Download or read book Alan J Pakula written by Jared Brown and published by Back Stage Books. This book was released on 2005 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "For me, Alan Pakula was one of the great American filmmakers, but if you look at his films, they look so simple. The camera is not doing back—flips and he's not afraid to hold a shot. You can argue that if you do your work really well, no one should notice." —Todd Field, director ofIn the Bedroom To Kill a Mockingbird.Klute.All the President's Men.Sophie's Choice.Presumed Innocent. Alan J. Pakula was the creative force behind these great films and dozens more. Here at last is the definitive biography of this film genius, based on interviews with more than 40 friends, including Jane Fonda, Robert Redford, and Meryl Streep, and unrestricted access to Pakula's own family and archives. Born in the Bronx, destined to take over the family printing business, Pakula instead began writing and acting in plays as a teenager and moved to Hollywood in the 1950s. Artistically driven, boundlessly inventive, hugely influential, Pakula has left an enduring film legacy. • Three-time Academy Award-winning water/director/producer • Interviews with Harrison Ford, Laurne Bacall, Meryl Street, Robert Redford, Jane Fonda, Kevin Kline, Candice Bergen, Donald Sutherland, and over 30 other film celebrities • More than 25 never-before-published photos of Pakula from his family

Download or read book Alan J Pakula written by Tom Ryan and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2024-08-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Renowned for his masterful storytelling, Alan J. Pakula (1928–1998) left an indelible mark on cinema history. Alan J. Pakula: Interviews offers a concise yet comprehensive overview of the director’s illustrious career, from his early days in Hollywood to his rise as a major filmmaker. From the famous “paranoia trilogy” of Klute, The Parallax View, and All the President’s Men to the gripping psychological drama of Sophie’s Choice and his often-undervalued later work, Pakula’s diverse filmography has captivated audiences and critics alike. The first published collection of interviews with the acclaimed director, this volume presents an illuminating portrait of Pakula as a filmmaker, an artist, and a man of many parts. The eighteen pieces compiled here, including an illuminating introduction and previously unpublished 1983 interview by editor Tom Ryan, provide a broad overview of Pakula’s career. In his own words, Pakula recounts his experience as Robert Mulligan’s producer, reflects on the bulk of films he made as director, and outlines his approach to the art of filmmaking. Taken as a whole, Alan J. Pakula: Interviews is a treasure trove of cinematic wisdom and a fitting tribute to the legacy of an important American filmmaker.

Download or read book The Last Empress written by Hannah Pakula and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2009-11-03 with total page 850 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With the beautiful, powerful, and sexy Madame Chiang Kai-shek at the center of one of the great dramas of the twentieth century, this is the story of the founding of modern China, starting with a revolution that swept away more than 2,000 years of monarchy, followed by World War II, and ending in the eventual loss to the Communists and exile in Taiwan. An epic historical tapestry, this wonderfully wrought narrative brings to life what Americans should know about China -- the superpower we are inextricably linked with -- the way its people think and their code of behavior, both vastly different from our own. The story revolves around this fascinating woman and her family: her father, a peasant who raised himself into Shanghai society and sent his daughters to college in America in a day when Chinese women were kept purposefully uneducated; her mother, an unlikely Methodist from the Mandarin class; her husband, a military leader and dogmatic warlord; her sisters, one married to Sun Yat-sen, the George Washington of China, the other to a seventy-fifth lineal descendant of Confucius; and her older brother, a financial genius. This was the Soong family, which, along with their partners in marriage, was largely responsible for dragging China into the twentieth century. Brilliantly narrated, this fierce and bloody drama also includes U.S. Army General Joseph Stilwell; Claire Chennault, head of the Flying Tigers; Communist leaders Mao Tse-tung and Chou En-lai; murderous warlords; journalists Henry Luce, Theodore White, and Edgar Snow; and the unfortunate State Department officials who would be purged for predicting (correctly) the Communist victory in the Chinese Civil War. As the representative of an Eastern ally in the West, Madame Chiang was befriended -- before being rejected -- by the Roosevelts, stayed in the White House for long periods during World War II, and charmed the U.S. Congress into giving China billions of dollars. Although she was dubbed the Dragon Lady in some quarters, she was an icon to her people and is certainly one of the most remarkable women of the twentieth century.

Download or read book Voyage of the Damned written by Gordon Thomas and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2014-07-01 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “extraordinary” true story of the St. Louis, a German ship that, in 1939, carried Jews away from Hamburg—and into an unimaginable ordeal (The New York Times). On May 13, 1939, the luxury liner St. Louis sailed from Hamburg, one of the last ships to leave Nazi Germany before World War II erupted. Aboard were 937 Jews—some had already been in concentration camps—who believed they had bought visas to enter Cuba. The voyage of the damned had begun. Before the St. Louis was halfway across the Atlantic, a power struggle ensued between the corrupt Cuban immigration minister who issued the visas and his superior, President Bru. The outcome: The refugees would not be allowed to land in Cuba. In America, the Brown Shirts were holding Nazi rallies in Madison Square Garden; anti-Semitic Father Coughlin had an audience of fifteen million. Back in Germany, plans were being laid to implement the final solution. And aboard the St. Louis, 937 refugees awaited the decision that would determine their fate. Gordon Thomas and Max Morgan Witts have re-created history in this meticulous reconstruction of the voyage of the St. Louis. Every word of their account is true: the German High Command’s ulterior motive in granting permission for the “mission of mercy;” the confrontations between the refugees and the German crewmen; the suicide attempts among the passengers; and the attitudes of those who might have averted the catastrophe, but didn’t. In reviewing the work, the New York Times was unequivocal: “An extraordinary human document and a suspense story that is hard to put down. But it is more than that. It is a modern allegory, in which the SS St. Louis becomes a symbol of the SS Planet Earth. In this larger sense the book serves a greater purpose than mere drama.”

Download or read book The Sterile Cuckoo written by John Nichols and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2013-08-05 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “A hilarious, sad . . . all too true novel about the rough underside of a college love affair.”—John Knowles, author of A Separate Peace When eighteen-year-old Jerry Payne first meets Pookie Adams at the Friarsburg, Oklahoma, bus depot, he is hardly aware that this moment marks the beginning of the most memorable love affair of his life. Overwhelmed (and yet secretly enchanted) by her zany, rambling monologue, Jerry is relieved to leave her in St. Louis as he continues to New York. Thinking he’s seen the last of her, he heads off to college, only to be pursued by seventeen lengthy letters, and before he knows it he’s involved with a seemingly crazy, startlingly honest girl who adores him. During the next two years, Pookie helps Jerry leave behind the fun-seeking, beer-blasted fraternity man he has become, as she teaches him to open his heart to her. Then, almost as suddenly as she appeared in his life, she disappears from it, leaving in her wake an eternal trail of love and wonder.

Download or read book Conspiracy Films written by Barna William Donovan and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-10 with total page 285 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For many years, conspiracy theories have been among the most popular story elements in Hollywood films. According to the "conspiracy culture," Government, Big Business, the Church, even aliens--all of which, bundled together, comprise the ubiquitous "Them"--are concealing some of the biggest secrets in American and world history. From The Manchurian Candidate (1962) to JFK (1991), The Matrix (1999) to The Da Vinci Code (2006), this decade-by-decade history explores our fascination with paranoia. The work paints a vivid picture of several of the more prevalent conspiracy theories and the entertainment they have inspired, not only in theatrical films but also in such television series as The X-Files, Lost and V.

Download or read book The Films of Douglas Sirk written by Tom Ryan and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2019-05-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for powerful 1950s melodramas like All That Heaven Allows, Written on the Wind, The Tarnished Angels, and Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk (1897–1987) brought to all his work a distinctive style that led to his reputation as one of twentieth-century film’s great directors. Sirk worked in Europe during the 1930s, mainly for Germany’s UFA studios, and then in America in the 1940s and ’50s. The Films of Douglas Sirk: Exquisite Ironies and Magnificent Obsessions provides an overview of his entire career, including Sirk’s work on musicals, comedies, thrillers, war movies, and westerns. One of the great ironists of the cinema, Sirk believed rules were there to be broken. Whether defying the decrees of Nazi authorities trying to turn film into propaganda or arguing with studios that insisted characters’ problems should always be solved and that endings should always restore order, what Sirk called “emergency exits” for audiences, Sirk always fought for his vision. Offering fresh insights into all of the director’s films and situating them in the culture of their times, critic Tom Ryan also incorporates extensive interview material drawn from a variety of sources, including his own conversations with the director. Furthermore, his enlightening study undertakes a detailed reconsideration of the generally overlooked novels and plays that served as sources for Sirk’s films, as well as providing a critical survey of previous Sirk commentary, from the time of the director’s “rediscovery” in the late 1960s up to the present day.

Download or read book Cycles Sequels Spin offs Remakes and Reboots written by Amanda Ann Klein and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2016-03-15 with total page 368 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With sequels, prequels, remakes, spin-offs, or copies of successful films or franchises dominating film and television production, it sometimes seems as if Hollywood is incapable of making an original film or TV show. These textual pluralities or multiplicities—while loved by fans who flock to them in droves—tend to be dismissed by critics and scholars as markers of the death of high culture. Cycles, Sequels, Spin-offs, Remakes, and Reboots takes the opposite view, surveying a wide range of international media multiplicities for the first time to elucidate their importance for audiences, industrial practices, and popular culture. The essays in this volume offer a broad picture of the ways in which cinema and television have used multiplicities to streamline the production process, and to capitalize on and exploit viewer interest in previously successful and/or sensational story properties. An impressive lineup of established and emerging scholars talk seriously about forms of multiplicity that are rarely discussed as such, including direct-to-DVD films made in Nigeria, cross-cultural Japanese horror remakes, YouTube fan-generated trailer mash-ups, and 1970s animal revenge films. They show how considering the particular bonds that tie texts to one another allows us to understand more about the audiences for these texts and why they crave a version of the same story (or character or subject) over and over again. These findings demonstrate that, far from being lowbrow art, multiplicities are actually doing important cultural work that is very worthy of serious study.

Download or read book Alan J Pakula written by and published by . This book was released on 2005 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book An Investigative Cinema written by Fabrizio Cilento and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 308 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book traces the development of investigative cinema, whose main characteristic lies in reconstructing actual events, political crises, and conspiracies. These documentary-like films refrain from a simplistic reconstruction of historical events and are mainly concerned with what does not immediately appear on the surface of events. Consequently, they raise questions about the nature of the “truth” promoted by institutions, newspapers, and media reports. By highlighting unanswered questions, they leave us with a lack of clarity, and the questioning of documentation becomes the actual narrative. Investigative cinema is examined in relation to the historical conjunctures of the “economic miracle” in Italy, the simultaneous decolonization and reordering of culture in France, the waves of globalization and neoliberalism in post-dictatorial Latin America, and the post-Watergate, post-9/11 climate in US society. Investigative cinema is exemplified by the films Salvatore Giuliano, The Battle of Algiers, The Parallax View, Gomorrah, Zero Dark Thirty, and Citizenfour.

Download or read book Making Movies Work written by Jon Boorstin and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 252 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: MAKING MOVIES WORK is a fascinating and accessible guide for both filmmakers and serious film fans. It is about how filmmakers think about film. "Through thoughtful examination of the filmmaker's art, Jon Boorstin enhances our sense of enjoyment and appreciation of the results.--Robert Redford.

Download or read book When the Movies Mattered written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2019-06-15 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In When the Movies Mattered Jonathan Kirshner and Jon Lewis gather a remarkable collection of authors to revisit the unique era in American cinema that was New Hollywood. Ten eminent contributors, some of whom wrote about the New Hollywood movement as it unfolded across the 1960s and 1970s, assess the convergence of film-industry developments and momentous social and political changes that created a new type of commercial film that reflected those revolutionary influences in American life. Even as New Hollywood first took shape, film industry insiders and commentators alike realized its significance. At the time, Pauline Kael compared the New Hollywood to the "tangled, bitter flowering of American letters in the 1850s" and David Thomson dubbed the era "the decade when movies mattered." Thomson's words provide the impetus for this volume in which a cohort of seasoned film critics and scholars who came of age watching the movies of this era reflect upon and reconsider this golden age in American filmmaking. Contributors: Molly Haskell, Heather Hendershot, J. Hoberman, George Kouvaros, Phillip Lopate, Robert Pippin, David Sterritt, David Thomson

Download or read book Hollywood s Last Golden Age written by Jonathan Kirshner and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2012-11-15 with total page 281 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Between 1967 and 1976 a number of extraordinary factors converged to produce an uncommonly adventurous era in the history of American film. The end of censorship, the decline of the studio system, economic changes in the industry, and demographic shifts among audiences, filmmakers, and critics created an unprecedented opportunity for a new type of Hollywood movie, one that Jonathan Kirshner identifies as the "seventies film." In Hollywood's Last Golden Age, Kirshner shows the ways in which key films from this period—including Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Graduate, and Nashville, as well as underappreciated films such as The Friends of Eddie Coyle, Klute, and Night Moves—were important works of art in continuous dialogue with the political, social, personal, and philosophical issues of their times. These "seventies films" reflected the era's social and political upheavals: the civil rights movement, the domestic consequences of the Vietnam war, the sexual revolution, women's liberation, the end of the long postwar economic boom, the Shakespearean saga of the Nixon Administration and Watergate. Hollywood films, in this brief, exceptional moment, embraced a new aesthetic and a new approach to storytelling, creating self-consciously gritty, character-driven explorations of moral and narrative ambiguity. Although the rise of the blockbuster in the second half of the 1970s largely ended Hollywood’s embrace of more challenging films, Kirshner argues that seventies filmmakers showed that it was possible to combine commercial entertainment with serious explorations of politics, society, and characters’ interior lives.

Download or read book Baz Luhrmann written by Tom Ryan and published by Univ. Press of Mississippi. This book was released on 2014-11-05 with total page 170 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though he has made only five films in two decades—Strictly Ballroom, William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet, and the Oscar-nominated films Moulin Rouge!, Australia, and The Great Gatsby—Australian writer-director Baz Luhrmann is an internationally known brand name. His name has even entered the English language as a verb, as in “to Baz things up,” meaning “to decorate them with an exuberant flourish.” Celebrated by some, loathed by others, his work is underscored by what has been described as “an aesthetic of artifice” and is notable for both its glittering surfaces and recurring concerns. In this collection of interviews, Luhrmann discusses his methods and his motives, explaining what has been important to him and his collaborators from the start and how he has been able to maintain an independence from the studios that have backed his films. He also speaks about his other artistic endeavors, including stage productions of La Bohème and A Midsummer Night's Dream, and his wife and collaborative partner Catherine Martin, who has received two Academy Awards for her work with Luhrmann.

Download or read book Robert Redford written by Michael Feeney Callan and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2011 with total page 521 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Draws on the actor, director, and producer's personal documents to offer insight into his complex life behind his famous roles, discussing the death of his son, his relationship with Sydney Pollack, and his establishment of the Sundance Film Festival.

Download or read book The Last Great American Picture Show written by Alexander Horwath and published by Amsterdam University Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 395 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This publication is a major evaluation of the 1970s American cinema, including cult film directors such as Bogdanovich Altman and Peckinpah.

Download or read book Other Hollywood Renaissance written by Lennard Dominic Lennard and published by Edinburgh University Press. This book was released on 2020-09-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late 1960s, the collapse of the classic Hollywood studio system led in part, and for less than a decade, to a production trend heavily influenced by the international art cinema. Reflecting a new self-consciousness in the US about the national film patrimony, this period is known as the Hollywood Renaissance. However, critical study of the period is generally associated with its so-called principal auteurs, slighting a number of established and emerging directors who were responsible for many of the era's most innovative and artistically successful releases.With contributions from leading film scholars, this book provides a revisionist account of this creative resurgence by discussing and memorializing twenty-four directors of note who have not yet been given a proper place in the larger history of the period. Including filmmakers such as Hal Ashby, John Frankenheimer, Mike Nichols, and Joan Micklin Silver, this more expansive approach to the auteurism of the late 1960s and 1970s seems not only appropriate but pressing - a necessary element of the re-evaluation of 'Hollywood' with which cinema studies has been preoccupied under the challenges posed by the emergence and flourishing of new media.