He then examines how Hitchcock fused striking visual motifs with social realism to create a timeless work of art. The film bears witness to issues that animate the contemporary innocence movement, including the unreliability of eyewitness testimony, the need for police lineup reforms, and the dangers of investigative “tunnel vision.” Given the hundreds of exonerations of the wrongfully convicted in recent years, The Wrong Man remains as timely as ever.

“Nothing to Fear is a fascinating history, not only for fans of Hitchcock but for anyone interested in how our justice system works (and sometimes doesn't). The story of ‘the wrong man' continues to resonate well into the twenty-first century, and will make you question your assumptions about innocence and guilt.” Dawn Raffel, author of The Strange Case of Dr. Couney, named by NPR as one of 2018’s Great Reads and winner of a 2019 Christopher Award.

 “Thanks to Jason Isralowitz for finally writing a book about Hitchcock’s most under-appreciated movie. Isralowitz brilliantly contextualizes the movie and the true-life story of Manny Balestrero, preceded by an eye-opening prologue detailing the justice system’s long history of indicting ‘the wrong man’ (and, in a few cases, ‘the wrong woman’). A must for both cinephiles and true crime buffs.” Bruce Goldstein, Repertory Artistic Director, Film Forum, New York.

ISBN: 9781949024425

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The Alien films are perceived to be a fractured franchise, each one loosely related to the others. They are nonlinear, complicated, convoluted: a collection of genre movies ranging from horror to war to farce.

But on closer examination, the threads that bind together these films are strong and undeniable. The series is a model of Catherine Keller’s cosmology as a cycle of order out of chaos, an illustration of her concept of evil as discreation.

When viewed through the lens of Keller’s Face of the Deep, the Alien films resolve into a cohesive whole. The series becomes six views of the idea of evil-as-exploitation, its origins, and its consequences. Each film expands on the concept of evil set forth by its predecessors, complicating that conception, and retroactively enriching readings of the films that came before.

Buy the book here.

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Get the book here.

“Matt Pais deserves four stars for reintroducing us to many of the greatly talented but often unsung heroes of 1990s film. This is a terrific read.”—RICHARD ROEPER

“Even if you’re drowning in pop culture nostalgia, Pais’ book is a fun, insightful and informative life raft.”—ROBERT K. ELDER, author of The Film That Changed My Life

“Matt Pais captures an entire era succinctly and vividly. A fascinating read.”—GABRIELLE ANWAR

“A love letter to my wonder years, and goes far beyond nostalgia. Every ‘90s kid will love it!”—DREW FORTUNE, Vulture/Rolling Stone contributor, screenwriter, and author of No Encore! Musicians Reveal Their Weirdest, Wildest, Most Embarrassing Gigs

“Jurassic Park.” “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” “That Thing You Do!” “Boy Meets World.” “A League of Their Own.” “Home Alone.” “Mighty Morphin Power Rangers.” “Doug.” “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” “Newsies.” “American Pie.” “Cool Runnings.” “The Mighty Ducks.” These are not just movies and shows. They are legends, and for so many who grew up in the ‘90s, important markers of our childhood. If you could ask the stars behind these classics anything—with the purpose of taking conversations in different directions than any they’ve had before—what would you say? What would you learn?

In “Talk ‘90s with Me,” each interview begins by exploring the subject’s own ‘90s nostalgia and then poses topics they've never discussed. It creates a blend of memories and analysis that’s fresh and unexpected, fun and thought-provoking, silly and profound—offering something new to remember (including exclusive, stump-your-friends trivia!) while honoring the movies and shows you’ll never forget.

Maybe it feels like getting a drink with the stars; maybe it just feels like the kind of long phone call that people had a lot more in the ‘90s.

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From the noted Hollywood biographer and author of The Contender comes this celebration of the great American love story—the romance between Lauren Bacall and Humphrey Bogart—capturing its complexity, contradictions, and challenges as never before.

In Bogie & Bacall, William Mann offers a deep and comprehensive look at Lauren Bacall, Humphrey Bogart, and the unlikely love they shared. Mann details their early years—Bogart’s effete upbringing in New York City; Bacall’s rise as a model and actress. He paints a vivid portrait of their courtship and twelve-year marriage: the fights, the reconciliations, the children, the affairs, Bogie’s illness and Bacall’s steadfastness until his death. He offers a sympathetic yet clear-eyed portrait of Bacall’s life after Bogie, exploring her relationships with Frank Sinatra and Jason Robards, who would become her second husband, and the identity crisis she faced.

Surpassing previous biographies, Mann digs deep into the celebrities’ personal lives and considers their relationship from surprising angles. Bacall was just nineteen when she started dating the thrice-married forty-five-year-old Bogart. How might that age gap have influenced their relationship? In addition to what she gained, what might Bacall have lost by marrying a Hollywood superstar more than twice her age? How did Bogart, a man of average looks, become one of the greatest movie stars of all time? Throughout, Mann explains the unparalleled successes of their individual careers as well as the extraordinary love between them and the legend that has endured.

Filled with entertaining details and thoughtful insights based on newly available records and correspondence, and illustrated with 30-40 photographs, Bogie & Bacall offers a fresh look at this famous couple, their remarkable relationship, and their legacy.

Buy here.

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John Bleasdale talks to a host of great writers attending the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival.

It includes Wendy Ide, Leigh Singer, Hugo Emmerzael and Marcus

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Joseph McBride returns to Writers on Film to talk about his new book on the films of Billy Wilder. But this wide-ranging discussion doesn't stop there. Billy Wilder: Dancing on the Edge is available here.

The director and cowriter of some of the world's most iconic films―including Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd., Some Like It Hot, and The Apartment―Billy Wilder earned acclaim as American cinema's greatest social satirist. Though an influential fixture in Hollywood, Wilder always saw himself as an outsider. His worldview was shaped by his background in the Austro-Hungarian Empire and work as a journalist in Berlin during Hitler's rise to power, and his perspective as a Jewish refugee from Nazism lent his films a sense of the peril that could engulf any society.

In this critical study, Joseph McBride offers new ways to understand Wilder's work, stretching from his days as a reporter and screenwriter in Europe to his distinguished as well as forgotten films as a Hollywood writer and his celebrated work as a writer-director. In contrast to the widespread view of Wilder as a hardened cynic, McBride reveals him to be a disappointed romantic. Wilder's experiences as an exile led him to mask his sensitivity beneath a veneer of wisecracking that made him a celebrated caustic wit. Amid the satirical barbs and exposure of social hypocrisies, Wilder’s films are marked by intense compassion and a profound understanding of the human condition.

Mixing biographical insight with in-depth analysis of films from throughout Wilder's career as a screenwriter and director of comedy and drama, and drawing on McBride's interviews with the director and his collaborators, this book casts new light on the full range of Wilder's rich, complex, and distinctive vision.

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Happy Pride Month: Writers on Film talks with Kyle Turner on his amazing book The Queer Film Guide: 100 Great Films the tell LGBTQIA+ Stories

"Kyle Turner has selected 100 of cinema’s greatest queer films that are often overlooked but foundational to the art form and the wider culture.

Starting in early cinema with trailblazers like Making a Man of Her and Different from Others, the list progresses through the eras, from Hitchcock’s Rope to cult classic The Rocky Horror Picture Show to today’s fast-growing list of queer films, including Carol, The Duke of Burgundy, and Moonlight. From lesser-known names to Academy Award winners, The Queer Film Guide offers a fresh take on what defines great cinema, lending a voice to the diverse creators and characters who’ve shaped the art form."

Here's a Letterboxd list of the film's mentioned.

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We talk Life Above the Clouds:

Steven DeLay's expansive collection of essays in this anthology proves that the subject of Malick is far from exhausted, and continues to affirm this filmmaker as an arousing

artist of aesthetic, philosophical, and cinematic intrigue "In Life Above the Clouds: Philosophy in the Films of Terrence Malick, DeLay curates both established and emerging Malick contributors who keenly prove that illuminating conversations surrounding his work keep us returning to Malick with fresh takes and passionate inquiries." The Philosophical Quarterly

Steven DeLay is Research Fellow at the Global Center for Advanced Studies. He is the author of Faint Not: Twelve Brief Meditations on the Word of God (2022), In the Spirit: A Phenomenology of Faith (2021), Before God: Exercises in Subjectivity (2020), and Phenomenology in France: A Philosophical and Theological Introduction (2019). His works of fiction include Elijah Newman Died Today: A Novella (2022) and Everything (2022). He is also the editor of the forthcoming Finding Meaning: Philosophy in Crisis based on the online series of essays "Finding Meaning" at Richard Marshall's 3:16 AM.

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Jim Colvill is an editor based in New York City. He is also the publisher who along with Jake Perlin established Film Desk Books, a NYC based small press and online bookseller dedicated to books on cinema. He also edited The Press Gang, a collection of work from New York Press, with critics Godfrey Cheshire, Matt Zoller Seitz and Armond White.

Here's a link to the site of Film Desk.

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Al Clark comes back to the podcast to talk the second half of his career. Having left London and Virgin, Al embarked on a massively influential career in the Australian film industry. His films launched many an Australian star both in front of behind the camera.

Here's the blurb from his second memoir:

"Time Flies Too is the sequel to 2021’s beguiling and absorbing memoir Time Flies by Al Clark, who in its last paragraph married and settled in Australia after a Spanish village childhood, a Scottish boarding school education and nearly two decades of living and working in London in the pioneering days of Virgin Records.

These new recollections playfully explore his adjustment to life in a new country, the labyrinth involved in making films, the gifted collaborators he encountered along the way, and the work itself — notably one of Australia’s most enduringly successful movies (The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert ). It completes the journey of a solitary boy who fell in love with cinema, and of the man who strove to bring it to life."

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Melanie Williams is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. A specialist in British cinema, her publications in this area include British Women’s Cinema (2009), Ealing Revisited (BFI, 2012), David Lean (2014), Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question (2017) and Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema (2019).

A Taste of Honey (1961) is a landmark in British cinema history. In this book, Melanie Williams explores the many, extraordinary ways in which it was trailblazing. It is the only film of the British New Wave canon to have been written by a woman – Shelagh Delaney, adapting her own groundbreaking stage play. At the behest of director Tony Richardson and his company, Woodfall, it was one of the first films to be made entirely on location, and was shot in an innovative, rough, poetic style by cinematographer Walter Lassally. It was also the launchpad for a new type of young female star in Rita Tushingham.

Tushingham plays the young heroine, Jo, who finds she is pregnant after her love affair with Jimmy (Paul Danquah), a Black sailor. When Jimmy's ship sails away, Jo is comforted and supported by her gay friend Geoff (Murray Melvin), while her unreliable mother, Helen (Dora Bryan), has her own life to lead. Candid in its treatment of matters of gender, class, ethnicity, sexuality and motherhood, and highly distinctive in its evocation of place and landscape, A Taste of Honey marked the advent of new possibilities for the telling of working-class stories in British cinema. As such, its rich but complex legacy endures to this day.

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Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com. He is also the TV critic for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and television has appeared in The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Sight and Sound. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine, and the co-founder and original editor of Press Play, an IndieWire blog of film and TV criticism and video essays.

A Brooklyn-based writer and filmmaker, Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers. 

Other Seitz books include Mad Men Carousel: The Complete Critical Companion, The Oliver Stone Experience, and TV (The Book). He is currently working on a novel, a children's film, and a book about the history of horror, co-authored with RogerEbert.com contributor Simon Abrams.

Visit his online book store HERE.

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George Stevens Jr. has had a long and illustrious career in the entertainment industry, passing over five generations. In his new book, "My Place in the Sun," Stevens Jr. provides a rare glimpse into the private lives of some of America's most famous first ladies, presidents, and celebrities. He shares personal stories and anecdotes about the Kennedys, Barack and Michelle Obama, Yo-Yo Ma, Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant, Bruce Springsteen, James Dean, Sidney Poitier, and many others. With humor and candor, Stevens gives readers a unique look at the American experience through the eyes of one of its most influential cultural figures. Readers will appreciate Stevens Jr.'s wit and insight as he takes them on a journey through the golden age of American film. His stories about Hollywood and Washington provide a unique perspective on a time that shaped our country's culture and history. My Place in the Sun is an enjoyable read for anyone who loves movies or wants to learn more about America's past.

Now available as an Audio Book.

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In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948―The Great McGinty, The Lady Eve, Sullivan’s Travels, The Palm Beach Story, and The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek among them―all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endlessly witty, his movies continue to influence filmmakers and remain popular to this day. Yet despite this acclaim, Sturges’s achievements remain underappreciated: he is too often categorized as a dialogue writer and plot engineer more than a director, or belittled as an irresponsible spinner of laughs.

In Crooked, but Never Common, Stuart Klawans combines a critic’s insight and a fan’s enthusiasm to offer deeper ways to think about and enjoy Sturges’s work. He provides an in-depth appreciation of all ten of the writer-director’s major movies, presenting Sturges as a filmmaker whose work balanced slapstick and social critique, American and European traditions, and cynicism and affection for his characters. Tugging at loose threads―discontinuities, puzzles, and allusions that have dangled in plain sight―and putting the films into a broader cultural context, Klawans reveals structures, motives, and meanings underlying the uproarious pleasures of Sturges’s movies. In this new light, Sturges emerges at last as one of the truly great filmmakers―and funnier than ever.

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Graham Skipper is a writer, actor, director, and producer, known for writing/directing the sci-fi/horror feature film Sequence Break, as well as his essays on horror cinema published in Fangoria and My Favourite Horror (Black Vortex Publishing, 2018). Most recently his work can be found in Simon & Schuster's Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man (2020). Graham is a lifelong Godzilla fan, and was honoured work with Toho developing their Godzilla Tales series of comedic short films in 2020.

Godzilla: The Ultimate illustrated Guide unites fascinating information and stunning imagery from more than 60 years of movie mayhem to show off the Earth's most enduring monster as never before. This book is the ultimate illustrated reference work to all things Godzilla, from the early days in black and white in Japan to the biggest blockbusters of the 21st century. Never before has a work united the full gamut of Godzilla incarnations. Facts and figures, actors and locations, co-starring monsters and plenty of superb illustrated material add up to make this a rampaging beast of a book!

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Will Scheibel is associate professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks, a volume in the TV Milestones Series (Wayne State University Press, 2020), with Julie Grossman. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, Film Criticism, Journal of Gender Studies, and Celebrity Studies.

Here's the blurb from the book:

Gene Tierney may be one of the most recognizable faces of studio-era Hollywood: she starred in numerous classics, including Leave Her to Heaven, The Ghost and Mrs. Muir, and Laura, with the latter featuring her most iconic role. While Tierney was considered one of the most beautiful women in Hollywood, she personified "ordinariness" both on- and off-screen. Tierney portrayed roles such as a pinup type, a wartime worker, a wife, a mother, and, finally, a psychiatric patient—the last of which may have hit close to home for her, as she would soon leave Hollywood to pursue treatment for mental illness and later attempted suicide in the 1950s. After her release from psychiatric clinics, Tierney sought a comeback as one of the first stars whose treatment for mental illness became public knowledge. In this book, Will Scheibel not only examines her promotion, publicity, and reception as a star but also offers an alternative history of the United States wartime efforts demonstrated through the arc of Tierney’s career as a star working on the home front. Scheibel’s analysis aims to showcase that Tierney was more than just "the most beautiful woman in movie history," as stated by the head of production at Twentieth Century Fox in the 1940s and 1950s. He does this through an examination of her making, unmaking, and remaking at Twentieth Century Fox, rediscovering what she means as a movie legend both in past and up to the present. Film studies scholars, film students, and those interested in Hollywood history and the legacy of Gene Tierney will be delighted by this read.

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The course of events is predetermined and cannot be changed. Forces beyond our control—or even our comprehension—shape our fates. Such is the deterministic worldview embedded in a wide swath of contemporary cinema, from arthouse experiments to popular genre films, through both thematic concerns and narrative structures. These films, especially the recent spate of “elevated” science fiction and horror, tap into this deep-seated anxiety by focusing on characters who ultimately fail to transcend the patterns and structures that define them.

Thomas M. Puhr identifies and analyzes the ways that cinema has dealt with the tension between fate and free will, from Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to Christopher Nolan’s Tenet. He examines films that express deterministic ideas, including circular narratives of stasis or confinement and fatalistic portraits of external forces dictating characters’ lives. Puhr considers determinism at the levels of the individual, the family, and society, reading films in which characters are trapped by past or alternate selves, the burdens of family histories, or oppressive social structures. He explores how films such as Joel and Ethan Coen’s Inside Llewyn Davis, Ari Aster’s Hereditary, Jordan Peele’s Us, and Lucrecia Martel’s Zama confront the limits of human agency. Puhr relates deterministic themes to the nature of moviegoing: In denying characters any ability to choose alternative paths, these films mirror how viewers themselves can only sit and watch.

Recasting the works of some of today’s most compelling directors, Fate in Film is an innovative critical account of an unrecognized yet crucial aspect of contemporary cinema.

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Charles Bramesco is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and many. many others. Taking you from the earliest feature films to today, Colours of Film introduces 50 iconic movies and explains the pivotal role that colour played in their success.

The use of colour is an essential part of film. It has the power to evoke powerful emotions, provide subtle psychological symbolism and act as a narrative device.

Wes Anderson’s pastels and muted tones are aesthetically pleasing, but his careful use of colour also acts as a shorthand for interpreting emotion. And let’s not forget Schindler’s List (1993, dir. Steven Spielberg), in which a bold flash of red against an otherwise black-and-white film is used as a powerful symbol of life, survival and death.

In Colours of Film, film critic Charles Bramesco introduces an element of cinema that is often overlooked, yet has been used in extraordinary ways. Using infographic colour palettes, and stills from the movies, this is a lively and fresh approach to film for cinema-goers and colour lovers alike.

He also explores in fascinating detail how the development of technologies have shaped the course of modern cinema, from how the feud between Kodak and Fujifilm shaped the colour palettes of the 20th Century's greatest filmakers, to how the advent of computer technology is creating a digital wonderland for modern directors in which anything is possible.

​Filled with sparkling insights and fascinating accounts from the history of cinema, Colours of Film is an indispensable guide to one of the most important visual elements in the medium of film.

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An illustrated critical survey of Academy Award–winning writer and director Sofia Coppola’s career, covering everything from her groundbreaking music videos through her latest films

In the two decades since her first feature film was released, Sofia Coppola has created a tonally diverse, meticulously crafted, and unapologetically hyperfeminine aesthetic across a wide range of multimedia work. Her films explore untenable relationships and the euphoria and heartbreak these entail, and Coppola develops these themes deftly and with discernment across her movies and music videos. From The Virgin Suicides and Marie Antoinette to Lost in Translation and The Beguiled, Coppola’s award-nominated filmography is also unique in how its consistent visual aesthetic is informed by and in conversation with contemporary fine art and photography.

Sofia Coppola offers a rich and intimate look at the overarching stylistic and thematic components of Coppola's work. In addition to critical essays about Coppola's filmography, the book will include interviews with some of her closest collaborators, including musician Jean-Benoît Dunckel and costume designer Nancy Steiner, along with a foreword by Italian filmmaker Alice Rohrwacher. It engages with her creative output while celebrating her talent as an imagemaker and storyteller. Along the way, readers meet again a cast of characters mired in the ennui of missed connections: loneliness, frustrated creativity, rebellious adolescence, and the double-edged knife of celebrity, all captured by the emotional, intimate power of the female gaze.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Hannah Strong is the associate editor at Little White Lies magazine. Her work has appeared in Vulture, GQ, the Guardian, and Dazed & Confused, and she regularly appears on television and radio as a film critic, largely for the BBC and ITV. Strong lives in London. Little White Lies is one of the world’s preeminent film magazines, pairing a unique editorial angle with beautiful illustration and world-class design.

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Recommended books:

• Andrew Killen 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America 
• J. Hoberman The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties

Buy We Are the Mutants book.

Visit We Are the Mutants website.

Here's their blurb:

If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out right now! If you’ve followed us over the last six plus years, you know our MO: we get deep down into the berserk array of popular and outsider media produced during the Cold War and talk about what these various artifacts—lost, forgotten, seemingly disposable—mean in the larger arenas of politics and culture, then and now. We Are the Mutants: The Battle for Hollywood from Rosemary’s Baby to Lethal Weapon takes that approach and applies it to American films released between the arrival of US combat troops in Vietnam and the end of President Ronald Reagan’s second term—probably the most discussed and beloved stretch of movies in Hollywood history. 

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The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive,

moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit,

and sacrifice from the award-winning, New York Times bestselling author of 

A Constellation of Vital Phenomena.

“Crackling with wit and suffused with insight, Mercury Pictures Presents explores the endless give-and-take between life and art, the cost of integrity, and the ways we must make peace with the past in order to move forward toward the future. . . . A genuinely moving and life-affirming novel that’s a true joy to read.”

—Celeste Ng, author of Little Fires Everywhere

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From the moment Bette Davis served up a dead rat to Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? a subset of camp horror films was born. The ‘Hag Horror’ genre exploited the former Oscar-winners and glamour queens who had effectively built Hollywood, transforming them into grotesque caricatures that revealed a cultural disdain for older women. 

In Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror, Caroline Young traces the development of this genre, from its origins in Sunset Boulevard and All About Eve, through to the horror movie phenomenon following the huge success of Psycho. It explores how the stars of the Golden Age adapted to the advent of television, the collapse of the studio system and changing censorship codes, and revived their fortunes by reaching new audiences as crazed spinsters and menopausal maniacs. 

Films like Strait-Jacket, Lady in a Cage, What’s the Matter with Helen? and Rosemary’s Baby reveal the fears around the growing feminist movement, a clash between tradition and youth, and a shift in notions of celebrity. Above all, Crazy Old Ladies is a timely overview of the subgenre, to reveal the sometimes painful stories of what happened to iconic, ageing actresses once their career as leading ladies was considered over. 

Crazy Old Ladies is published by Bear Manor Media, where you can purchase a copy.

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In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film in 1939 with Confessions of a Nazi Spy. Other studios followed with such films as The Mortal Storm (MGM), Man Hunt (Fox), The Man I Married (Fox), and The Great Dictator (United Artists). While these films represented a small percentage of Hollywood’s output, senators took aim at the Jews in Hollywood who were supposedly “agitating us for war” and launched an investigation that resulted in Senate Resolution 152. The resolution was aimed at both radio and movies that “have been extensively used for propaganda purposes designed to influence the public mind in the direction of participation in the European War.” When the Senate approved a subcommittee to investigate the intentions of these films, studio bosses were ready and willing to stand up against the government to defend their beloved industry. What followed was a complete embarrassment of the United States Senate and a large victory for Hollywood as well as freedom of speech.

Many works of American film history only skim the surface of the 1941 investigation of Hollywood. In Hollywood Hates Hitler! Jew-Baiting, Anti-Nazism, and the Senate Investigation into Warmongering in Motion Pictures, author Chris Yogerst examines the years leading up to and through the Senate Investigation into Motion Picture War Propaganda, detailing the isolationist senators’ relationship with the America First movement. Through his use of primary documents and lengthy congressional records, Yogerst paints a picture of the investigation’s daily events both on Capitol Hill and in the national press.

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A Walter Hill Film is the first critical biography of Walter Hill, the legendary writer-director producer whose filmography includes 48 HRS. films, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Geronimo, Streets of Fire, Wild Bill, Broken Trail, the Alien films, and the pilot for Deadwood.

The author is Walter Chaw, film critic for Film Freak Central and a contributor to The New York Times, Vulture, NPR and many other publications. The James Joyce of crime fiction James Ellroy wrote the introduction. The foreword is by Larry Gross, Hill's writing partner on 48 HRS. The book also includes a note from Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead, Hot Fuzz, and Last Night in Soho.

From the author: "A Walter Hill Film is a 400-page critical study of Walter Hill’s films and early screenplays that began, as a lot of these projects do, with a question. I had recently gotten the opportunity to watch The Warriors and Streets of Fire on 35mm archival prints and even though I had seen them before, revisiting them at this time, in that format, was… visceral? Kinetic? Exhilarating. All of those things in a way almost physical, and I wanted to know what it was about these pictures - and their director, Walter Hill, that could inspire so specific a response. I felt like I was on fire. Along with a couple hundred devotees, I floated out of the auditorium. Who the hell was this guy?

So I looked for books about Hill and discovered that there was one - but it was in Italian. There might be another in German, I’m not sure. But there had been no serious critical studies of him in English. Charles Taylor wrote an incredible essay about Robert Culp’s Hickey & Boggs, Hill’s first produced screenplay, but aside from a few rich interviews and archival videos, there wasn’t much scholarship. Part of that has to do I think with Hill’s own aversion to dwelling too much on his own work; but mostly, I think Hill’s films are seen as merely action movies, ‘guy flicks’ easily digestible and just as easily disposable. The more I watched his movies, though, the more I saw Hill as continuing in the tradition of filmmakers like Nicholas Ray, Sam Peckinpah, Howard Hawks and, especially, Robert Aldrich. Aldrich who, born to wealth and privilege, gave it all up to make ‘guy flicks’ that were nonetheless rooted in social awareness and protest.

I’m not an archivist, not a historian, really, and though I enjoy interviewing my heroes, I wouldn’t say I have a particular gift nor interest in it. What I can do, though, is watch a body of work and identify throughlines in it that speak to me. I can, in other words, write about myself. I think that’s what good critics do. A Walter Hill Film is a study of a career that has revealed itself to me as extraordinarily sensitive to issues around race and gender; a “man’s man” director actually brave enough to show things as they really are in our world: broken, hostile towards culturally-proscribed underclasses. with pieces consistent through what is now a seventh decade. Of course James Ellroy wrote the introduction for it.

I spoke with Hill throughout the long, four-year process of this volume, and to a few of his collaborators as well, but this isn’t

a “behind-the-scenes” or 'making of' memoir. It’s a process of unpacking the life’s work of an important American artist. It’s a book about figuring out something about these movies that set me on fire."

A Walter Hill Film is being published by MZS Press, Matt Zoller Seitz's arts books imprint. The store is offering a limited number of these hardcovers signed by the author.

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A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away provides a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most influential films of the last fifty years as seen through the eyes of Paul Hirsch, the Oscar-winning film editor who worked on such classics as George Lucas’s Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back, Brian De Palma’s Carrie and Mission: Impossible, Herbert Ross’s Footloose and Steel Magnolias, John Hughes’s Ferris Bueller’s Day Off and Planes, Trains & Automobiles, Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down, and Taylor Hackford’s Ray.

Hirsch breaks down his career movie by movie, offering a riveting look at the decisions that went into creating some of cinema’s most iconic scenes. He also provides behind-the-scenes insight into casting, directing, and scoring and intimate portraits of directors, producers, composers, and stars. Part film school primer, part paean to legendary filmmakers and professionals, this funny and insightful book will entertain and inform aficionados and casual moviegoers alike.

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Ten years ago, Rachel Abramowitz began interviewing the most powerful women in the movie-making business in an effort to discover how they had infiltrated this male-dominated world. From superstar actors to independent directors, women in all arenas opened up to her, and the result is extraordinary—together, these stories comprise the most comprehensive history to date of women in Hollywood. Here, in their own candid and provocative words, are Jodie Foster, Penny Marshall, Dawn Steel, Sherry Lansing, Barbra Streisand, Nora Ephron, Meryl Streep, Jane Campion, and many others—in short, one of the most talented casts ever assembled. Poignant, inspiring, scandalous, and hilarious, this is at once a landmark look at the evolution of women’s place in filmmaking and a glimpse inside one of the most powerful industries in American culture.

Here's the Substack page.

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The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, and nearly four hundred others, assembled from the American Film Institute’s treasure trove of interviews, reveals a fresh history of the American movie industry from its beginnings to today. 

From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture of what it was like to work in Hollywood from its beginnings to its present day. Gleaned from nearly three thousand interviews, involving four hundred voices from the industry, Hollywood: The Oral History, lets a reader “listen in” on candid remarks from the biggest names in front of the camera—Bette Davis, Meryl Streep, Tom Hanks, Harold Lloyd—to the biggest behind it—Frank Capra, Steven Spielberg, Alfred Hitchcock, Jordan Peele, as well as the lesser known individuals that shaped what was heard and seen on screen: musicians, costumers, art directors, cinematographers, writers, sound men, editors, make-up artists, and even script timers, messengers, and publicists. The result is like a conversation among the gods and goddesses of film: lively, funny, insightful, historically accurate and, for the first time, authentically honest in its portrait of Hollywood. It’s the insider’s story. 

 Legendary film scholar Jeanine Basinger and New York Times bestselling author Sam Wasson, both acclaimed storytellers in their own right, have undertaken the monumental task of digesting these tens of thousands of hours of talk and weaving it into a definitive portrait of workaday Hollywood.  

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This week I'm talking to Jake Cunnigham and Michael Leader of Ghibliotheque about their new guide to Anime. There are a ton of film recommendations in here for the beginner and some great depth for the devoted fan.

I've just launched a substack related to the podcast John Writes on Film: click here for the first post.

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As one of the world’s most dynamic and recognised celebrity icons, Eddie Murphy has been present in comedy and music for the last five decades and has dominated our big screens since his debut feature film, action comedy, 48hrs. some forty years ago. Delivered from a never-seen-before viewpoint, ‘Eddie Murphy; Deliriously Funny’ is an immersive account of Murphy’s entire comedy genius that spans the highs and lows of his career, touching on his childhood, exploring his influences, his stand-up comedy roots, music and film. From the author of ‘Rik Mayall: Comedy Genius’ and ‘Al Pacino: The Movies Behind The Man’, Mark Searby intricately unravels the golden thread of comedy that has weaved through the fabric of Murphy’s life and career, in both film and music, and exposes the deeper catalysts behind it.

Taking us on a profound journey that outlines Murphy’s life, Searby creates an honest account that is charged with the excitement, frustration, confidence and fearlessness that Murphy has experienced and delivered throughout his work. Documenting the incredible highs, and the equally spectacular lows, ‘Eddie Murphy; Deliriously Funny’ includes exclusive interviews and quotes from those that have worked closest to him. Highlighting his breakthrough on mainstream TV via Saturday Night Live, through to multimillion-dollar box office smashes of his most famed and successful films; 48 Hrs., Beverly Hills Cop, Coming To America, Harlem Nights, Boomerang, The Nutty Professor, Shrek, Dreamgirls, Norbit and Dr. Dolittle, Searby also delves in to the career flops that span comedy sketches and numerous big screen films, and ultimately how Murphy used them on one of the most amazing rides through Hollywood.

Packed with excerpts and interviews with the likes of Reginald Hudlin (Boomerang), Katt Williams (Norbit), Keith Robinson (Dreamgirls), David Patrick Kelly (48 Hrs.), Steven Berkoff (Beverly Hills Cop) and more, not only does the book celebrate Murphy’s career but it also gives insight to the person behind it. Featured heavily throughout the book are the deeper topics that have ultimately fuelled Murphy’s passion for comedy. Exploring his ability to use comedy as a vehicle to “put racism and sexism front and centre throughout”, Searby delves into the vast pool of examples that find “In amongst all of the hilarious comedy routines Murphy was creating, there were moments that spoke honestly and directly about racism.”

Told with an air of wit that captures Murphy’s inspiring outlook on life, the book is not a gossip frenzied account of his personal life but a testament to the career and his doggedly determined, confident traits that has allowed it to span half a century. From influences that went before, such as Richard Pryor, Nipsey Russell, Moms Mabley and even Elvis Presley and Bruce Lee, Eddie Murphy became the biggest influence in the world, non more so than with aspiring Black comics.

“A pioneer of a new form of much- loved entertainment that was speaking to an entirely new Black generation. It featured a combative edge, an edge that put racism and sexism front and centre throughout. They wouldn’t shut up or back down when discussing the topics that mattered most to them. This was their time to speak and they were not going to let anyone off the hook. Eddie Murphy was doing that with his stand-up to a huge audience – Black and white.”

As with his previous work, Searby masters his subject and highlights how, no matter whether you are an avid fan or not, Eddie Murphy will have touched your life at some point in time. Whether it be through music, through comedy, through the voice of a donkey or adult humour, his reign as one of the world’s most iconic inhabitants is undeniable and ‘Eddie Murphy; Deliriously Funny’ is a captivating insight into his legacy.

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Scotland’s greatest export. The world’s first super spy. Voted the sexiest man on the planet. Sir Sean Connery was a titanic figure on screen and off for over half a century. Author A. J. Black delves into Connery’s life for more than mere biography, exploring not just the enormously varied pictures he made including crowd pleasing blockbusters such as The Untouchables or Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, serious-minded fare in The Hill or The Offence, and his strange sojourns into eclectic fantasy with Zardoz or Time Bandits, but also the sweep of a career that crossed movie eras as well as decades.

We talk about it all

Plus watch the video I made to marvel at the vocal versatility of Around the World with Sean Connery

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Alistair Owen is author of Smoking in Bed: Conversations with Bruce Robinson (one of David Hare’s Books of the Year in the Guardian), Story and Character: Interviews with British Screenwriters, Hampton on Hampton (one of Craig Raine’s Books of the Year in the Observer) and The Art of Screen Adaptation: Top Writers Reveal Their Craft.

He has written original and adapted screenplays and stageplays, on spec and to commission; contributed filmmaker interviews to Creative Screenwriting and film book reviews to the Independent on Sunday; and recently published his first novel, The Vetting Officer.

Alistair has chaired Q&A events at the Hay Festival, Edinburgh International Book Festival and London Screenwriters’ Festival; and his platform with Christopher Hampton in the Lyttelton Theatre to celebrate Faber’s 75th anniversary was published in the anthology Faber Playwrights at the National Theatre.

His next nonfiction project is a book of conversations with bestselling author and screenwriter William Boyd, for Penguin.

Find Alistair and his books on Amazon.com, Amazon UK, Goodreads and Shepherd

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I talk to Hanna Flint, critic, broadcaster and author of Strong Female Character, a personal and incisive reflection on how cinema has been the key to understanding herself and the world we live in.

A feminist of mixed-race heritage, Hanna has succeeded in an industry not designed for people like her. Interweaving anecdotes from familial and personal experiences – episodes of messy sex, introspection, and that time actor Vincent D’Onofrio tweeted that Hanna Flint sounded ‘like a secret agent’ – she offers a critical eye on the screen’s representation of women and ethnic minorities – their impact on her life, body image and ambitions – with the humour and eloquence that has made her a leading film critic of her generation. Divided into sections Origin Story, Coming of Age, Adult Material, Workplace Drama and Strong Female Character, the book ponders how the creative industries could better reflect our multicultural society.

Warm, funny and engaging and full of film-infused lessons, Strong Female Character will appeal to readers of all backgrounds and seeks to help us better see ourselves in our own eyes rather than letting others decide who and what we can be.

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It’s April 2016. Stephen Bradley has just spent a very hectic year and a half promoting his latest film, Noble, as it was released across the world from Los Angeles to Cannes to New Zealand. What he doesn’t know, until now, is that during the same period he was also developing a Stage IV cancer that has now spread to vital organs.

Shooting and Cutting: A Survivor's Guide to Filmmaking and Other Diseases alternates between the journey of Stephen’s life-changing treatment, his renewed sense of purpose in current work projects and war-stories from twenty years of filmmaking. The style is honest, humorous and, most of all, entertaining. The narratives intertwine with pace, twists, turns and as many cliffhangers as possible. As an account of life on the edge, the book is full of unexpected detail and emotional nuance. 

Buy HERE.

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Instant #1 New York Times Bestseller!

Michael Mann, four-time-Oscar-nominated writer-director of The Last of the Mohicans, The Insider, Ali, Miami Vice, Collateral, and Heat teams up with Edgar Award–winning author Meg Gardiner to deliver Mann’s first novel, an explosive return to the universe and characters of his classic crime film—with an all-new story unfolding in the years before and after the iconic movie

“Heat 2 is now one of my favorite suspense novels. . . . I’m already quoting lines from Heat 2 to my writer friends (shamelessly saying the lines are mine).” – James Patterson

One day after the end of Heat, Chris Shiherlis (Val Kilmer) is holed up in Koreatown, wounded, half delirious, and desperately trying to escape LA. Hunting him is LAPD detective Vincent Hanna (Al Pacino). Hours earlier, Hanna killed Shiherlis’s brother in arms Neil McCauley (De Niro) in a gunfight under the strobe lights at the foot of an LAX runway. Now Hanna’s determined to capture or kill Shiherlis, the last survivor of McCauley’s crew, before he ghosts out of the city.

In 1988, seven years earlier, McCauley, Shiherlis, and their highline crew are taking scores on the West Coast, the US-Mexican border, and now in Chicago. Driven, daring, they’re pulling in money and living vivid lives. And Chicago homicide detective Vincent Hanna—a man unreconciled with his history—is following his calling, the pursuit of armed and dangerous men into the dark and wild places, hunting an ultraviolent gang of home invaders.

Meanwhile, the fallout from McCauley’s scores and Hanna’s pursuit cause unexpected repercussions in a parallel narrative, driving through the years following Heat.

Heat 2 projects its dimensional and richly drawn men and women into whole new worlds—from the inner sanctums of rival crime syndicates in a South American free-trade zone to transnational criminal enterprises in Southeast Asia. The novel brings you intimately into these lives. In Michael Mann’s Heat universe, they will confront new adversaries in lethal circumstances beyond all boundaries.

Heat 2 is engrossing, moving, and tragic—a masterpiece of crime fiction with the same extraordinary ambitions, scope, and rich characterizations as the epic film.

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Dav

Columbo was arguably the most popular and most unique television mystery series ever—even though, within two minutes of the titles, the audience already knew the murderer’s identity. The show captivated tens of millions of viewers for 69 adventures produced over 35 years. Yet if star Peter Falk had gotten his way, it would have run far longer.

Columbo was never formally cancelled, just subtly killed off. Twice. Who was to blame? The temperamental lead who would rather work in movies? The budget-conscious studio, exhausted with the star’s demands? Or was it the meddling television studios, searching for a younger, hipper replacement?

Discover the solution in Shooting Columbo: The Lives and Deaths of TV’s Rumpled Detective. Author David Koenig takes you behind the scenes to witness the creation and making of every case, from the pilot Prescription: Murder (and its earlier incarnations on The Chevy Mystery Show and on stage) to the final special, Columbo Likes the Nightlife.

You’ll discover the origins of the Lieutenant’s unseen wife, the lethargic Dog, the wrinkled raincoat, the wheezing 1959 Peugeot, and “Just one more thing....” The narrative draws on scores of exclusive interviews with the show’s writers, producers, directors and other creative personnel, as well as previously unpublished studio records, including scripts, memos, production reports, casting sheets, and business diaries. They will transport you to the harried story conferences, the heated confrontations, and take... after take... after take... of filming.

The “shooting” of Columbo was filled with backstage intrigue and larger-than-life personalities who, through it all, created unforgettable classic television.

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Formed in early 2015 by film scholars Dario Llinares and Neil Fox, The Cinematologists is a podcast and film club that aims to bring fans, filmmakers, critics and academics together to watch, discuss and engage with cinema of all forms, genres and eras. 

The podcast is often based on a live event film screening where contributions from the hosts and audience members are recorded and edited together with related interviews and contextual chat from Neil and Dario, but there are also long form interview episodes with academics and filmmakers. 

At time of writing the podcast is entering its 16th season.

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“Movie Speak won’t guarantee you a job, but having a knowledge of the industry terms will fool everyone into thinking you own the place.” — Steven Spielberg

“Finally a book that celebrates the process—the dynamic web of people, technique, and artistry—underneath every foot of celluloid.” —Jodie Foster

Uncover the secret language of movie-making in a handbook for film buffs and language-lovers, as well as anyone who aspires to break into the business, with hundreds of essential terms, explained. Opening a window into the fascinatingly technical, odd, colorful, and mysterious working language of movies, Oscar-winning producer, actor, and director Tony Bill sheds light on the hugely complex process of making a film, as well as on the hierarchies between the cast and crew and the on-set etiquette of any movie production.

From why the Assistant Director calls “wrap” to the real reason Hollywood stars began wearing sunglasses, Movie Speak offers tricks of the trade learned over decades in Hollywood—to help you crack the code of the movie business.

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In 1888, Frenchman Louis Le Prince shot the world’s first motion picture. In 1890, he boarded a train in his home country and vanished — never to be seen again. Just a few months later, Thomas Edison announced “his” own groundbreaking motion picture device — one Le Prince’s family thought looked unsettlingly familiar…

The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain on Louis Le Prince’s life and work, dispelling the secrets that shroud each — and sheds light, for the first time, on his disappearance…

“Absorbing… bring[s] sharp forensic skills and a cool head to a narrative that has become hijacked by wild conspiracy theories” — The Sunday Times (UK)

“A fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative of one of the forgotten figures in cinematic history” — Kirkus (starred review)

“Vivid character sketches, lyrical descriptions of the art and science of moviemaking, and a dramatic plot twist make this a must-read” — Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Combines firsthand accounts with dynamic writing to bring the Victorian era to life. A remarkable cast of characters (including Le Prince’s equally fascinating wife, Lizzie) makes for compelling reading” — Library Journal

“A captivating whodunit [and] a lens on the development of cinema itself… Briskly paced and elegant… Indisputably dramatic” — Harper’s Magazine

“Absorbing, forensic and jaw-dropping” — Total Film

“Partly a fascinating history, partly a surprisingly twisted whodunit, and entirely an insightful story of human intrigue” — Deborah Blum, Pulitzer-Prize winning author of The Poisoner’s Handbook

“A gripping tale that holds its own against any Hitchcockian thriller” — New York Times bestselling author Jennifer Keishin Armstrong

“Meticulous and entertaining… persuasively solves the 130-year-old mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance and death. A terrific book” — Jill Jonnes, author of Empires of Light and Eiffel’s Tower

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Released in 1946, The Best Years of Our Lives became an immediate success. Life magazine called it “the first big, good movie of the post-war era” to tackle the “veterans problem.” Today we call that problem PTSD, but in the initial aftermath of World War II, the modern language of war trauma did not exist. The film earned the producer Samuel Goldwyn his only Best Picture Academy Award. It offered the injured director, William Wyler, a triumphant postwar return to Hollywood. And for Harold Russell, a double amputee who costarred with Fredric March and Dana Andrews, the film provided a surprising second act.

Award-winning author Alison Macor illuminates the film’s journey from script to screen and describes how this authentic motion picture moved audiences worldwide. General Omar Bradley believed The Best Years of Our Lives would help “the American people to build an even better democracy” following the war, and the movie inspired broad reflection on reintegrating the walking wounded. But the film’s nuanced critique of American ideals also made it a target, and the picture and its creators were swept up in the anti-Communist witch hunts of the late 1940s. In this authoritative history, Macor chronicles the making and meaning of a film that changed America.

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Guests from Cannes: Luke Hicks, Savina Petkova, Staphanie Zacharek, and Jason Solomons.

Listeners and guests: Cai Ross and Ian Killick.

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Buy the book here.

In this genre-defying work of cultural history, the chief film critic of Slate places comedy legend and acclaimed filmmaker Buster Keaton’s unique creative genius in the context of his time.

Born the same year as the film industry in 1895, Buster Keaton began his career as the child star of a family slapstick act reputed to be the most violent in vaudeville. Beginning in his early twenties, he enjoyed a decade-long stretch as the director, star, stuntman, editor, and all-around mastermind of some of the greatest silent comedies ever made, including Sherlock Jr., The General, and The Cameraman.

Even through his dark middle years as a severely depressed alcoholic finding work on the margins of show business, Keaton’s life had a way of reflecting the changes going on in the world around him. He found success in three different mediums at their creative peak: first vaudeville, then silent film, and finally the experimental early years of television. Over the course of his action-packed seventy years on earth, his life trajectory intersected with those of such influential figures as the escape artist Harry Houdini, the pioneering Black stage comedian Bert Williams, the television legend Lucille Ball, and literary innovators like F. Scott Fitzgerald and Samuel Beckett.

In Camera Man, film critic Dana Stevens pulls the lens out from Keaton’s life and work to look at concurrent developments in entertainment, journalism, law, technology, the political and social status of women, and the popular understanding of addiction. With erudition and sparkling humor, Stevens hopscotches among disciplines to bring us up to the present day, when Keaton’s breathtaking (and sometimes life-threatening) stunts remain more popular than ever as they circulate on the internet in the form of viral gifs. Far more than a biography or a work of film history, Camera Man is a wide-ranging meditation on modernity that paints a complex portrait of a one-of-a-kind artist.

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I talk to writer, film producer and academic about screenwriters and screenwriting.

Here's some information from Neil's own webpage:

My award-winning film work includes the short film It’s Natural To Be Afraid (2011), viewable here, and the feature film ‘Wilderness’ (2017), currently out for sale following a successful festival run.  You can find my filmmaking site here. 

I am the co-founder and co-host of the renowned film podcast The Cinematologists.

I write about music documentaries for The Quietus, and about film more broadly for Beneficial Shock, Directors Notes and others.

I am a contributing editor to MAI: Journal of Feminism and Visual Culture, and have conducted long-form interviews with filmmakers Hope Dickson Leach and Lynn Shelton.

On this site you will find details of current projects and articles alongside links to where you can find evidence of my bold claims.

My research interests include Film Education, Music Documentaries and Concert Films, and Podcasting.

By day I am a senior lecturer in Film at the School of Film & Television, Falmouth University, where I also lead a research and innovation programme on pedagogy. I teach screenwriting and filmmaking on the BA Film and MA Film & Television courses.

I have a beautiful wife and a daughter, Beth and Tessa, a cheeky dog called Bailey (aka Chaos Dog) and we all live in Cornwall, UK.

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A full-speed-ahead oral history of the nearly two-decade making of the cultural phenomenon Mad Max: Fury Road—with more than 130 new interviews with key members of the cast and crew, including Charlize Theron, Tom Hardy, and director George Miller, from the pop culture reporter for The New York Times, Kyle Buchanan.

It won six Oscars and has been hailed as the greatest action film ever, but it is a miracle Mad Max: Fury Road ever made it to the screen… or that anybody survived the production. The story of this modern classic spanned nearly two decades of wild obstacles as visionary director George Miller tried to mount one of the most difficult shoots in Hollywood history.

Production stalled several times, stars Tom Hardy and Charlize Theron clashed repeatedly in the brutal Namib Desert, and Miller’s crew engineered death-defying action scenes that were among the most dangerous ever committed to film. Even accomplished Hollywood figures are flummoxed by the accomplishment: As the director Steven Soderbergh has said, “I don’t understand how they’re not still shooting that film, and I don’t understand how hundreds of people aren’t dead.”

Kyle Buchanan takes readers through every step of that moviemaking experience in vivid detail, from Fury Road’s unexpected origins through its outlandish casting process to the big-studio battles that nearly mutilated a masterpiece. But he takes the deepest dive in reporting the astonishing facts behind a shoot so unconventional that the film’s fantasy world began to bleed into the real lives of its cast and crew. As they fought and endured in a wasteland of their own, the only way forward was to have faith in their director’s mad vision. But how could Miller persevere when almost everything seemed to be stacked against him?

With hundreds of exclusive interviews and details about the making of Fury Road, readers will be left with one undeniable conclusion: There has never been a movie so drenched in sweat, so forged by fire, and so epic in scope.

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The son of a celebrated Hollywood director emerges from his father's shadow to claim his own place as a visionary force in American culture. George Stevens, Jr. tells an intimate and moving tale of his relationship with his Oscar-winning father and his own distinguished career in Hollywood and Washington. Fascinating people, priceless stories and a behind-the-scenes view of some of America's major cultural and political events grace this riveting memoir.

George Stevens, Jr. grew up in Hollywood and worked on film classics with his father and writes vividly of his experience on the sets of A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), Giant (1956) and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959). He explores how the magnitude of his father's talent and achievements left him questioning his own creative path. The younger Stevens began to forge his unique career when legendary broadcaster Edward R. Murrow recruited him to elevate the Motion Picture Service at the United States Information Agency in John F. Kennedy's Washington. Stevens' trailblazing efforts initiated what has been called the "golden era" of USIA filmmaking and a call to respect motion pictures as art. His appointment as founding director of the American Film Institute in 1967 placed him at the forefront of culture and politics, safeguarding thousands of endangered films and training a new generation of filmmakers. Stevens' commitment to America's cultural heritage led to envisioning the prestigious Kennedy Center Honors and propelled a creative life of award-winning films and television programs that heightened attention to social justice, artistic achievement, and the American experience.

Stevens provides a rare look at a pioneering American family spanning five generations in entertainment: from the San Francisco stage in the 19th century to silent screen comedies, Academy Award-winning films, Emmy Award-winning television programs and a Broadway play in the 21st century. He reveals the private side of the dazzling array of American presidents, first ladies, media moguls, and luminaries who cross his path, including Elizabeth Taylor, Sidney Poitier, the Kennedys, Yo-Yo Ma, Cary Grant, James Dean, Bruce Springsteen, Barack and Michelle Obama, and many more.

In My Place in the Sun, George Stevens, Jr. shares his lifelong passion for advancing the art of American film, enlightening audiences, and shining a spotlight on notable figures who inspire us. He provides an insightful look at Hollywood's Golden Age and an insider's account of Washington spanning six decades, bringing to life a sparkling era of American history and culture.

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Age of Cage might be the closest we will get to understanding the singular beauty of each of Nic Cage’s always electric performances. You are holding the Rosetta Stone for Cage. Enjoy it.”

—Paul Scheer, actor, writer and host of the How Did This Get Made? and Unspooled podcasts

Icon. Celebrity. Artist. Madman. Genius.

Nicolas Cage is many things, but love him, or laugh at him, there's no denying two things: you’ve seen one of his many films, and you certainly know his name. But who is he, really, and why has his career endured for over forty years, with more than a hundred films, and birthed a million memes?

Age of Cage is a smart, beguiling book about the films of Nicolas Cage and the actor himself, as well as a sharp-eyed examination of the changes that have taken place in Hollywood over the course of his career. Critic and journalist Keith Phipps draws a portrait of the enigmatic icon by looking at—what else?—Cage’s expansive filmography.

As Phipps delights in charting Cage’s films, Age of Cage also chronicles the transformation of film, as Cage’s journey takes him through the world of 1980s comedies (Valley Girl, Peggy Sue Got Married, Moonstruck), to the indie films and blockbuster juggernauts of the 1990s (Wild at Heart, Leaving Las Vegas, Face/Off, Con Air), through the wild and unpredictable video-on-demand world of today.

Sweeping in scope and intimate in its profile of a fiercely passionate artist, Age of Cage is, like the man himself, surprising, insightful, funny, and one of a kind. So, snap out of it, and enjoy this appreciation of Nicolas Cage, national treasure.

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John Bleasdale talks to Matthew Page about his new book 100 Bible Films.

From The Passion of the Christ to Life of Brian, and from The Ten Commandments to Last Temptation of Christ, filmmakers have been adapting the stories of the Bible for over 120 years, from first time the Höritz Passion Play was filmed in the Czech Republic back in 1897. Ever since, these stories have inspired musicals, comedies, sci-fi, surrealist visions and the avant garde not to mention spawning their own genre, the biblical epic. Filmmakers across six continents and from all kinds of religious perspectives (or none at all), have adapted the greatest stories ever told, delighting some and infuriating others.

100 Bible Films is the indispensible guide to this wide and varied output, providing an authoritative but accessible history of biblical adaptations through one hundred of the most interesting and significant biblical films. Richly illustrated with film stills, this book depicts how such films have undertaken a complex negotiation between art, commerce, entertainment and religion.

Matthew Page traces the screen history of the biblical stories from the very earliest silent passion plays, via the golden ages of the biblical epic, through to more innovative and controversial later films as well as covering significant TV adaptations. He discusses films made not only by some of our greatest filmmakers, artists such as Martin Scorsese, Jean Luc Godard, Alice Guy, Roberto Rossellini, Pier Paolo Pasolini, Lotte Reiniger, Carl Dreyer and Luis Buñuel, but also those looking to explore their faith or share it with lovers of cinema the world over.

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John Bleasdale talks to Leon Hunt, the author of Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur.

The blurb from Bloomsbury:

How do we approach a figure like Mario Bava, a once obscure figure promoted to cult status? This book takes a new look at Italy's 'maestro of horror' but also uses his films to address a broader set of concerns. What issues do his films raise for film authorship, given that several of them were released in different versions and his contributions to others were not always credited? How might he be understood in relation to genre, one of which he is sometimes credited with having pioneered?

This volume addresses these questions through a thorough analysis of Bava's shifting reputation as a stylist and genre pioneer and also discusses the formal and narrative properties of a filmography marked by an emphasis on spectacle and atmosphere over narrative coherence and the ways in which his lauded cinematic style intersects with different production contexts. Featuring new analysis of cult classics like Kill, Baby … Kill (1966) and Five Dolls for an August Moon (1970), Mario Bava: The Artisan as Italian Horror Auteur sheds light on a body of films that were designed to be ephemeral but continue to fascinate us today.

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Read the book Cimino here.

The first biography of critically acclaimed then critically derided filmmaker Michael Cimino—and a reevaluation of the infamous film that destroyed his career

The director Michael Cimino (1939–2016) is famous for two films: the intense, powerful, and enduring Vietnam movie The Deer Hunter, which won Best Picture at the Academy Awards in 1979 and also won Cimino Best Director, and Heaven’s Gate, the most notorious bomb of all time. Originally budgeted at $11 million, Cimino’s sprawling western went off the rails in Montana. The picture grew longer and longer, and the budget ballooned to over $40 million. When it was finally released, Heaven’s Gate failed so completely with reviewers and at the box office that it put legendary studio United Artists out of business and marked the end of Hollywood's auteur era.

Or so the conventional wisdom goes. Charles Elton delves deeply into the making and aftermath of the movie and presents a surprisingly different view to that of Steven Bach, one of the executives responsible for Heaven’s Gate, who wrote a scathing book about the film and solidified the widely held view that Cimino wounded the movie industry beyond repair. Elton’s Cimino is a richly detailed biography that offers a revisionist history of a lightning rod filmmaker. Based on extensive interviews with Cimino’s peers and collaborators and enemies and friends, most of whom have never spoken before, it unravels the enigmas and falsehoods, many perpetrated by the director himself, which surround his life, and sheds new light on his extraordinary career. This is a story of the making of art, the business of Hollywood, and the costs of ambition, both financial and personal.

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'Like a pizza delivery driver who travels everywhere by moped, or a volcanologist who keeps turning the central heating up, I'm a film critic who loves going to the cinema.'

Peter Bradshaw is the film reviewer for intelligent, curious cinemagoers; he has worked at the Guardian for twenty years. The Films That Made Me collates his finest reviews from the last two decades, which carry with them his deep experience, knowledge and understanding of film.

Introducing each section with a brief introductory article in his light, humorous tone, and ranging from The Cat in the Hat and the Twilight Saga to Synecdoche: New York, Bradshaw shares the films that he loved, the films that he hated, the films that made him laugh, cry, swoon and scared.

Bradshaw's reviews range from the insightful and introspective to the savage and funny. The Films That Made Me is a must read for all film fanatics.

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Joseph McBride has written a ton of books, as well as writing screenplays and television specials. The subjects of his work include baseball slang, JFK, and biographies of Frank Capra, Billy Wilder and John Ford. His latest is a superb exploration of the work of the Coen Brothers. Here's the blurb:

The Coen Bros. have attracted a wide following and have been rewarded with Oscars and other honors. Some of their films such as Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and No Country for Old Men are cult favorites and box office hits. Yet this team of filmmaking brothers remains misunderstood in some critical circles, partly because, like John Ford, they mischievously refuse to explain themselves to interviewers, preferring to let their work speak for itself. Ethan and Joel Coen also delight in unsettling cinematic conventions and confounding audiences while raising disturbing questions about human nature.

Mixing film genres and styles, playing with narrative in postmodernist ways, the Coens’ films display shocking tonal shifts as they blend comedy and drama and, most controversially, comedy and violence. This potent mélange of themes and stylistic approaches makes the Coens’ films adventurous, unpredictable probes into social anxieties and reflections on the omnipresence of evil in the modern world. In their trenchant satire, these brilliant writer-directors are heirs to Preston Sturges and Billy Wilder, and as satirists tend to do, the Coens sometimes provoke audience anger and incomprehension along with enjoyment of their penchant for black comedy. 

Film historian and critic Joseph McBride jousts with the Coens’ detractors while defining the filmmakers’ freshness and originality. The quirkily individualistic Coens are the kind of personal filmmakers the increasingly conglomerated American cinema rarely fosters anymore, a distinction partly attributable to their following in Europe and their partial financing by European sources. This critical study goes beyond the often-superficial and confused nature of Coen criticism to illuminate their artistic personalities and contributions to cinematic culture.

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John Bleasdale talks to Isaac Butler the author of The Method How the 20th Century Learned to Act.

“Entertaining … a remarkable story.”--The New Yorker

“Delicious, humane, probing.”--Vulture, Most Anticipated Books of 2022

"The best and most important book about acting I've ever read."--Nathan Lane

From the coauthor of The World Only Spins Forward comes the first cultural history of Method acting--an ebullient account of creative discovery and the birth of classic Hollywood.

On stage and screen, we know a great performance when we see it. But how do actors draw from their bodies and minds to turn their selves into art? What is the craft of being an authentic fake? More than a century ago, amid tsarist Russia's crushing repression, one of the most talented actors ever, Konstantin Stanislavski, asked these very questions, reached deep into himself, and emerged with an answer. How his “system” remade itself into the Method and forever transformed American theater and film is an unlikely saga that has never before been fully told.

Now, critic and theater director Isaac Butler chronicles the history of the Method in a narrative that transports readers from Moscow to New York to Los Angeles, from The Seagull to A Streetcar Named Desire to Raging Bull. He traces how a cohort of American mavericks--including Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, and the storied Group Theatre--refashioned Stanislavski's ideas for a Depression-plagued nation that had yet to find its place as an artistic powerhouse. The Group's feuds and rivalries would, in turn, shape generations of actors who enabled Hollywood to become the global dream-factory it is today. Some of these performers the Method would uplift; others, it would destroy. Long after its midcentury heyday, the Method lives on as one of the most influential--and misunderstood--ideas in American culture.

Studded with marquee names--from Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe, and Elia Kazan, to James Baldwin, Ellen Burstyn, and Dustin Hoffman--The Method is a spirited history of ideas and a must-read for any fan of Broadway or American film.

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John Bleasdale talks to J Blake Fichera author of Scored to Death and Scored to Death 2, available here.

Scored to Death collects 14 info-packed, terrifyingly entertaining interviews with renowned film composers who have provided music for some of the horror genre's greatest films and franchises, including Halloween, A Nightmare on Elm Street, Friday the 13th, Hellraiser, Maniac, The Fog, Prince of Darkness, Cujo,

Dawn of the Dead, Deep Red, Suspiria, Santa Sangre, Zombie, The Beyond, Insidious, The Conjuring, Hostel, The Strangers, House of the Devil, and many more!

​

Interviewed are director-composer John Carpenter; sound designer-composer Alan Howarth; Italian composers and members of the band Goblin (known for their scores for Dario Argento films) Claudio Simonetti and Maurizio Guarini; Hollywood composers Christopher Young, Tom Hajdu (of the composing team tomandandy), Charles Bernstein, Jay Chattaway, and Nathan Barr; as well as horror notables Fabio Frizzi, Simon Boswell, Joseph Bishara, Jeff Grace, and 

Harry Manfredini.

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John Bleasdale talks to Noah Isenberg about his book We'll Always Have Casablanca.

Here's the blurb:

For the 75th anniversary of its premiere—the incredible story of how Casablanca was made and why it remains the most beloved of Hollywood films.

Casablanca was first released in 1942, just two weeks after the city of Casablanca itself surrendered to American troops led by General Patton. Featuring a pitch-perfect screenplay, a classic soundtrack, and unforgettable performances by Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, and a deep supporting cast, Casablanca was hailed in the New York Times as “a picture that makes the spine tingle and the heart take a leap.” The film won Oscars for best picture, best director, and best screenplay, and would go on to enjoy more revival screenings than any other movie in history. It became so firmly ensconced in the cultural imagination that, as Umberto Eco once said, Casablanca is “not one movie; it is ‘movies.’”

We’ll Always Have Casablanca is celebrated film historian Noah Isenberg’s rich account of this most beloved movie’s origins. Through extensive research and interviews with filmmakers, film critics, family members of the cast and crew, and diehard fans, Isenberg reveals the myths and realities behind Casablanca’s production, exploring the transformation of the unproduced stage play into the classic screenplay, the controversial casting decisions, the battles with Production Code censors, and the effect of the war’s progress on the movie’s reception. Isenberg particularly focuses on the central role refugees from Hitler’s Europe played in the production (nearly all of the actors and actresses cast in Casablanca were immigrants).

Finally, Isenberg turns to Casablanca’s long afterlife and the reasons it remains so revered. From the Marx Brothers’ 1946 spoof hit, A Night in Casablanca, to loving parodies in New Yorker cartoons, Saturday Night Live skits, and Simpsons episodes, Isenberg delves into the ways the movie has lodged itself in the American psyche.

Filled with fresh insights into Casablanca’s creation, production, and legacy, We’ll Always Have Casablanca is a magnificent account of what made the movie so popular and why it continues to dazzle audiences seventy-five years after its release.

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John Bleasdale talks to Michael Leader and Jake Cunningham, hosts of the podcast Ghibliotheque, now a beautiful book. Ghibliotheque offers a well-balanced and highly informed critique of some of the greatest animated movies of all time, including Spirited Away, My Neighbour Totoro and Princess Mononoke.

From Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind to Earwig and the Witch, authors Michael Leader and Jake Cunningham review every Studio Ghibli feature film, providing insightful background information on how the films were made, and considered film-fan reactions to the works themselves. Beautifully illustrated with stills and posters, portraits of the creative team and the Studio itself, this is a comprehensive, engaging guide to the wonderfully complex, mysterious and entertaining worlds of the legendary, Oscar-winning animation company.

The book is available here.

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John Bleasdale talks to Jonathan Melville author of A Kind of Magic: Making the Original Highlander.

When two American producers took a chance on a college student's script, they set in motion a chain of events involving an imploding British film studio, an experimental music video director still finding his filmmaking feet, a former James Bond with a spiralling salary, and the unexpected arrival of low-budget production company, Cannon Films.

Author Jonathan Melville looks back at the creation of Highlander with the help of more than 60 cast and crew, including stars Christopher Lambert and Clancy Brown, as they talk candidly about the gruelling shoot that took them from the back alleys of London, to the far reaches of the Scottish Highlands, and onto the mean streets of 1980s New York City.

With insights from Queen's Brian May and Roger Taylor on the film's iconic music, exclusive screenwriter commentary on unmade scripts, never-before-seen photos from private collections, and a glimpse into the promotional campaign that never was, if there can be only one book on Highlander then this is it!

Visit the Writers on Film bookshop

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John Bleasdale talks to Clark Collis, the author of You've Got Red on You: How Shaun of the Dead was Brought to Life.

How did a low-budget British movie about Londoners battling zombies in a pub become a beloved global pop culture phenomenon?

You’ve Got Red on You details the previously untold story of 2004’s Shaun of the Dead, the hilarious, terrifying horror-comedy whose fan base continues to grow and grow. After consulting dozens of the people involved in the creation of the film, author Clark Collis reveals how a group of friends overcame seemingly insurmountable odds to make a movie that would take bites out of both the UK and the US box office before ascending to the status of bona fide comedy classic.

Featuring in-depth interviews with director Edgar Wright, producer Nira Park, and cast members Simon Pegg, Nick Frost, Kate Ashfield, Bill Nighy, Lucy Davis, and Coldplay singer Chris Martin, the book also boasts a treasure trove of storyboards, rare behind-the-scenes photos, and commentary from famous fans of the movie, including filmmakers Quentin Tarantino and Eli Roth, Walking Dead executive producer Greg Nicotero, and World War Z author Max Brooks.

As Pegg’s zombie-fighting hero Shaun would say, “How’s that for a slice of fried gold?”

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John Bleasdale talks to Anna Cale author of The Real Diana Dors. The story of Swindon-born film star Diana Dors is one of fame, glamour and intrigue. From the moment she came into the world, her life was full of drama. Her acting career began in the shadow of the Second World War, entering the film world as a vulnerable young teenager and negotiating the difficult British studio system of the 1940s and 50s. Yet she battled against the odds to become one of the most iconic British actors of the 20th century.

This book follows her remarkable story, from childhood in suburban Swindon, to acting success as a teenager and finding fame as the ‘the English Marilyn Monroe’. Many remember her as an outspoken and sometimes controversial figure, grabbing headlines for her personal life as often as her film roles. For Diana, image seemed to be everything, but there was more to her than the ‘blonde bombshell’ reputation suggested. A talented actor, she worked on numerous film and television projects, building a fascinating career that spanned decades.

Set against the backdrop of the changing social landscape of twentieth century Britain, this book charts the ups and downs of her diverse acting career and her tumultuous private life, to build a fascinating picture of a truly unique British screen icon.

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John Bleasdale talks to Ian Nathan about Peter Jackson and his book Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle Earth.

The definitive history of Peter Jackson's Middle-earth saga, Anything You Can Imagine takes us on a cinematic journey across all six films, featuring brand-new interviews with Peter, his cast & crew. From the early days of daring to dream it could be done, through the highs and lows of making the films, to fan adoration and, finally, Oscar glory.

Lights

A nine-year-old boy in New Zealand's Pukerua Bay stays up late and is spellbound by a sixty-year-old vision of a giant ape on an island full of dinosaurs. This is true magic. And the boy knows that he wants to be a magician.

Camera

Fast-forward twenty years and the boy has begun to cast a spell over the film-going audience, conjuring gore-splattered romps with bravura skill that will lead to Academy recognition with an Oscar nomination for Heavenly Creatures. The boy from Pukerua Bay with monsters reflected in his eyes has arrived, and Hollywood comes calling. What would he like to do next? 'How about a fantasy film, something like The Lord of the Rings...?'

Action

The greatest work of fantasy in modern literature, and the biggest, with rights ownership so complex it will baffle a wizard. Vast. Complex. Unfilmable. One does not simply walk into Mordor - unless you are Peter Jackson.

Anything You Can Imagine tells the full, dramatic story of how Jackson and his trusty fellowship of Kiwi filmmakers dared take on a quest every bit as daunting as Frodo's, and transformed JRR Tolkien's epic tale of adventure into cinematic magic, and then did it again with The Hobbit. Enriched with brand-new interviews with Jackson, his fellow filmmakers and many of the films' stars, Ian Nathan's mesmerising narrative whisks us to Middle-earth, to gaze over the shoulder of the director as he creates the impossible, the unforgettable, and proves that film-making really is 'anything you can imagine'.

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John Bleasdale talks to Glenn Frankel author of books on The Searchers, High Noon and Midnight Cowboy. Glenn worked for many years at the Washington Post, where he served as bureau chief in London, Jerusalem and Southern Africa, winning a Pulitzer Prize in 1989 for International Reporting. He taught journalism at Sanford University and the University of Texas at Austin, where he directed the School of Journalism. He has won the National Jewish Book Award and was a finalist for the Lost Angeles Times Book Prize. His books on The Searchers and High Noon were bestsellers that have won critical acclaim, and he is a Motion Picture Academy Film Scholar for his book, Shooting Midnight Cowboy: Art, Sex, Loneliness, Liberation, and the Making of a Dark Classic.

His books are available here.

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John Bleasdale talks to Tom Shone, author of Blockbuster, The Nolan Variations and Martin Scorsese a Retrospective. Marvel, Dune, No Time to Die and Last Duel discussed as the Blockbusters Strike Back. There are SPOILERS.

Here's the blurb from the book:

It's a typical summer Friday night and the smell of popcorn is in the air. Throngs of fans jam into air-conditioned multiplexes to escape for two hours in the dark, blissfully lost in Hollywood's latest glittery confection complete with megawatt celebrities, awesome special effects, and enormous marketing budgets. The world is in love with the blockbuster movie, and these cinematic behemoths have risen to dominate the film industry, breaking box office records every weekend. With the passion and wit of a true movie buff and the insight of an internationally renowned critic, Tom Shone is the first to make sense of this phenomenon by taking readers through the decades that have shaped the modern blockbuster and forever transformed the face of Hollywood.

The moment the shark fin broke the water in 1975, a new monster was born. Fast, visceral, and devouring all in its path, the blockbuster had arrived. In just a few weeks Jaws earned more than $100 million in ticket sales, an unprecedented feat that heralded a new era in film. Soon, blockbuster auteurs such as Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and James Cameron would revive the flagging fortunes of the studios and lure audiences back into theaters with the promise of thrills, plenty of action, and an escape from art house pretension.

But somewhere along the line, the beast they awakened took on a life of its own, and by the 1990s production budgets had escalated as quickly as profits. Hollywood entered a topsy-turvy world ruled by marketing and merchandising mavens, in which flops like Godzilla made money and hits had to break records just to break even. The blockbuster changed from a major event that took place a few times a year into something that audiences have come to expect weekly, piling into the backs of one another in an annual demolition derby that has left even Hollywood aghast.

Tom Shone has interviewed all the key participants -- from cinematic visionaries like Spielberg and Lucas and the executives who greenlight these spectacles down to the effects wizards who detonated the Death Star and blew up the White House -- in order to reveal the ways in which blockbusters have transformed how Hollywood makes movies and how we watch them. As entertaining as the films it chronicles, Blockbuster is a must-read for any fan who delights in the magic of the movies.

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John Bleasdale talks to Mark Searby, author of Al Pacino The Movies Behind the Man. His recommended book is Lawrence Grobel's biography of Al Pacino.

Here's a blurb from the book:

Al Pacino: The Movies Behind The Man is the ultimate insider’s guide to the filmography of the legendary Hollywood actor.

Consistently recognised as one of the greatest actors of all time, Al Pacino has a huge legacy within film and an equally impressive archive of awards to his name. Unlike many other books that hold a sole character in their title, whether you’re a fan of his repertoire or not, Al Pacino: The Movies Behind The Man gives a remarkable and often unexplored insight into film and one of it’s key actors, making this an accessible and inspiring read.

Giving an in-depth look at the films made by this icon throughout his career, Al Pacino: The Movies Behind The Man explores his legacy from his breakout performance in The Panic in Needle Park through to the early highs of the 1970s and 80s with The Godfather Parts I and II, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon and Scarface. Each chapter of this book guides the reader through the inception, pre-production and filming of Al Pacino’s entire film catalogue, delving in to previously unearthed critique and opinions of those that worked so closely with him.

Readers can explore the reviews and the box office returns and digest a critical analysis on every film Pacino has ever worked on. His big box office hits such as Heat, The Devil’s Advocate and Donnie Brasco through to the smaller, independent and personal productions including The Local Stigmatic, Looking For Richard and Chinese Coffee make for an inspirited variation of accounts and insight into the workings of such a highly regarded character.

Featuring over fifty exclusive interviews from actors, directors, producers and writers, interviews include the likes of Stephen Bauer (Scarface), Jerry Schatzberg (The Panic in Needle Park), Israel Horovitz (Author! Author!), Hugh Hudson (Revolution), Bruce Altman (Glengarry Glen Ross), Lowell Bergman (The Insider), Jay Mohr (S1m0ne), Cary Brokaw (Angels in America), Kris Marshall (The Merchant of Venice), Lawrence Grobel (Salome and Wilde Salome) and many more.

Giving a unique insight and depth to the workings behind a film icon, Mark Searby presents, AL PACINO: THE MOVIES BEHIND THE MAN

Available to purchase now. Click for Amazon UK, Amazon US, Barnes & Noble, Kobo, Smashword, iBooks and other e-book retailers.

Paperback edition available here

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John Bleasdale talks to author Jason Bailey about his new book, described below. You can also hear his podcast at this link.

In Fun City Cinema: New York and the Movies That Made It, author Jason Bailey digs through New York’s last century via one quintessential New York film of each decade: The Jazz Singer, King Kong, The Naked City, Sweet Smell of Success, Midnight Cowboy, Taxi Driver, Wall Street, Kids, 25th Hour, and Frances Ha.

In doing so, Bailey crafts two intertwining histories: of a great American city in flux, and the classic films and legendary filmmakers that took their inspiration from its grittiness and splendor, creating what we can now view as “accidental documentaries” of the city’s moods and modes.

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John Bleasdale talks to Lynne Sachs, the Memphis born, Brooklyn based filmmaker on the eve of a season of her works being streamed on the Criterion Channel. Since the 1980s, Sachs has created cinematic works that defy genre through the use of hybrid forms and collaboration, incorporating elements of the essay film, collage, performance, documentary and poetry. Her films explore the intricate relationship between personal observations and broader historical experiences. With each project, she investigates the implicit connection between the body, the camera, and the materiality of film itself.

Over her career, Sachs has been awarded support from the Guggenheim Foundation, the NYFA, and Jerome Foundation. Sachs has made 40 films (including Tip of My Tongue, Your Day is My Night, Investigation of a Flame, and Which Way is East). Her films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art, Wexner Center, the Walker, the Getty, New York Film Festival, and Sundance. In 2021, Edison Film Festival and Prismatic Ground Film Festival at Maysles Documentary Center awarded Sachs for her body of work.

Sachs is also deeply engaged with poetry. In 2019, Tender Buttons Press published her first book Year by Year Poems. In 2020 and 2021, she taught film and poetry workshops at Beyond Baroque, Flowchart Foundation, San Francisco Public Library, and Hunter.  www.lynnesachs.com

After comprehensive career retrospectives at Sheffield Doc/Fest 2020 and the Museum of the Moving Image in 2021, the Criterion Channel is delighted to announce that director Lynne Sachs’ films will join the Channel in October 2021 along with a newly recorded director interview exploring her works. Sachs will be making her the Criterion Channel debut with seven earlier works followed by her latest feature, Film About a Father Who, recently released theatrically by Cinema Guild and receiving its exclusive streaming premiere with the Criterion Channel. 

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L.A. native Sam Wasson studied Film at Wesleyan University and at the USC School of Cinematic Arts before publishing his first book, A Splurch in the Kisser: The Movies of Blake Edwards, which film critic Andrew Sarris deemed “the critical resurrection of Blake Edwards."

In 2010, Wasson's Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman became a New York and Los Angeles Times Best Seller. The book has been translated into over a dozen languages, and was named by Entertainment Weekly one of the best pop-culture books of all time. 

Paul on Mazursky, Wasson’s 2011 book of conversations with the legendary writer-director of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice and Down and Out in Beverly Hills, moved director Quentin Tarantino to declare Paul Mazursky "one of the great writer-directors of cinema.”

Fosse, Wasson’s award-winning 2013 biography of the legendary director-choreographer, appeared on over a half-dozen Best of the Year lists and was called “one of the most eloquent showbiz accounts in years” by the Chicago Tribune. In conjunction with the Paley Center for Media, Wasson unearthed "Seasons of Youth," a lost 1961 Fosse television special, now publicly available at the Paley Center's archives in New York and Los Angeles. 

In addition to his work as an author, Wasson has written for numerous publications including The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, and The New Yorker. He’s served as a consultant for The National Comedy Center in New York and The Film Society of Lincoln Center, was a Visiting Professor of Film at Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut and Emerson College in Los Angeles. As panelist and lecturer Wasson has appeared all over the world, from the 92nd Street Y in New York to The Second City in Chicago and the Rome International Film Festival, and has been a featured guest on CNN, BBC, Fox, ABC, NPR, and for The Criterion Collection.

In 2017, The New York Times called Wasson's latest book, Improv Nation: How We Made A Great American Art, "one of the most important stories in American popular culture."

His latest book, The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood, was a New York Times Best Seller. “Sam Wasson’s deep dig into the making of the film,” Janet Maslin wrote, “is a work of exquisite precision. It’s about much more than a movie. It’s about the glorious lost Hollywood in which that 1974 movie was born.”

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John Bleasdale talks to Paul Duncan author and editor of The James Bond Archives:

The ultimate companion to all things 007, covering the making of every single movie in the James Bond franchise, from Dr. No to No Time To Die. With more than 1,007 images and an oral history featuring 150 members of cast and crew, this comprehensively updated XXL edition will delight fans of the most successful and longest-running film franchise in cinema history.

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John Bleasdale talks to Ian Nathan, one of the UK’s best known film writers. A former editor and executive editor of Empire magazine, is the author of Alien Vault, the worldwide best-selling history of Ridley Scott’s masterpiece, Quentin Tarantino: The Iconic Filmmaker and His Work, a gorgeous study of the acclaimed director; studies of The Coen Brothers, Tim Burton, the adaptations of Stephen King; plus the best-selling Anything You Can Imagine: Peter Jackson and the Making of Middle-earth, the filmmaking history of The Lord of the Rings films. You might also have seen him on the popular Sky Arts Discovering Film and The Directors series.

Follow him on Twitter: @iannathan2

Visit his blog: https://iannathanblog.wordpress.com

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CORRECTION: Rob mentioned some 80s film essays on Channel Four by Lindsay Anderson and Alan Clarke – it was actually Alan Parker. (His correction)

Rob Young's new book continues his exploration of British culture, delving into TV and cinema.

Growing up in the 1970s, Rob Young's main storyteller was the wooden box with the glass window in the corner of the family living room, otherwise known as the TV set. Before the age of DVDs and Blu-ray discs, YouTube and commercial streaming services, watching television was a vastly different experience. You switched on, you sat back and you watched. There was no pause or fast-forward button.

The cross-genre feast of moving pictures produced in Britain between the late 1950s and late 1980s - from Quatermass and Tom Jones to The Wicker Man and Brideshead Revisited, from A Canterbury Tale and The Go-Between to Bagpuss and Children of the Stones, and from John Betjeman's travelogues to ghost stories at Christmas - contributed to a national conversation and collective memory. British-made sci-fi, folk horror, period drama and televisual grand tours played out tensions between the past and the present, dramatised the fractures and injustices in society and acted as a portal for magical and ghostly visions.

In The Magic Box, Rob Young takes us on a fascinating journey into this influential golden age of screen and discovers what it reveals about the nature and character of Britain, its uncategorisable people and buried histories - and how its presence can still be felt on screen in the twenty-first century.

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I talk to Matthew about Night Moves and the Scottish screenplay writer Alan Sharp, as well as Orson Welles and especially his recently reconstructed film The Other Side of the Wind.

You can find Matthew's work here: www.matthewaspreygear.com 

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