A few key books that will tell you how films are really made.
Oliver Stone is a film writer and a director with 3 Oscars on his shelf: Best Screenplay for Midnight Express (1978), and Best Director for Platoon (1986), and Born on the 4th of July (1989). After Midnight Express, his writing…
Continue reading Oliver Stone’s Great Autobiography is a Must
FUTURE NOIR, the book by Paul. M. Sammon, summarises with amazing detail how the classic sci-fi movie was made. Sammons’s book is a mammoth work on the making of a very unique film. I’ve read many “Making Of” books, but…
Continue reading Best “Making Of” Books: The Making of BLADE RUNNER
It’s Terrific!, Citizen Kane’s tagline insisted in every poster. For many years considered the best film ever (still now by many), paradoxically, if you were in the American film industry in 1940 most possibly you would think that Citizen Kane…
Continue reading Best “Making Of” Books: The Making of CITIZEN KANE
Darren Aronofsky is a prestigious American film writer and director with a very personal style of filmmaking. His career shows widely different movies, some highly distinguished ones, such as π, Requiem for a Dream, The Wrestler and Black Swan. Below,…
Continue reading The 5 Best Books on Making Movies, by Darren Aronofsky
From the book Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, the basic rules of pitching. In case you are not familiar with William Goldman (1931-2018), he’s been one of the best screenwriters Hollywood has seen. He was…
Continue reading William Goldman’s Ten Commandments of Pitching
And How the Classic Western High Noon Became a Response to the Wave of Extreme Anti-Communism which Swarmed the American Film Industry. What we Mean by Red Scare? National Geographic summarises it very well here and below: The Red Scare…
Continue reading Witch Hunt in 50s Hollywood: The Second Red Scare
How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror. Jason Zinoman‘s Shock Value is a seminal book on modern horror films if ever there was one. In the same way that I would recommend you…
Continue reading SHOCK VALUE, the Essential Book about America’s 70s New Horror Films
Nestor Almendros, John Alcott, and Roger Deakins. Of this great triad of Gods of Cinematography, only Deakins is still with us, working at full throttle. Nestor Almendros Spanish by birth (Catalan to be exact), Cuban by adoption, French by most…
The Star Wars Canon is Inhabited by Zillions of Books. This is a selection of a few books which, in my opinion, comprehend very well the soul of the main Star Wars films. This is not about those fiction books…
Frederic Raphael: There’s a lot of talk. You want a lot of talk? Stanley Kubrick: I can’t say what I want. I want to do Arthur’s story (Schnitzler’s “Traumnovelle”), but in New York, now. That’s all I can tell you.…
Continue reading How Stanley Kubrick’s EYES WIDE SHUT Was Written
