Showing titles in Film & TV

An in-depth celebration of the romantic comedy’s modern golden era and its role in our culture, tracking the genre from its heyday in the ’80s and the ’90s, its unfortunate decline in the 2000s, and its explosive reemergence in the age of streaming, featuring exclusive interviews with the...

Susan Fleming appeared in three Broadway shows and twenty-eight films before she turned her back on a show business career she never really enjoyed or wanted. The role of her lifetime came when she married Harpo Marx in 1936. Together, they raised four adopted children and enjoyed one of Hollywood's happiest and most successful unions. But their twenty-year age difference made Susan a young widow in 1964. Her story is the counterpoint to the beloved and acclaimed Harpo Marx autobiography, Harpo Speaks! Susan's perspective provides a true look behind the curtain and details Harpo's last years.

Joan Crawford's remarkable forty-five-year motion picture career is one of the industry's longest. Signing her first contract in 1925, she was crowned an MGM star four years later and by the mid-1930s was the most popular actress in America. In the early 1940s, Crawford's risky decision to move to Warner Bros. was rewarded with an Oscar for Mildred Pierce. This triumph launched a series of film noir classics. She teamed with rival Bette Davis in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?, proving that Crawford, whose career had begun by defining big-screen glamor, had matured into a dramatic actress.

Official Audiobook version of the Fully Authorised Biography of Stephen Fry and Hugh Laurie written by acclaimed comedy biographer Jem Roberts (Clue, Blackadder, Douglas Adams) and narrated by the author... with a bit of help from his award-winning colleague Kris Dyer.

In this compelling study, Joshua Clover undertakes the task of decoding the film. Examining The Matrix's digital effects and how they were achieved, he shows how the film represents a melding of cinema and video games (the greatest commercial threat to have faced Hollywood since the advent of television) and achieves a hybrid kind of immersive entertainment. He also unpacks the movie's references to philosophy, showing how The Matrix ultimately expresses the crisis American culture faced at the end of the 1990s.

Encounter Jesus the way his followers did. Every follower of Jesus in the gospels had a not-so-great “before”: A brash fisherman. A pious religious leader. A demon-possessed woman. A thieving tax collector. Christ’s love saw beyond their brokenness and forgave. Jesus revolutionized the lives of those who followed him. And He’s still doing it today. Each of the forty devotions in The Chosen contains a scripture, a unique look into a gospel story, suggestions for prayer, and questions that lead you further in your relationship with Christ.

With an in-depth look at the two most empowering years in the life of Marilyn Monroe, The Girl details how The Seven Year Itch created an icon and sent the star on an adventure of self-discovery and transformation from a controlled wife and contract player into a businesswoman and unlikely...

Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece, Pan's Labyrinth (2006), won a total of 76 awards and is one of the most commercially successful Spanish-language films ever made. Blending the world of monstrous fairytales with the actual horrors of post-Civil War Spain, the film's commingling of real and fantasy worlds speaks profoundly to our times. This study of Guillermo del Toro's cult masterpiece places 'Pan's Labyrinth' in its cultural and historical contexts, and provide an illuminating analysis of the film's techniques, themes and meanings.

Drawing on Daphne du Maurier's short story and contemporary newspaper reports of bird attacks in California, Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds (1963) featured Tippi Hedren in her first starring role. Camille Paglia's compelling study considers the film's aesthetic, technical and mythical qualities, and analyses its depiction of gender and family relations. A film about anxiety, sexual power and the violence of nature, it is quintessential Hitchcock.

Daniel Day-Lewis is an actor regarded by many as the finest of his generation. His portrayal of cerebral-palsy sufferer Christy Brown in My Left Foot won him his first Oscar in 1990, and in 2008 another Oscar followed for his role in There Will Be Blood. His roles in The Age of Innocence, The Last of the Mohicans and In the Name of the Father further cemented his reputation as well as grossing millions at the box office, making Day-Lewis one of Hollywood's most bankable stars.

From this audiobook, you'll learn: how planning and shooting a short film today can lead to a feature-length project tomorrow; everything you need to know about writing a movie project on a burger budget; tips on how to find locations and not get arrested; Shooting tips galore for building exciting scenes; sound and film editing tips and all kinds of special effects wizardry, including puppetry; screenings, promotions, and juicy tips on film festival strategy; and more.

Will we ever get tired of watching Cher navigate Beverly Hills High School and discover true love in the movie Clueless? As if! Written by Amy Heckerling and starring Alicia Silverstone, Clueless is an enduring comedy classic that remains one of the most streamed movies on Netflix, Amazon, and iTunes even 20 years after its release. In the first book of its kind, Jen Chaney has compiled an oral history of the making of this iconic film using recollections and insights collected from key cast and crew members.

A legendary fusion of science fiction and horror, Ridley Scott's Alien (1979) is one of the most enduring films of modern cinema – its famously visceral scenes acting like a traumatic wound we seem compelled to revisit. Exploring the ways in which Alien compels us to think about otherness, Luckhurst demonstrates how and why this interstellar slasher movie, this old dark house in space, came to coil itself around our darkest imaginings about the fragility of humanity.

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003) brings two Americans together in Tokyo, each experiencing a personal crisis. Both are distant — emotionally and spatially — from their spouses. They are lost until they develop an intimate connection. In the film’s poignant, famously ambiguous closing scene, they find each other, only to separate. In this close look at the multi-award-winning film, Suzanne Ferriss mirrors Lost in Translation’s structuring device of travel: her analysis takes the form of a trip, from planning to departure...

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel...

Whether it is a director insisting on a final cut, a star demanding a bigger motor home, a producer holding the line on a budget, or a grip with a gripe, it seems that the world of moviemaking is nothing but Sturm und Drang. Shoot Out presents a raucous look at how movies get made and the players involved, from writers, producers, directors, and stars to agents and marketers. For film buffs, aspiring filmmakers, students, and anyone else intrigued by the inner workings of Hollywood, this is the quintessential take on the how, who, what, and why of the film business.

Brainstorm is an amazing five-year probe into the mysterious death of beloved movie star Natalie Wood by a real-life criminal law authority who determinedly pursued the truth in the face of Los Angeles County officials hell-bent on keeping it buried forever. Brainstorm: An Investigation of the Mysterious Death of Film Star Natalie Wood is the first-person account of Sam Perroni’s probing investigation of the actress’s death.

Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.” And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and...

Few American television series are as deeply entrenched in twentieth-century popular culture as M*A*S*H, a Korean War medical comedy characterized by its dark tone and finesse in tackling serious social and political issues. By the end of its run, M*A*S*H had been a mainstream hit for several seasons and won fourteen Emmys, leading it to be called, "the most popular pre-Seinfeld series in television history." In this comprehensive study of M*A*S*H, David Scott Diffrient analyzes the series' contextual issues such as its creation, reception, and circulation as well as textual issues like its formal innovations, narrative strategies, and themes.

Today's world wants to know you and the real story behind why you do what you do. Whether you have a product to sell, a company mission to share or an audience to entertain, people are far more likely to engage if you deliver a well-crafted story with an emotional core. Bobette Buster is a story consultant, lecturer and screenwriter who works with major studios and in top film programmes all over the world. She shares the tools used by some of the world's best storytellers and helps you apply them to your own.