Films, cinema Books

To make compelling television, our industry depends on enthusiastic new voices with fresh ideas. While there are plenty of books about the mechanics of writing, this is the first time an insider has detailed the invaluable TV executive perspective. As...

Sharing his own process honed over a decades-long career, Emmy-nominated director Dan Attias brings you into the actual experience of directing series television.Whether it's the high-stakes pressure of solving a last-minute problem on set, or the joy of...

Editing for Directors guides directors through postproduction, starting with planning for editing during the shoot and ending with the completion of their film. This thorough, well-illustrated book describes the artistic, organisational, and technical...

The Total FilmMaker was originally written and based on over 480 hours of Jerry's guest lecture series at USC Film School in 1966, where his then-students included aspiring young filmmakers Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. From script to...

Through a "Crazy" approach in writing the feature screenplay, the first half of the book guides the reader in how to create and develop: Story Idea, Characters, One Page Step Outline, and the solid script. In the second half, the book covers professional...

This groundbreaking guide describes six seemingly different popular movies and genres (Skyfall, The Avengers, The Hangover, A Beautiful Mind, The Conjuring, Gone Girl) and shows screenwriters how they all follow the exact same 120 Universal Story Beats...

Reality TV: An Insider's Guide to TV's Hottest Market is a no-nonsense read that doesn't sugarcoat the realities of the process or the ethical gut-checks that writers and producers often experience in trying to deliver an engaging end product...

Master of the Cinematic Universe is a guide to the future of trans-media storytelling. Content creators of every flavor are constantly needing to expand the mediums they can work in. This volume serves as a resource for using the timeless truths of story...

Martin Scorsese directs films that range from the subtlest studies of relationships to violent gangster movies, with characters who are driven to the extremes of their personality. This book looks at Scorsese's key techniques, showing how he uses space,...

Released in conjunction with the 75th-anniversary DVD release of The Wizard of Oz, this book is the definitive story of how one of America's most beloved movies was made and a marvelous, unprecedented examination of how Hollywood used to make movies...

An informal yet informed journey through the classic works of Japanese cinema and their directors.This is a passionate, personal journey through one of the world's greatest national cinemas, beginning with the classic directors who came to the fore in...

Named a Best Book of the Year by Financial Times"Singular, stylish and slightly intoxicating in its scope." Rolling StoneAcclaimed media critic J. Hoberman's masterful and majestic exploration of the Reagan years as seen through the unforgettable movies...

Learn to turn a simple screenplay into a visual masterpiece! Top production designers share their real-life experiences to explain the aesthetic, narrative, and technical aspects of the craft. Step by step, aspiring filmmakers will discover sound...

The movie that inspired filmmakers to direct is like the atomic bomb that went off before their eyes. The Film That Changed My Life captures that epiphany. It explores 30 directors' love of a film they saw at a particularly formative moment, how it...

A Queer Film Classic on IshmaelBernal's 1980 film that follows a dozencharacters, all denizens of Manila's sordid yet exuberant underworld, as theypursue life, love, and pleasure. Bernal cited Robert Altman's Nashville as one of the influences onhis...

Reception studies have made film audiences increasingly visible, while surveys track trends and policymakers gather information about audience preferences and demographics. But little attention has been paid to the specific contextual relationships and...

This book examines issues of censorship, publicity and teenage fandom in 1950s Britain surrounding a series of controversial Hollywood films: The Wild One, Blackboard Jungle, Rebel Without a Cause, Rock Around the Clock and Jailhouse Rock. It also...

Despite the steady rise in adaptations of Samuel Beckett's work across the world following the author's death in 1989, Beckett's afterlives is the first book-length study dedicated to this creative phenomenon. The collection employs interrelated concepts...

Decades before the emergence of a French self-styled 'hood' film around 1995, French filmmakers looked beyond the gates of the capital for inspiration and content. In the Paris suburbs they found an inexhaustible reservoir of forms, landscapes and social...

This is a book for all those who have been absorbed and moved by Brief Encounter in the seventy or so years since its first appearance. It explores the central relationship of the film, where two people who fall unexpectedly in love come to realise that...

In a world defined by the flow of people, goods and cultures, many contemporary French films explore the multicultural nature of today's France through language. From rival lingua francas such as English to socio-politically marginalised languages such...

Chic, sophisticated, seductive and enigmatic, the Parisienne possesses a je ne sais quoi that makes her difficult to define. But who or what is the Parisienne, and how is she depicted in cinema? The first book-length study on the subject combines...

This topical and innovative study is the first book on Algerian cinema to be published in English since the 1970s. At a time when North African and Islamic cultures are of increasing political significance, Algerian National Cinema presents a dynamic,...

A tour de force chronicling the development of realism in Chinese cinemaThe history of Chinese cinema is as long and complicated as the tumultuous history of China itself. Be it the silent, the Communist, or the contemporary, each Chinese cinematic era...

Revealing cinema's place in the coevolution of media technology and the humanCinema did not die with the digital, it gave rise to it. According to Jeffrey West Kirkwood, the notion that digital technologies replaced analog obscures how the earliest...

An exploration of how film has made legible the Italian long '68 as a moment of crisis and transitionTraditionally, the definition of political cinema assumes a relationship between cinema and politics. In contrast to this view, author Mauro Resmini sees...

An urgent volume of essays engages the Gothic to advance important perspectives on our geological eraWhat can the Gothic teach us about our current geological era? More than just spooky, moonlit castles and morbid graveyards, the Gothic represents a...

How computer animation technologies became vital visualization tools in the life sciencesWho would have thought that computer animation technologies developed in the second half of the twentieth century would become essential visualization tools in...

A new critical approach to cinema and media based on Buddhism as a philosophical discourse How can a philosophical discourse generated in Asia help us reframe and renew cinema and media theory? Cinema Illuminating Reality provides a possible way to do...

In UtopianTelevision, Michael Cramer examines works of the great filmmakers RobertoRossellini, Peter Watkins, and Jean-Luc Godard, all of whom looked totelevision as a promising new medium even while remaining critical of itsexisting practices. Cramer...

Age range 9+For fans of The Vampire Diaries, Dracula, or any original bloodsucker comes a parody of the children's classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar In this hilarious parody of a children's classic, The Very Thirsty Vampire presents a charming...

In the long-awaited American Gothic Jonathan Rigby tells the story of the Hollywood horror film from its 19th-century beginnings through to the arrival of Vincent Price as a genre star in films like House of Wax and The Fly. This 60-year period...

Oscar-winning production designer Peter Lamont worked behind the scenes on 18 James Bond films, beginning with the 1960s classics starring Sean Connery and George Lazenby. Along the way, he worked with director James Cameron and...

This is a full account of the dazzling Technicolor years that turned the screen from silver to every color of the rainbow. Here in one volume are the films, the stars, the showmen and all the elements behind the phenomenon that changed movies forever...

When The Sound of Music was released in 1965, it took the world by storm, capturing five Oscars (including Best Picture) and holding the number-one spot box-office record for five years. For millions of viewers, the film is a rare combination of a...

A story is a living thing. And you don't work on a living thing, you work with it. This is the way of the screenwriter, and it is something that writer and director Amnon Buchbinder believes all masterful screenwriters understand intuitively: learning...

Drew Struzan has created some of the most iconic movie posters of the last 30 years, from "Raiders of the Lost Ark" to "Star Wars: Episode III". This sumptuous hardcover edition, with an Introduction by George Lucas, features over 250 pieces of art,...

Andrei Tarkovsky is the most celebrated Russian filmmaker since Eisenstein, and one of the most important directors to have emerged during the 1960s and 70s.Although he made only seven features, each one was a major landmark in cinema, the most...

Australian and New Zealand crime and thriller writing is booming globally, with antipodean authors regularly featuring on awards and bestseller lists across Europe and North America, and overseas readers and publishers looking more and more to tales from...

The animations of Japan's Studio Ghibli are amongst the most respected in the movie industry. Their delightful films rank alongside the most popular non-English language films ever made, with each new eagerly anticipated release a guaranteed box...

Forty years ago as a graduate student I wrote a book about Spaghetti Westerns, called 10,000 Ways to Die. It's an embarrassing tome: full of half-assed semiotics and other attenuated academic nonsense.Thirty years later I wrote an entirely new...

Crowdfunding is a major source of funding for independent films and over $250 million has been raised for films just on Kickstarter alone. This book will guide you through every stage of planning, creating, and running your film crowdfunding campaign...

An engrossing account of Alain Resnais'sincomparable film, this book documents how a film that began as a cinematicspin-off of an educational exhibition became a significant step in the buildingof a collective consciousness of the tragedy of World War II...

The philosophically rich David Bowie is an artist of wide and continuing influence. The theatrical antics of Bowie ushered in a new rock aesthetic, but there is much more to Bowie than mere spectacle. The visual belies the increasing depths of his...

Now available in paperback, this is the first academic book dedicated to the filmmaking of the three-best known Mexican-born directors, Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu and Alfonso Cuaron. Deborah Shaw examines the career trajectories of...

Swedish crime fiction became an international phenomenon in the first decade of the twenty-first century, starting first with novels but then percolating through Swedish-language television serials and films on to English-language BBC productions and...

Theatres on film is an innovative contribution to the study of both theatre and film history, with its detailed discussion of popular and influential films that have taken the theatre as their subject, informed by a strong sense of the cultural and...

Looking at contemporary film and television, this book explores how popular genres frame our understanding of on-screen performance. It brings together ground-breaking and inspiring work on this topic from both renowned and newer academics in the field...