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Are there any other good day-by-day production history books y'all'd recommend? I've been reading Haver's book on A Star is Born and Rathgeb's on Rebel Without a Cause and enjoying all the nitty gritty details.

Picture by Lillian Ross, which covers the disastrous shooting of John Huston's the Red Badge of Courage, is probably the most well-known

I second the rec for Picture, one of my favorite nonfiction books, period. Also, and not quite day-by-day but still a comprehensive behind-the-scenes, I like Aljean Harmetz’s book on The Wizard of Oz. I’ve not read her books on Casablanca and Gone with the Wind.

Sam Staggs has books on All About Eve, Sunset Blvd, Imitation of Life, and A Streetcar Named Desire. I read the one on Eve, and it was an entertaining and informative read, but not exactly serious scholarship. It’s waspishly written and surprisingly lengthy, and so quickly gets tiresome if you don’t have an appetite for gossipy minutiae. I suspect the others are more of the same.

There is The Two Hundred Days of 8 1/2 by Deena Boyer.

Picture sounds right up my alley—it'll be interesting to get that level of detail on a movie that doesn't have a legendary status now...

Coincidentally, NYRB just reissued Picture: https://www.nyrb.com/products/picture-l ... 7214483508

There's also the related genre of film-maker's diaries. Jarman's cover longer periods and aren't necessarily film specific, but Isaac Julien's Diary of a Young Soul Rebel on the production of his film is intresting in places. Boorman's Money Into Light about making The Emerald Forest is apparently great and is currently sitting on my shelf waiting to be read...

senseabove wrote: Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:33 am Are there any other good day-by-day production history books y'all'd recommend? I've been reading Haver's book on A Star is Born and Rathgeb's on Rebel Without a Cause and enjoying all the nitty gritty details.

My 2 favourites in this genre are:

The Devil's Candy: The Bonfire of the Vanities Goes to Hollywood
by Julie Salamon

Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven's Gate
by Steven Bach

ESSENTIAL reading, especially if you are a big fan of the two movies

If there are any others as good as these two, please let me know

My recommendation, if i recall correctly, has very little actual nuts-and-bolts filmmaking stuff about the film ostensibly in question (The African Queen), i believe it deals mostly with preproduction--location scouting perhaps?, and I don't even know how verifiable or trustworthy the 'facts' it deals in are, but you should very much check out Peter Viertel's great White Hunter, Black Heart, for a fascinating and very ambiguous portrait of John Huston. This book is just full of tall tales, incredible scenes, reckless behaviour, and what have you.

A number of great books about Hollywood Palace Intrigue:

• Andrew Yule's Fast Fade: David Puttnam, Columbia Pictures, and the Battle for Hollywood

• David McClintock's Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street

• Nancy Griffin & Kim Masters' Hit and Run

I should have posted this on the Amazon Deals thread last week, but I picked up The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz.

It’s a mammoth book, in size, pages and scope. It is very much presented in a kaleidoscope manner, with all kinds media photos, film stills, hand written notes, and script pages. It’s a mix of essays, reviews and Q&A. I’ve barely scratched the surface this week, as I skipped to the parts I cared most about, like his work with Robert Richardson (I don’t think either have been as good with out each other) and films like Nixon and Natural Born Killers (perhaps his best, in my eyes). He goes over the the feud with Tarantino, but awkwardly wears the Stanley Kramer comparison as a badge of honor.

It’s a lot of fun to read, especially for $12 but I currently see it selling for $25.

Can anyone recommend "Kenji Mizoguchi and the Art of Japanese Cinema by Tadao Sato"?
I have found conflicting reviews online, specifically critiquing the translation/editing of the English language version.
The reason I ask is my local bookshop has copies for €9.99 but I hesitated to buy it due to the aforementioned criticism.

Are there any film magazines that you guys are reading regularly for good quality content?

I've been disappointed with the last few issues of Sight & Sound. I tried one Little White Lies and thought it was ok (The 100 Best British Films one) but nothing great.

Is there anything with exceptionally good writing and undiscovered gems (even genre mags)?

Thompson’s big, bulky, fiercely opinionated tome is the definitive movie reference book, even if his tastes run mighty persnickety (I just randomly opened to a page in the middle and found this comment, re Paul Newman: “I am skeptical of such blue-eyed likability”). I highly recommend it guys!

I wouldn’t normally quibble about a mere letter, but it’s important to distinguish between David Thomson (author of A Biographical Dictionary of Film) and David Thompson (BBC documentary producer turned increasingly regular talking head and commentary provider) because it’s confusing enough that their names sound identical when read out loud!

bearcuborg wrote: Tue Jul 09, 2019 9:16 pm I should have posted this on the Amazon Deals thread last week, but I picked up The Oliver Stone Experience by Matt Zoller Seitz.

It’s a mammoth book, in size, pages and scope. It is very much presented in a kaleidoscope manner, with all kinds media photos, film stills, hand written notes, and script pages. It’s a mix of essays, reviews and Q&A. I’ve barely scratched the surface this week, as I skipped to the parts I cared most about, like his work with Robert Richardson (I don’t think either have been as good with out each other) and films like Nixon and Natural Born Killers (perhaps his best, in my eyes). He goes over the the feud with Tarantino, but awkwardly wears the Stanley Kramer comparison as a badge of honor.

It’s a lot of fun to read, especially for $12 but I currently see it selling for $25.

You weren’t kidding about the value here; I checked Amazon a few hours after you originally posted and got a copy for $8.41 after sales tax, and now that it arrived and I’ve spent a few minutes flipping through it, I feel like I stole it. This would have been a great buy at $25!

It had been in my shopping cart for awhile, after seeing it on the shelf at my Philly Barnes & Noble a few years ago. I’m glad you got a great deal! Matt is a terrific writer. It’s given me a lot of inspiration for my book about mumblecore.

I also recommend (but don’t currently own) the David S Cohen and James Mottram mammoth book, Die Hard: The Ultimate Visual History.

I’m holding out for a similar deal, but I also spent a good deal of time with it at Barnes & Noble a year ago.

bearcuborg wrote: Thu Jul 18, 2019 1:56 am Matt is a terrific writer.

Ahem...

senseabove wrote: Sat Jun 29, 2019 12:33 am Are there any other good day-by-day production history books y'all'd recommend? I've been reading Haver's book on A Star is Born and Rathgeb's on Rebel Without a Cause and enjoying all the nitty gritty details.

Discovered another one, though it's not in English: Michel Cournot's Le premier spectateur: histoire vraie is a novelized recounting of his time spent on the set for the length of shooting on Henri-Georges Clouzot's Les espions

Inside the Prisoner: Radical Television and Film in the 1960s by Ian Rakoff. Now this is an odd book, which is recommended with provisos.

Rakoff was assistant editor for two episodes of The Prisoner and co-wrote “Living In Harmony”, the Western episode, and there is some interesting material on the series as seen from someone involved at the margins. Much as I like the series, I’m not familiar with behind the scenes and making-ofs in the way I am with, say, Doctor Who but assuming the book is accurate it’s amazing anything was finished – much like the original Star Wars, many of the people involved had no idea what was going on and were convinced the series would fail and disappear without trace. There’s also more than a bit about creative tensions (basically Patrick McGoohan against everybody else) – including one lengthy section about a seemingly terrifying meeting Rakoff had where he was harangued for two hours by McGoohan for all sorts of random reasons.

Along with Prisoner material, the other main focus is on Rakoff’s relationship with Lindsay Anderson, in particular their work on If… Anderson comes off (like McGoohan to a degree) to be abrasive but brilliant and there seems to be a genuine friendship between the two. In addition, Rakoff works with Roeg on a never completed (but at least partially shot) semi-documentary about Glastonbury combined with material on Borges – a project which seems tantalising to say the least.

As a whole the book is vaguely frustrating – it tries a bit too hard to impose the framework and outlook of The Prisoner on everything else – but often fascinating. So, recommended depending on how many boxes are ticked for you by The Prisoner / Anderson / Roeg.

J. Hoberman's review of Hannah Frank's Frame by Frame: A Materialist Aesthetics of Animated Cartoons in Artforum. Frank's articles "Traces of the World," which covers some of the same ground as this book, and "Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain," on Eisenstein's Macbeth sketches, are among the best works of contemporary film criticism/scholarship that I've read, so I'm really looking forward to reading this.

Frame by Frame happens to be available as a free ebook straight from the publisher: https://luminosoa.org/site/books/10.1525/luminos.65/

Has anyone checked out the listing for Taschen's Jacques Tati: The Complete Works? It looks like a suitcase-sized box set with five volumes:
Designed by M/M (Paris), the set includes:

Volume I, ‘Tati films’: stills from all six feature films
Volume II, ‘Tati writes’: the complete screenplays, plus those of two unmade films
Volume III, ‘Tati works’: a comprehensive survey of his life and work
Volume IV, ‘Tati explores’: essays on important themes in his films
Volume V, ‘Tati speaks’: quotations and interviews

Not exactly cheap at $225, but it looks pretty impressive.

That Tati book set is evidently the one so long in the making that Jonathan Rosenbaum posted his contributions (essays on each feature film) on his Web site some time ago. I assume these are still included in the final product.

On the Taschen site, their listing for the book describes Tati as having "lapsed into obscurity". Is that really accurate? Among regular moviegoers probably – but then again so has everything older than the last 15 years or so – but certainly not in cinephilic circles or in academia. Or am I suffering from tunnel vision induced by my love for Tati?

I doubt they’d be releasing a five volume set devoted to him if it were true. He seems as popular as a French comedian working over half a century ago can be, and I say that as someone who does not look upon it with Tati-colored glasses