Download or read book The Life and Work of Dennis Potter written by W. Stephen Gilbert and published by ABRAMS. This book was released on 2002-01-01 with total page 524 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The first critical biography of the innovative television writer whose off-kilter creations helped spark the Golden Age of modern television. TV writer Dennis Potter is widely credited with revolutionizing television. The innovative shows he created for the BBC, including The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven, trailblazed new paths for genre-bending entertainment and demonstrated the creative possibilities of episodic television. Potter also adapted both of those shows into critically acclaimed major motion pictures: Pennies from Heaven starring Steve Martin, and The Singing Detective starring Robert Downey Jr. In The Life and Work of Dennis Potter, W. Stephen Gilbert analyzes Potter’s impressive body of work, emphasizing the dramatic interplay between his life and the medium he loved. At the age of twenty-four, Potter was diagnosed with psoriatic arthopathy, a rare debilitating skin disease whose horrors he portrayed with biting black humor through his alter ego, the character Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective. Gilber traces Potter’s career from its beginnings to his astonishing final interview to Melvyn Bragg, weeks before his death. Unforgettable for its honesty about life, work, and dying, the result was yet another gripping piece of television—and quintessential Dennis Potter. “[T]he late dramatist’s influence can be seen in many places, from Twin Peaks to Mrs. Brown’s Boys.” —The Guardian “Gilbert recalls the lacerating wit, passionate intelligence, and courage behind the television playwright responsible for The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven.” —Vanity Fair

Download or read book Dennis Potter written by Humphrey Carpenter and published by Faber & Faber. This book was released on 2009-01-22 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dennis Potter's death in 1994 deprived British television of its most controversial figure. Potter was a prolific writer of genius. Yet while his subversive television plays, such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, scandalized and delighted the nation, they also made him the butt of the tabloids, who nicknamed him 'Dirty Den' for his 1989 serial Blackeyes. Humphrey Carpenter, acclaimed biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, Britten and Robert Runcie, interviewed everyone who came close to Potter, and had exclusive access to Potter's archives, including the many unmade television and film scripts. Carpenter portrays a very different Potter from the aggressive public image: a deeply shy and reclusive man, who was psychologically as well as physically scarred by the illness which struck him down at the age of twenty-six. Potter was a man with a vast interest in sex but also a terrible loathing of it, thanks to an appalling experience he suffered in childhood. Potter was a man much gossiped about. Carpenter's remarkable biography establishes the extraordinary truth behind the rumours; describes Potter's strange, obsessive relationships with women such as Gina Bellman, who played Blackeyes; and gives a vivid portrait of the backstage dramas and fights behind Potter's screen triumphs. 'What is valuable about this book is that it reveals Potter's real private life, which barely features in his plays ... A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man: his generosity and cruelty, his coarseness and tenderness, and the thwarted sexual yearning that underlay everything.' Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph

Download or read book Seeing the Blossom written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 84 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Contains the interview between Dennis Potter and Melvyn Bragg conducted on 5 April 1994 on Channel 4 television. Potter knew he had only a few weeks to live so the discussion is of great poignancy and power. Their conversation records Potter's honest dissection of his life and work. This book also contains Potter's celebrated James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1993 and an earlier BBC2 television interview.

Download or read book Dennis Potter written by John R. Cook and published by Manchester University Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 420 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Anthology of key extracts, in Italian - both literary and non-literary.. Introduction and notes in English.. Contains material which would mesh well with various standard set texts, such as Pavese, Bittorini, Calvino, Viganò.. A unique selection - no competing Italian edition.

Download or read book Fight and Kick and Bite written by W. Stephen Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 1995 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Fight and Kick and Bite written by W. Stephen Gilbert and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 382 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Potter on Potter written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1994-06-01 with total page 171 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: If one writer embodies the unique character of British television drama, it is Dennis Potter. Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective amply demonstrate how far he has pushed the frontiers of television drama. In the course of this book, British television's pre-eminent playwright - latterly a novelist and film-maker - talks with passionate erudition, disarming candour and acerbic wit about the early influences that shaped him and led to his pioneering use of non-naturalism to his self-reflexive subversion of film and TV cliches, his controversial approach to sex, politics, religion and the double-edged puritanism of the English condition. The book presents a remarkable portrait of a man for whom writing is, first and foremost, a vocation.

Download or read book The Singing Detective written by Dennis Potter and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 1986 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The narrative counterpoints life in a hospital ward of a writer crippled by a horrific skin disease with the plot of his atmosperic thriller to the point where fantasy and reality seem to change places.

Download or read book Lipstick on Your Collar written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1993 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in post-war Britain, this Potter screenplay has been made into a C4 TV series. It is the time of Suez and the setting is the War Office - half of the department's incumbents are true army men, British to the core and proud of it, but the remainder are world-weary national servicemen, aching to get into the civvies and the promise of a new life. Post-war austerity is still with us, but the younger style is making itself felt - and Potter's rock 'n' roll music reflects this.

Download or read book Difficult Men written by Brett Martin and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-07-29 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 10th anniversary edition, now with a new preface by the author "A wonderfully smart, lively, and culturally astute survey." - The New York Times Book Review "Grand entertainment...fascinating for anyone curious about the perplexing miracles of how great television comes to be." - The Wall Street Journal "I love this book...It's the kind of thing I wish I'd been able to read in film school, back before such books existed." - Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows on cable channels dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and creative ambition. Combining deep reportage with critical analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of this artistic watershed - a golden age of TV that continues to transform America's cultural landscape. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players - including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) - and reveals how television became a truly significant and influential part of our culture.

Download or read book The White Hotel written by D. M. Thomas and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1993-09-01 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The million copy, Booker Prize finalist, besteller “To describe this novel as spine-tingling in its indescribable poetic effect would be to trivialize its profoundly tragic theme. Say then that it is heart-stunning.”—The New York Times It is a dream of electrifying eroticism and inexplicable violence, recounted by a young woman to her analyst, Sigmund Freud. It is a horrifying yet restrained narrative of the Holocaust. It is a searing vision of the wounds of the twentieth century, and an attempt to heal them. Interweaving poetry and case history, fantasy and historical truth-telling, The White Hotel is a modern classic of enduring emotional power that attempts nothing less than to reconcile the notion of individual destiny with that of historical fate.

Download or read book Karaoke and Cold Lazarus written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 392 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cold Lazarus is set 400 years in the future. Feeld's cryogenically preserved head is being commercially exploited. An American media tycoon realizes the astronomical ratings potential of a TV show in which the 'real' twentieth-century story of Daniel Feeld's life, via his chemically induced memories, can be fed to millions of viewers.

Download or read book Blackeyes written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1987 with total page 184 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The elderly half-forgotten author Maurice Kingsley uses his beautiful fashion model niece Jessica's life as a model for a book, embroidering it with his own quirky insights into a surprise best-seller, a modern parable for a wasted life that becomes a candidate for the Booker Prize.

Download or read book Unreliable Memoirs written by Clive James and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2009-05-18 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nearly 30 years ago, James wrote a refreshingly candid book that made no claims to be accurate, precise, or entirely truthful, only to entertain. Long unavailable in the U.S., "Unreliable Memoirs" is being made available to American readers.

Download or read book Pennies from Heaven written by Dennis Potter and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dennis Potter's most popular television drama, 'Pennies from Heaven', 'a play with music, in six parts', was first shown in 1978 on BBC1. Set in the thirties, it starred Bob Hoskins and concerned the amorous and geographical wanderings of a travelling sheet music salesman, who is both fortunate and unfortunate enough to believe in the songs in his suitcase. When it was first shown, the free-flowing movement from fact to fiction and back again, shown by characters suddenly performing to old recordings of thirties hit tunes to illustrate their longings, and then returning again to their humdrum lives, was startling and innovatory.

Download or read book Changing Forest written by Dennis Potter and published by Random House. This book was released on 2015-03-19 with total page 95 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England... with a people as warm as anywhere else, but they seemed warmer to me.' It was a childhood which informed all his television work, from his first documentary to such classic dramas as The Singing Detective. The Changing Forest, first published in 1962, is Potter's deeply personal study of that small area- its people, traditions, ceremonies and institutions- at a time of profound cultural and social change in the late 1950s and early '60s. With extraordinary precision and feeling he describes the fabric of a world whose old ways are yielding to the new: habits altering; expectations growing; work, leisure, language itself changing under the impact of the new television, of commercial jingles and the early Elvis. And, with powerful sympathy and wit, he asks whether the gains of modernity have, for the individuals and society he so marvellously evokes, been worth the loss. Part autobiography of one of this century's greatest writers, part elegy for a vanishing way of life, part testament to the abiding humanity that underlies all Potter's work, this exquisite, passionate and brillinat book is a classic of its kind.

Download or read book Cooking for Kings written by Ian Kelly and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2005-09-01 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A recipe-enhanced profile of one of history's most prolific culinary writers draws on the subject's memoirs to trace his rise from Paris orphan to international celebrity, a journey during which he traveled throughout Europe and Russia and prepared sumptuous feasts for royal families. Reprint.