Making Movies Work

MAKING MOVIES WORK is a fascinating and accessible guide for both filmmakers and serious film fans. It is about how filmmakers think about film. "Through thoughtful examination of the filmmaker's art, Jon Boorstin enhances our sense of enjoyment and appreciation of the results.--Robert Redford.

Why does a director choose a particular script? What must they do in order to keep actors fresh and truthful through take after take of a single scene? How do you stage a shootout—involving more than one hundred extras and three colliding taxis—in the heart of New York’s diamond district? What does it take to keep the studio honchos happy? From the first rehearsal to the final screening, Making Movies is a master’s take, delivered with clarity, candor, and a wealth of anecdote. For in this book, Sidney Lumet, one of our most consistently acclaimed directors, gives us both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on forty years of experience on movies that range from Long Day’s Journey into Night to Network and The Verdict—and with such stars as Katharine Hepburn, Paul Newman, Marlon Brando, and Al Pacino—Lumet explains how painstaking labor and inspired split-second decisions can result in two hours of screen magic.

Learn how to make movies like a professional. Whether you want to shoot dramas, documentaries, or animation, you'll find everything you need inside the clapper-board box--Container.

Focusing on early cinema's relationship with the pictorial arts, this pioneering study explores how cinema's emergence was grounded in theories of picture composition, craft and arts education – from magic lantern experiments in 1890s New York through to early Hollywood feature films in the 1920s. Challenging received notions that the advent of cinema was a celebration of mechanisation and a radical rejection of nineteenth-century traditions of representation, Kaveh Askari instead emphasises the overlap between craft traditions and modernity in early film. Opening up valuable new perspectives on the history of film as art, Askari links American silent cinema with the practice of teaching the public how to appreciate fine art; charts its entrance into arts education via art schools and university film courses; shows how concepts of artistic production entered films through a material interest in the studio; and examines the way in which Maurice Tourneur and Rex Ingram made early art films by shaping an image of the film director around the idea of the fine artist.

You see them on the video shelves, with titles such as Domestic Strangers, The Bride of Frank, The Blood Between Us, Strawberry Estates and Sandman. Skeptically, perhaps, you rent one and slip it into the VCR. Hey, you think, this isn't so bad--sometimes actually quite good. Suddenly, you discover that there is a whole range of movies from filmmakers operating outside the studio system that have their own attractions that the big budget fare can't match. You have, of course, discovered the world of independent filmmaking. Intrigued, you begin thinking that maybe you could do this, maybe you could make an independent feature film. In this work, J.R. Bookwalter, Ronnie Cramer, Mike Gingold, Eric Stanze, Steve Ballot, and 20 others tell what it is really like to make an independent feature. Covering such topics as the script, equipment, actors, publicity, distribution, all facets of production, and budgeting, these indie filmmakers give a virtual how-to for those interested in joining them or just learning more about how those interesting titles end up on video store shelves.

In 1958, soon after his arrival in Los Angeles, Gary Graver caught a showing of die recently released Touch of Evil. Upon viewing the B classic, Graver decided he wanted to be a director and spent many years honing his craft, as both a cinematographer and a director, not to mention writer, actor, and producerùmuch like his idol, Orson Welles. In 1970, when Graver learned that Welles was in town, he impulsively called the director and offered his services as a cameraman. It was only the second time in Welles's career that he had received such an offer from a cinematographer, the other from Gregg Toland who worked on Citizen Kane. Book jacket.

One of the failings of Nollywood has been the absence of research into what makes a production truly great. Making Movies the Nollywood Way is a compedium of unique insights into the thought process behind most of the movies made in Nollywood as well as the motivation behind the movies.The book shares the opinions and viewpoints of 21 of the most impactful Nollywood Movie Makers on how the industry operates, what its unique challenges are and what the Nollywood loving audience look for in their favorite movies. This book will help students of Theatre Arts, Researchers in Nollywood, movie enthusiasts and anyone seeking knowledge about the industry.