A captivating exploration of the life, work, and insider insight of legendary film producer Howard Kazanjian

Howard Kazanjian, a film producer whose career spans 50 years, has collaborated with Hollywood legends such as Alfred Hitchcock, Billy Wilder, Sam Peckinpah, Steven Spielberg, and George Lucas, and worked on such classics as The Empire Strikes Back, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Return of the Jedi. Complete with personal anecdotes from the front lines, and coupled with rare archival photographs, this full-length biography tells the story of Kazanjian’s rise in Hollywood and takes us behind the scenes of the producer’s role in some of the biggest blockbusters in film history.

Who is Mike Hodges? One of the great maverick British film-makers. A director who is uncompromising and willing to fight his corner, he has made films over the last three decades that mark him out as a rare and unusual talent. He is a difficult film-maker to define. His work includes crime drama (Get Carter, Croupier and Pulp), science-fiction (Flash Gordon and The Terminal Man) and even comedy (Morons from Outer Space), but he has also made watchable oddities such as A Prayer for the Dying (Mickey Rourke courting controversy as an IRA killer seeking redemption) and Black Rainbow (a surreal fantasy drama little seen, but much acclaimed). He started his career in television in the 1960s, but hit the big screen with the violent crime drama Get Carter, a film that has now achieved cult status (recently voted the best British film ever in Hotdog magazine) and continues to be the benchmark any British crime film sets itself against. Though hardly prolific- just eight feature films in 30 years - Mike Hodges makes fascinating movies that just won't go away. As well as an introductory essay, each of Hodges film and television work is reviewed and analysed. There is also an article looking at the impact and continuing influence of Get Carter and a section listing any other information about Hodges and his films.

Shyam Benegal is an Indian director and screenwriter whose work is considered central to New Indian cinema. By closely analysing several of Benegal s films, this book provides an understanding of India s post-independence history.

The book examines the filmmaker s focus on women by highlighting his subtle and critical engagement with a truism of Indian nationalism: women s centrality to the (nation-) state s negotiation with modernity. It looks at the importance Benegal accords to history its little known, contested, or iconic events and figures in crafting national culture and identities, and goes on to discuss the filmmaker s nuanced representation of the developmental agendas of the nation-state. The book presents an account of the relationship of historical film and fiction to official history, and provides a fuller understanding of Indian cinema, and how it is shaped by as well as itself shapes national imperatives.

Filling a gap in the literature, the book offers an analysis of cinematic treatment of post-independence narratives and gives important insights into the imagination of the time. It is a useful contribution for students and scholars of Film Studies, South Asian History and South Asian Culture.

Otto Preminger (1905-1986), whose Hollywood career spanned the 1930s through the 1970s, is popularly remembered for the acclaimed films he directed, among which are the classic film noir Laura, the social-realist melodrama The Man with the Golden Arm, the CinemaScope musical Carmen Jones, and the riveting courtroom drama Anatomy of a Murder. As a screen actor, he forged an indelible impression as a sadistic Nazi in Billy Wilder's Stalag 17 and as the diabolical Mr. Freeze in television's Batman. He is remembered, too, for drastically transforming Hollywood's industrial practices. With Exodus, Preminger broke the Hollywood blacklist, controversially granting screen credit to Dalton Trumbo, one of the exiled "Hollywood Ten." Preminger, a committed liberal, consistently shattered Hollywood's conventions. He routinely tackled socially progressive yet risque subject matter, pressing the Production Code's limits of permissibility. He mounted Black-cast musicals at a period of intense racial unrest. And he embraced a string of other taboo topics-heroin addiction, rape, incest, homosexuality-that established his reputation as a trailblazer of adult-centered storytelling, an enemy of Hollywood puritanism, and a crusader against censorship. Otto Preminger: Interviews compiles nineteen interviews from across Preminger's career, providing fascinating insights into the methods and mindset of a wildly polarizing filmmaker. With remarkable candor, Preminger discusses his filmmaking practices, his distinctive film style, his battles against censorship and the Hollywood blacklist, his clashes with film critics, and his turbulent relationships with a host of well-known stars, from Marilyn Monroe and Frank Sinatra to Jane Fonda and John Wayne.

An absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942-88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and her feature film Losing Ground, Collins explored new dimensions of what narrative film could and should do. However, her achievements in filmmaking were part of a greater life project. In this critically imaginative study of Collins, L.H. Stallings narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life explores the global significance and futurist implications of filmmaker and writer Kathleen Collins. In addition to her two films, Stallings examines the broad and expansive and varying forms of writing produced by Collins during her short life time. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, Stallings intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins's personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins definitively emphasizes the evolution of film and film studies that Collins makes possible for current and future generations of filmmakers.

'I give this as a present more than other book. I buy it for people so often that I’ve been known to give girlfriends two copies, one birthday after another’ - Dolly Alderton

Now with an introduction from Dolly Alderton, author of Everything I Know About Love, revealing how a new generation of women can take inspiration from Nora’s sharp wit and wisdom about life.

* Never marry a man you wouldn't want to be divorced from.

* If the shoe doesn't fit in the shoe store, it's never going to fit.

* When your children are teenagers, it's important to have a dog so that someone in the house is happy to see you.

* If only one third of your clothes are mistakes, you're ahead of the game.

* Anything you think is wrong with your body at the age of thirty-five you will be nostalgic for by the age of forty-five.

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.

From such cult hits as Raising Arizona (1987) and The Big Lebowski (1998) to major critical darlings Fargo (1996), No Country for Old Men (2007), and Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), Ethan and Joel Coen have cultivated a bleakly comical, instantly recognizable voice in modern American cinema. In The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together, film critic Adam Nayman carefully sifts through their complex cinematic universe in an effort to plot, as he puts it, "some Grand Unified Theory of Coen-ness." The book combines critical text-biography, close film analysis, and enlightening interviews with key Coen collaborators-with a visual aesthetic that honors the Coens' singular mix of darkness and levity. Featuring film stills, beautiful and evocative illustrations, punchy infographics, and hard insight, this book will be the definitive exploration of the Coen brothers' oeuvre.

Hitchcock's previously untold origin story. Alfred Hitchcock called The Lodger "the first true Hitchcock movie," the one that anticipated all the others. And yet the story of how The Lodger came to be made is shrouded in myth, often repeated and much embellished, even by Hitchcock himself. The First True Hitchcock focuses on the twelve-month period that encompassed The Lodger's production in 1926 and release in 1927, presenting a new picture of this pivotal year in Hitchcock's life and in the wider film world. Using fresh archival discoveries, Henry K. Miller situates Hitchcock's formation as a director against the backdrop of a continent shattered by war and confronted with the looming presence of a new superpower, the United States, and its most visible export-film. The previously untold story of The Lodger's making in the London fog-and attempted remaking in the Los Angeles sun-is the story of how Hitchcock became Hitchcock.

THE ESSENTIAL AND EXPANDED UNOFFICIAL GUIDE TO THE WHEDONVERSE! This revised and updated edition covers every aspect of his work, through insightful essays and in-depth interviews with key figures in the 'Whedonverse'.

In 1980, Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas traveled to Lebanon to film a documentary of interviews with Palestinians of the refugee camps around Beirut about their dreams. The Dream: A Diary of the Film is Malas's haunting chronicle of his immersion in the life of the camps, including Shatila, Burj al-Barajneh, Nahr al-Bared, and Ein al-Helweh. It also describes the filmmaking process, from the research stage to the film's unofficial release, in Shatila Camp, before it reached a global audience. In vivid and poetic detail, Malas provides a snapshot of Palestinian refugees at a critical juncture of Lebanon's bloody civil war, and at the height of the PLO's power in Lebanon before the 1982 Israeli invasion and the PLO's subsequent expulsion. Malas probes his subjects' dreams and existential fears with an artist's acute sensitivity, revealing the extent to which the wounds and contingencies of Palestinian statelessness are woven into the tapestry of a fragmented Arab nationalism. Although he halted his work on the film in 1982, following the massacres of Sabra and Shatila, he completed it in 1987, turning 400 interviews into 23 dreams and 45 minutes of screen time. Both diary and film present these people somewhere between present and past tense, but they are preserved forever in the word, magnetic tape, and now in digital code. The Dream is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of the Palestinians in the modern Middle East, and for students and scholars of Arab filmmaking, politics, and literature.

Edward Dmytryk was one of the so-called "Hollywood Ten" who were jailed for contempt of Congress for refusing to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1947. Finding himself blacklisted after his prison sentence and unable to operate under a pseudonym, he took the step of testifying and naming names to the Committee. His career resumed to considerable commercial success, but also to prolonged and bitter criticism from the left and persistent mistrust from the right. Acknowledged as one of the key figures in the development of the film noir genre, having directed one of its first films, Murder, My Sweet, Edward Dmytryk has otherwise been frequently sidelined in critical studies because of the political controversy. This book is the first to critically evaluate each of the dozens of films he made between the 1930s and the 1970s including The Young Lions, Crossfire and The Caine Mutiny, among many others.

A spectacular and comprehensive authorized retrospective of Oscar-winning visual effects master Phil Tippett, founder and namesake of iconic Tippett StudioFrom Star Wars to Jurassic Park and RoboCop to Starship Troopers, special effects master Phil Tippett has brought his magic to some of the most iconic films of all time. His unparalleled career in visual effects spans more than 40 years, with two Academy Awards, one BAFTA, and two Emmys. This stunning book celebrates Tippett's career, from early Super 8 explorations through his groundbreaking work with Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks, and beyond. While Tippett's first love remains the stop-motion animation that made him a Hollywood legend, he was present at the birth of big-screen digital effects, and his genius has evolved with the times. In 1984 he founded Tippett Studio, which has come to specialize in digital effects.Packed with over a thousand behind-the-scenes photographs, Mad Dreams and Monsters includes never-before-published stories from the master himself and a veritable who's who of visual effects luminaries-a must-have for movie fans, film students, and anyone who's ever been captivated by movie magic.

Christian Petzold (b. 1960) is the best-known filmmaker associated with the "Berlin School" of postunification German cinema. Identifying as an intellectual, Petzold self-consciously approaches his work for both the big and the small screen by weaving critical reflection on the very conditions of contemporary filmmaking into his approach. Archeologically reconstructing genre filmmaking in a national film production context that makes the production of genre cinema virtually impossible, he repeatedly draws on plots from classic films, including Alfred Hitchcock's, in order to provide his viewers with the distinct pleasures only cinema can instill without, however, allowing his audience the comforts the "cinema of identification" affords them. Including thirty-five interviews, Christian Petzold: Interviews is the first book in any language to document how one of Germany's best-known directors thinking about his work has evolved over the course of a quarter of a century, spanning his days as a flailing student filmmaker in the early 1990s in postunified Germany to 2020, when his reputation as one of world cinema's most respected auteurs has been firmly enshrined. The interviews collected here-thirty of which are published in English for the first time-highlight Petzold's career-long commitment to foregrounding how economic operations affect individual lives. The volume makes for a rich resource for readers interested in Petzold's work or contemporary German cinema but also those looking for theoretically challenging and sophisticated commentary offered by one of global art cinema's leading figures.

The autobiography of pioneering Soviet Russian film director and film theorist Sergei Eisenstein, noted in particular for his silent films, 'Strike' (1924) and 'October' (1927).

'The Tender Whisper of Death' is a new collection of tales from the extraordinary pen of Jean Resnik. Writing with an ear for the spiritual dimensions of language, Resnik investigates the emotional and sexual psyches of characters who have been crushed by life. But all of these people are survivors, in the strongest sense of the phrase, and each one, although beaten down by experience, is seeking a final, inexorable awakening. At once both fatalistic and inspiring. 'The Tender Whisper of Death' will appeal to anyone with an interest in the psychology of doomed love.

This new collection of writings on Alfred Hitchcock considers Hitchcock both in his time and as a continuing influence on filmmakers, films and film theory. The contributions, who include leading scholars such as Slavoj Zizek, Laura Mulvey, Peter Wollen, and James Naremore, discuss canonical films such as Notorious and The Birds alongside lesser-known works including Juno and the Paycock and Frenzy. Articles are grouped into four thematic sections: 'Authorship and Aesthetics' examines Hitchcock as auteur and investigates central topics in Hitchcockian aesthetics. 'French Hitchcock' looks at Hitchcock's influence on filmmakers such as Chabrol, Truffaut and Rohmer, and how film critics such as Bazin and Deleuze have engaged with Hitchcock's work. 'Poetics and Politics of Identity' explores the representation of personal and political in Hitchcock's work, and the final section, 'Death and Transfiguration' addresses teh manner in which the spectacle and figuration of death haunts the narrative universe of Hitchcock's films, in particular his subversive masterpiece Psycho.

This special issue recognizes the work and legacy of Agnes Varda (1928-2019), a Belgian-born film director, screenwriter, photographer, and artist whose work was part of the French New Wave film movement of the 1950s and 1960s. In the wake of Varda's passing in March 2019, contributors offer reflections on the continued relevance of her work. Until the end of her life, Varda was engaged with feminism, ethics, politics, and the representation of women in the film industry. Rather than focusing on Varda's most famous films, the contributors to this issue consider aspects of her oeuvre that have contemporary relevance and those that point to the future: films, art installations, and photographs that have received less scholarly attention; her political activism; her role as manager of her own production company; and her Instagram presence. By emphasizing these often-overlooked elements of Varda's creative output, the contributors reveal the depth of her artistic legacy and demonstrate how vastly important and interconnected her entire body of work is. Contributors Dominique Bluher, Nadine Boljkovac, Kelley Conway, Rebecca J. DeRoo, Sandy Flitterman-Lewis, Colleen Kennedy-Karpat, Homay King, Matt St. John, Emma Wilson

The first book to talk about the creative process of one of Hollywood's most iconic directors From Drugstore Cowboy to Elephant, Milk and Good Will Hunting, Gus Van Sant's films have captured the imagination of more than one generation. Acclaimed as both an independent and mainstream filmmaker, he is also an artist, photographer and writer. Based on completely new and exclusive interviews, and featuring previously unseen imagery, this book provides a personal insight into how Van Sant successfully approaches these different and varied artforms, providing an inspirational look into the working life of one of America's most pivotal cultural and creative practitioners.

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.

An absorbing portrait of a groundbreaking Black woman filmmaker. Kathleen Collins (1942-88) was a visionary and influential Black filmmaker. Beginning with her short film The Cruz Brothers and Miss Malloy and her feature film Losing Ground, Collins explored new dimensions of what narrative film could and should do. However, her achievements in filmmaking were part of a greater life project. In this critically imaginative study of Collins, L.H. Stallings narrates how Collins, as a Black woman writer and filmmaker, sought to change the definition of life and living. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins: A Black Woman Filmmaker's Search for New Life explores the global significance and futurist implications of filmmaker and writer Kathleen Collins. In addition to her two films, Stallings examines the broad and expansive and varying forms of writing produced by Collins during her short life time. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins showcases how Collins used filmmaking, writing, and teaching to assert herself as a poly-creative dedicated to asking and answering difficult philosophical questions about human being and living. Interrogating the ideological foundation of life-writing and cinematic life-writing as they intersect with race and gender, Stallings intervenes on the delimited concepts of life and Black being that impeded wider access, distribution, and production of Collins's personal, cinematic, literary, and theatrical works. The Afterlives of Kathleen Collins definitively emphasizes the evolution of film and film studies that Collins makes possible for current and future generations of filmmakers.

Glorious Catastrophe presents a detailed critical analysis of the work of Jack Smith from the early 1960s until his AIDS-related death in 1989. Dominic Johnson argues that Smith's work offers critical strategies for rethinking art's histories after 1960. Heralded by peers as well as later generations of artists, Smith is an icon of the New York avant-garde. Nevertheless, he is conspicuously absent from dominant histories of American culture in the 1960s, as well as from narratives of the impact that decade would have on coming years. Smith poses uncomfortable challenges to cultural criticism and historical analysis, which Glorious Catastrophe seeks to uncover. The first critical analysis of Smith's practices across visual art, film, performance, and writing, the study employs extensive, original archival research carried out in Smith's personal papers, and unpublished interviews with friends and collaborators. It will be essential reading for students and scholars interested in the life and art of Jack Smith, and the greater histories that he interrupts, including those of experimental arts practices, and the development of sexual cultures.

Offers not only an analytical study of the films of Herzog, perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century and in the present. Werner Herzog (b. 1942) is perhaps the most famous living German filmmaker, but his films have never been read in the context of German cultural history. And while there is a surfeit of film reviews, interviews, and scholarly articles on Herzog and his work, there are very few books devoted to his films, and none addressing his entire career to date. Until now. Forgotten Dreams offers not only an analytical study of Herzog's films but also a new reading of Romanticism's impact beyond the nineteenth century. It argues that his films re-envision and help us better understand a critical stream in Romanticism, and places the films in conversation with other filmmakers, authors, and philosophers in order to illuminate that critical stream. The result is a lively reconnection with Romantic themes and convictions that have been partly forgotten in the midst of Germany's postwar rejection of much of Romantic thought, yet are still operative in German culture today. The film analyses will interest scholars of film, German Studies, and Romanticism as well as a broader public interested in Herzog's films and contemporary German cultural debates. The book will also appeal to those interested in the ongoing renegotiation - by Western and other cultures - of relationships between reason and passion, civilization and wild nature, knowledge and belief. Laurie Ruth Johnson is Professor of German, Comparative and World Literature, and Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.