More to come.
Pace yourself.
1) The Emperor and the Wolf: The Lives and Films of Akira Kurosawa and Toshiro Mifune by Stuart Galbraith. This dual biography/filmography is exhaustively researched and comes with literally hundreds of pages of notes, appendices and lists. It’s great for anyone interested in what was arguably the greatest actor/director combination in cinema history.
2) Conversations With Wilder by Cameron Crowe. Rock journalist turned filmmaker Cameron Crowe sat down with the late, great Billy Wilder and this book is a wonderful, indispensable record of their talks. In it, Wilder talks not only about his films, his contemporaries, the actors, actresses, writers and studio executives that he had the fortune (or misfortune) to deal with over his multi-decade career but also, his tips for writers (which I used to have hanging over my desk) to his opinion on then-current release Titanic (“Have you ever seen such horseshit?”). It’s no wonder that after compiling this book, Crowe went on to make his masterpiece Almost Famous.
3) Writing Movies For Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too! By Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant. This witty, no BS book details the highs and lows of being a professional screenwriter in Hollywood. While being encouraging, it also reassures you in some of the hard facts of how movies are made (“you will get fired”). It also breaks down some of the more obscure jobs on a typical film set, gives you the addresses and menu recommendations for L.A. landmark In-N-Out burger and shares humorous stories of various celebrity encounters.
4) The Lady From The Black Lagoon: Hollywood Monsters and the Lost Legacy of Millicent Patrick by Mallory O’Meara. If you’ve never heard of Millicent Patrick, don’t feel bad, too few people have. This book is a long-overdue exploration of the woman who was instrumental in creating The Creature From The Black Lagoon be was subsequently uncredited in the final film. Interwoven with Patrick’s story is O’Meara’s, in which she doggedly pursues any and all information on Patrick while simultaneously dealing with critics (often men), who are either condescending or tell her that it would be better as an article rather than a book. I can honestly say that the moment I heard about this book, I preordered it.
5) Oscar Micheaux: The Great and Only: The Life of America’s First Black Filmmaker by Patrick McGilligan. Honestly, all of McGilligan’s biographies are great reads, but I’m picking this one because it’s the first book of his that I ever read and because at the time I read it, I had never heard of Oscar Micheaux before. Micheaux, one part entrepreneur, one part artist and one part conman, was writing, directing and producing Black-centered films back when being an independent filmmaker was a huge challenge, let alone being a minority one. Micheaux’s films have been collected on Kino Lorber’s excellent box set Pioneers of African-American Cinema and are often streaming on The Criterion Channel. It is a fascinating exploration of not only an individual, but a time when inclusivity was virtually nonexistent and people yearned for cinema that represented them. We’ve come a long way, but we’re not there yet.
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