The award-winning television series Mystery Science Theater 3000 (1988-1999) has been described as ""the smartest, funniest show in America,"" and forever changed the way we watch movies. The series featured a human host and a pair of robotic puppets who, while being subjected to some of the worst films ever made, provided ongoing hilarious and insightful commentary in a style popularly known as ""riffing."" These essays represent the first full-length scholarly analysis of Mystery Science Theater 3000--MST3K--which blossomed from humble beginnings as a Minnesota public-access television into a cultural phenomenon on two major cable networks. Included are interviews with series creator Joel Hodgson and cast members Kevin Murphy and Trace Beaulieu.

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

Exploring one of the most dynamic and contested regions of the world, this series includes works on political, economic, cultural, and social changes in modern and contemporary Asia and the Pacific.

In 2010, The Walking Dead premiered on AMC and has since become the most watched scripted program in the history of basic cable. Based on the graphic novel series by Robert Kirkman, The Walking Dead provides a stark, metaphoric preview of what the end of civilization might look like: the collapse of infrastructure and central government, savage tribal anarchy, and purposeless hordes of the wandering wounded. While the representation of zombies has been a staple of the horror genre for more than half a century, the unprecedented popularity of The Walking Dead reflects an increased identification with uncertain times. In The Walking Dead Live! Essays on the Television Show, Philip L. Simpson and Marcus Mallard have compiled essays that examine the show as a cultural text. Contributors to this volume consider how the show engages with our own social practices-from theology and leadership to gender, race, and politics-as well as how the show reflects matters of masculinity, memory, and survivor's guilt. As a product of anxious times, The Walking Dead gives the audience an idea of what the future may hold and what popular interest in the zombie genre means. Providing insight into the broader significance of the zombie apocalypse story, The Walking Dead Live! will be of interest to scholars of sociology, cultural history, and television, as well as to fans of the show.

This book philosophically and creatively examines ways in which independent filmmakers may explore, through practice, the discovery and development of a personal voice in the making of their films. Filmmaker and academic, Professor Erik Knudsen, uses a combination of autoethnographic experience derived from his own filmmaking practice and new insights gained from a series of ethnomediaological StoryLab workshops with independent filmmakers in Malaysia, Ghana and Colombia to drive this innovative examination. The book contextualises this practice exploration within an eclectic psychological and philosophical framework that ranges from Jungian psychological theories of the collective unconscious to Sheldrakian scientific theories of morphic resonance, from Christian mystical ideas about creative motivation to structuralist theories that underpin our linguistic understanding of story and narrative. Why should we create? What is a creative act? This in-depth study tackles these questions by examining the early ideation stages of cinematic expression and ultimately seeks to understand the practical ways in which ideas are shaped into stories and narratives.

Have you written the script for the next box office blockbuster or hit TV show and just need the right agent to sell it? Not sure whether to accept an if-come deal or a script commitment? Debating which manager is the right choice to steer your career? Well, worry no more... How to Manage Your Agent is a fun, friendly guide to the world of literary representation. Enter the inner sanctums of Hollywood's power-brokers and learn how they influence what pitches get bought, what projects get sold, and which writers get hired. Find tips from top-level executives, agents, managers, producers, and writers to help you maximize your own representation and kick your career into overdrive! You'll learn: * How agents prioritize their client list... and ways to guarantee you're at the top * When to approach new representation... and what you need to capture their interest * Hollywood's secret buying schedule... and how to ensure you're on it * The truth about packaging... where it helps and when it hurts * Which agents are best for you... and where to find them * Advice on acing your first agent meeting... and why so many writers blow it * Managers' tricks for creating buzz... and when to use them yourself * How to fire your agent... without killing your career * When you don't need representation... and how to succeed without it The value of good representation is undeniable-especially in a world where agents and managers control which projects (and careers) live or die. How to Manage Your Agent puts you on the inside track to get your work the attention it deserves!

Exploring the enduring popularity of Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, this collection offers analysis of both the novel itself and its adaptations. In spite of a mixed response from critics, Les Miserables instantly became a global bestseller. Since its successful publication over 150 years ago, it has traveled across different countries, cultures, and media, giving rise to more than 60 international film and television variations, numerous radio dramatizations, animated versions, comics, and stage plays. Most famously, it has inspired the world's longest running musical, which itself has generated a wealth of fan-made and online content. Whatever its form, Hugo's tale of social injustice and personal redemption continues to permeate the popular imagination. This volume draws together essays from across a variety of fields, combining readings of Les Miserables with reflections on some of its multimedia afterlives, including musical theater and film from the silent period to today's digital platforms. The contributors offer new insights into the development and reception of Hugo's celebrated classic, deepening our understanding of the novel as a work that unites social commentary with artistic vision and raising important questions about the cultural practice of adaptation.

A Guide to Screenwriting Success, Second Edition provides a comprehensive overview of writing-and rewriting-a screenplay or teleplay and writing for digital content. Duncan's handy book teaches new screenwriters the process of creating a professional screenplay from beginning to end. It shows that inspiration, creativity, and good writing are not elusive concepts but attainable goals that any motivated person can aspire to. Duncan includes sections on all aspects of screenwriting-from character development to story templates-and breaks down the three acts of a screenplay into manageable pieces. A Guide to Screenwriting Success contains dozens of exercises to help writers through these steps. The second half of Duncan's practical book covers another, often overlooked, side of screenwriting-the teleplay. Aspiring writers who also want to try their hand at writing for television will need to learn the specifics of the field. The book breaks down this area into two parts, the one-hour teleplay and the situation comedy. There is a section on writing and producing digital content that embraces the "Do It Yourself" attitude to approaching a career in the entertainment industry. Success in screenwriting is no longer a dream but an achievable goal for those who pick up Duncan's guide.

Starring Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta and Uma Thurman, Pulp Fiction exploded on to the screen in 1994 and transformed the direction of contemporary cinema. Nominated for seven Oscars and winner of the BAFTA award, this triplet of masterfully interwoven crime stories is witty, gritty and shamelessly violent, displaying Tarantino's visceral approach to character and plot. Tarantino has spawned a whole host of wannabes in the wake of this, the defining movie of the 1990s. But none has demonstrated the elegant style and compassion that make Tarantino's screenplays so compellingly readable. Nominated for seven Oscars, Pulp Fiction starred John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis and Uma Thurman and won the US Oscar for Best Screenplay, the BAFTA and the prestigious Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival. Quentin Tarantino's other films include Reservoir Dogs, Jackie Brown, From Dusk Till Dawn and most recently, Inglorious Basterds and Django Unchained.

A successful screenplay starts with an understanding of the fundamentals of dramatic story structure. In this practical introduction, Edward J. Fink condenses centuries of writing about dramatic theory into ten concise and readable chapters, providing the tools for building an engaging narrative and turning it into an agent-ready script. Fink devotes chapters to expanding on the six basic elements of drama from Aristotle's Poetics (plot, character, theme, dialogue, sound, and spectacle), the theory and structure of comedy, as well as the concepts of unity, metaphor, style, universality, and catharsis. Key terms and discussion questions encourage readers to think through the components of compelling stories and put them into practice, and script formatting guidelines ensure your finished product looks polished and professional. Dramatic Story Structure is an essential resource not only for aspiring screenwriters, but also for experienced practitioners in need of a refresher on the building blocks of storytelling.

Two brand-new monologues in the Talking Heads series, as seen on BBC1 and iPlayer 'Given the opportunity to revisit the characters from Talking Heads I've added a couple more, both of them ordinary women whom life takes by surprise. They just about end up on top and go on, but without quite knowing how. Still, they're in good company, and at least they've made it into print.' Alan Bennett's twelve Talking Heads are acknowledged masterworks by one of our most highly acclaimed writers. Some thirty years after the original six, Bennett has written Two Besides, a pair of monologues. Each, in its way, is a devastating portrait of grief. In An Ordinary Woman, a mother suffers the inevitable consequences when she makes life intolerable for herself and her family by falling for her own flesh and blood; while The Shrine tells the story behind a makeshift roadside shrine, introducing us to Lorna, bearing witness in her high-vis jacket, the bereft partner of a dedicated biker with a surprising private life. The two new Talking Heads were recorded for the BBC during the exceptional circumstances of coronavirus lockdown in the spring of 2020, directed by Nicholas Hytner and performed by Sarah Lancashire and Monica Dolan. The book contains a substantial preface by Nicholas Hytner and an introduction to each, by Alan Bennett.

The new blockbuster from Christopher Nolan. Tenet is a global thriller whose action stretches across time zones, and stars Robert Pattinson, Elizabeth Debicki and John David Washington. The film displays Nolan's preoccupations, especially how Time can shift from one moment to the next. The film is out in the US on July 17, 2020.

From the critically-acclaimed independent filmmaker, Michael Roemer, comes Film Stories: Screenplays as Story, a highly-anticipated first collection of screenplays. Beyond film scripts, Film Stories is designed to help film students master concepts like three-act structure, conflict, surprise, rising action, and crisis, while crafting not only a story, but a story that tells. Volume One contains the screenplays for Nothing But a Man, The Plot Against Harry, Stone My Heart, and Pilgrim, Farewell. Volume One also features a comprehensive introduction entitled "Beginnings," in which Roemer discusses the creation of his screenplays and includes anecdotes on the making and distribution of his films that any screenwriter or filmmaker will find invaluable. Volume Two contains the screenplays for Losing Emily, Famous Long Ago, Mortal Longings, Act of God, and Sad but Funny.

Jim Carrey is Truman Burbank, the most famous face on television, only he doesn't know it. He is the unwitting star of a nonstop, 24-hour-a-day documentary soap opera called The Truman Show, with every moment of his life broadcast to a worldwide audience. Everyone around him is an actor. He is a prisoner in a made-for-TV paradise. This is the story of his escape.

Rarely has a first-time collaboration between a writer and director produced such a stunning result. In this book, both Niccol and Weir's lively talents and creative force come to light, as each contributes some highly original material to amplify the brilliant107-page shooting script, reproduced here in facsimile. Niccol has given us another version of The Truman Show, in photos and captions--in effect, our very own photo album. For his contribution, Peter Weir chose to let us in on the intricately detailed, often hilarious "backstory," which he wrote as part of his preparation, and eventually shared with the cast and crew during production. Also included are complete cast and crew credits.

Adapted for the screen by the author from his celebrated memoir, Alan Bennett's The Lady in the Van, is directed by long-standing collaborator Nicholas Hytner. The film tells the true story of the relationship between Alan Bennett and the singular Miss Shepherd, a woman of uncertain origins who 'temporarily' parked her van in Bennett's London driveway and proceeded to live there for 15 years. Their unique story is funny, poignant and life-affirming. The Complete Lady in the Van contains a Foreword by Nicholas Hytner, a substantial Introduction with diary entries by Alan Bennett, the original memoir and the screenplay. The book includes numerous illustrations by David Gentleman, who sketched on set throughout filming, and a colour plate-section including behind-the-scenes photographs and stills from the film

A NEW, REVISED EDITION OF THE ULTIMATE NORA EPHRON COLLECTION, PACKED WITH WIT, WISDOM AND COMFORT, WITH AN INTRODUCTION FROM CANDICE CARTY-WILLIAMS 'The perfect introduction to the iconic writer' STYLIST INCLUDING: * Nora's much-loved essays on everything from friendship to feminism to journalism * Extracts from her bestselling novel Heartburn * Scenes from her hilarious screenplay for When Harry Met Sally * Unparalleled advice about friends, lovers, divorces, desserts and black turtleneck sweaters 'It's got a little bit of everything, from witty essays on feminism, beauty, and ageing to profiles of empowering female figures' ELLE *PRAISE FOR NORA EPHRON* 'So bold and so vulnerable at the same time. I don't know how she did it' PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE 'Nora's exacting, precise, didactic, tried-and-tested, sophisticated-woman-wearing-all-black wisdom is a comfort and a relief' DOLLY ALDERTON 'Nora Ephron is the funniest, cleverest, wisest friend you could have' NIGELLA LAWSON 'I am only the one of millions of women who will miss Nora's voice' LENA DUNHAM

Woody Allen, who first became famous as a stand up comedian and a writer of comedy routines, has also had a distinguished career as a playwright and screenwriter/director. Allen owes his celebrity status primarily to his critically acclaimed films, such as Manhattan, Hannah and her Sisters, and Crimes and Misdemeanors. In Woody Allen: A Casebook, Kimball King, has selected major plays and films by Woody Allen and has chosen well-known scholars to examine their complexities in detail. Allen's sophisticated movie musical scores as well as his thoughtful studies of American character and life are analyzed by contemporary critics, such as William Hutchings, Tom Sahy, and King himself. The result is a volume that surveys artistic highpoints of the Allen canon and illustrates the creative impact of Allen's works on audiences and readers.

Comedy

Characters: 3 male, 8 female

Interior Set

Allan Felix has this thing about Humphrey Bogart. If only he had some of Bogart's technique... Bookish and insecure with women, Allan's hero, Bogey comes to the rescue, with a fantastic bevy of beauties played out in hilarious fantasy sequences. Fixed up by friends with gorgeous women, he's so awkward that even Bogey's patience is tried. Allan mostly resembles a disheveled, friendly dog and this is what ultimately charms his best friend's wife, Linda into bed. It's a tough life, making it in the world of beautiful people but if you can't be a hero it helps to have one...

"Hilarious...a cheerful romp. Not only are Mr. Allen's jokes and their follow ups, asides and twists audaciously brilliant, but he has a great sense of character."-The New York Times

"A funny, likeable comedy that has a surprising amount of wistful appeal."-New York Post

Essays explore many aspects of the teen detective series, including Veronica Mars and vintage television; the search for the mother; fatherhood; how the show relates to the classical Greek paradigm; feminist anger and vigilante justice; the anti-hero's journey; the intergenerational audience; rape narrative and meaning; and television fandom, among others.

Inspired by Dostoyevsky's short story, The Double tells the story of Simon, a timid man, scratching out an isolated existence in an indifferent world. He is overlooked at work, scorned by his mother, and ignored by the woman of his dreams. He feels powerless to change any of these things. The arrival of a new co-worker, James, serves to upset the balance. James is both Simon's exact physical double and his opposite - confident, charismatic and good with women. To Simon's horror, James slowly starts taking over his life.

Images and script (in both French and English) from one of the greatest experimental films ever made by a master of the form. "This book version of La Jetee is, to my mind, astonishingly beautiful. It brings a total freshness to the work and a new way to use photos to deal with dramatic events. Not a film's book, but a book in its own right; the real cine-roman announced in the film's credits."; Chris Marker La Jetee, the legendary science fiction film about time and memory after a nuclear apocalypse, was released in 1964 and is considered by many critics to be among the greatest experimental films ever made. (It provided the basis for Terry Gilliam's 1995 film 12 Monkeys.) Chris Marker, who is the undisputed master of the film essay, composed this postapocalyptic story almost entirely of black-and-white still photographs. The story concerns an experiment in recovering and changing the past through the action of memory, yet the film can be read as a poem dominated by a single moving image, which in its context becomes one of the supreme moments in the history of film. This Zone Books edition reproduces the film's original images along with the script in both English and French.

Reading and Writing a Screenplay takes you on a journey through the many possible ways of writing, reading and imagining fiction and documentary projects for cinema, television and new media. It explores the critical role of a script as a document to be written and read with both future readers and the future film it will be giving life to in mind.

The book explores the screenplay and the screenwriting process by approaching the film script in three different ways: how it is written, how it is read and how it can be rewritten. Combining contemporary screenwriting practices with historical and academic context, Isabelle Raynauld provides key analytical tools and reading strategies for conceptualizing and scripting projects based on the impact different writing styles can have on readers, with various examples ranging from early cinema to new media and new platforms throughout.

This title offers an alternative, thought-provoking and inspiring approach to reading and writing a screenplay that is ideal for directors, producers, actors, students, aspiring screenwriters and readers interested in understanding how an effective screenplay is created.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements

Introduction: The screenplay as text

1. What constitutes a "good" screenplay?

2. The screenplay as text

3. Ideas, writing in stages and types of documents

4. What does screenwriting share with editing principles?

5. Structures

6. Point of view: telling a story from a certain perspective

7. The scene

8. The character

9. Writing sound

10. Writing for documentary

11. New media, new forms of writing: towards expanded screenwriting practices

12. Reading a screenplay: reading modes from analysis to writing

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Winner 1938 Pulitzer Prize for Drama
In an important publishing event, Samuel French, in cooperation with the Thornton Wilder estate is pleased to release the playwright's definitive version of "Our Town." This edition of the play differs only slightly from previous acting editions, yet it presents "Our Town" as Thornton Wilder wished it to be performed. Described by Edward Albee as ..".the greatest American play ever written," the story follows the small town of Grover's Corners through three acts: "Daily Life," "Love and Marriage," and "Death and Eternity." Narrated by a stage manager and performed with minimal props and sets, audiences follow the Webb and Gibbs families as their children fall in love, marry, and eventually-in one of the most famous scenes in American theatre-die. Thornton Wilder's final word on how he wanted his play performed is an invaluable addition to the American stage and to the libraries of theatre lovers internationally.

Actors and the Art of Performance: Under Exposure combines the author's two main biographical paths: her professional commitment to the fields of both theatre and philosophy. The art of acting on stage is analysed here not only from the theoretical perspective of a spectator, but also from the perspective of the actor. The author draws on her experience as both a theatre actor and a university professor whose teachings in the art of acting rely heavily on her own experience and also on her philosophical knowledge. The book is unique not only in terms of its content but also in terms of its style. Written in a multiplicity of voices, the text oscillates between philosophical reasoning and narrative forms of writing, including micro-narratives, fables, parables, and inter alia by Carroll, Hoffmann and Kleist. Hence the book claims that a trans-disciplinary dialogue between the art of acting and the art of philosophical thinking calls for an aesthetical research that questions and begins to seek alternatives to traditionally established and ingrained formats of philosophy.

This thorough account of the life and films of the Spanish-Basque filmmaker Julio Medem is the first book in English on the internationally renowned writer-director of Vacas, La ardilla roja (Red Squirrel), Tierra, Los amantes del Circulo Polar (Lovers of the Arctic Circle), Lucia y el sexo (Sex and Lucia), La pelota vasca: la piel contra la piedra (Basque Ball) and Caotica Ana (Chaotic Ana), Initial chapters explore Medem's childhood, adolescence and education and examine his earliest short films and critical writings against a background of a dramatically changing Spain. Later chapters provide accounts of the genesis, production and release of Medem's challenging and sensual films, which feed into complex but lucid analyses of their meanings, both political and personal, in which Stone draws on traditions and innovations in Basque art, Spanish cinema and European philosophy to create a complete and provocative portrait of Medem and his work. -- .