books about cinema

The best book of the last year afaic is Nick P's monograph on Goodbye Dragon Inn. I tend toward monographs in general when it comes to movies, though. (See also the BFI Film Classics on Night of the Living Dead.)

Essential reads from a glance at my shelf:

Stuart Klawans, Film Follies
Manny Farber, Negative Space
James Baldwin, The Devil Finds Work
Damien Bona & Mason Wiley, Inside Oscar

not a book per se but the folks translating serge daney at http://sergedaney.blogspot.com/?m=1 have my eternal gratitude

A few others that must be tucked away in storage:

Craig Seligman, Sontag & Kael
Jonathan Rosenbaum, Moving Places
John Gregory Dunne, The Studio
James Schamus, Carl Theodor Dreyer's Gertrud: The Moving Word
Jason Zinoman, Shock Value

Will second Klawans, Baldwin, and Inside Oscar, the latter essential bathroom reading.

Also:

Luis Bunuel - My Last Sigh
Sam Stagg - All About All About Eve: The Complete Behind-the-Scenes Story of the Bitchiest Film Ever Made!
Simon Callow - Orson Welles: One Man Band.

The Stagg is perfect for some snowy night in front of the fire.

the exclamation point is a poem

On top of my standard everything-by-Kael-and-Kauffmann (and everything about Kael), plus Mark Harris's Pictures at a Revolution, I've come to like making-of books: Glenn Kenny's book on Goodfellas, Glenn Frankel's Shooting Midnight Cowboy, Michael Benson's Space Odyssey: Stanley Kubrick, Arthur C. Clarke, and the Making of a Masterpiece, Melissa Maerz's oral history of Dazed & Confused, Carl Gottleib's The Jaws Log, Jan Stuart's Nashville Chronicles: The Making of Robert Altman's Masterpiece.

A few already mentioned, I'd also rep for the following:

Mark Harris's Five Came Back
David Thompson's Have You Seen?. T
John Boorman's Money Into Light. Boorman tells the tortuous story of the making of The Emerald Forest
Thomas Doherty's Hollywood and Hitler, 1933-1939. Explores the tensions between commerce, censorship, the expatriate Germans opposing the Nazis and Hollywood's wish to do the right thing but not rock the boat.
Otto Friedrich's City of Nets
William Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade
Mark Feeney's Nixon at the Movies. Feeney tells the story of the Nixon era through the films he watched when President.
Legs McNeill's The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Industry Warts and all oral history of the rise and fall of the porn cinema industry from the late 60s to the arrival of the internet.
Francois Truffaut's Hitchcock. The master and his student in combative form.
Alain Silver's Film Noir: An Encyclopedic Reference to the American Style
Thomas Schatz's The Genius of the System
Kevin Brownlow's The Parade's Gone By... and Hollywood:The Pioneers. Essential works on the silent film era, the Hollywood book is more of a photo book, but no poorer for that.
Cary Elwes's As You Wish, very charming and funny account of the making of The Princess Bride.

The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood is RAD
Cassavetes on Cassavetes is the shit

I've spent many pleasant hours with Inside Warner Bros. Rudy Behlmer, a collection of internal production memos & correspondence between WB execs, staffers & stars, covering the 30s through the early 50s.

The Phantom Empire by Geoffrey O'Brien

Xp You’d like Letters from Hollywood edited by Rocky Lang and Barbara Hall which collects correspondence from the 1920s to 1970s. The telegram Henry Fonda sent to William Wyler on the birth of Jane Fonda is a joy.

In 1937, Henry Fonda sent a telegram to William Wyler (who was directing him in Jezebel at the time) and his friends, who had dubbed themselves as ‘The Jezzies,’ to announce the birth of his daughter Jane. In return, the group sent a letter to Henry, taking a jab at his acting. pic.twitter.com/oOFPKktgKU

— ana (@pelicinema) May 1, 2021

Wish someone would turn this into a full-length book.

https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2010/04/movie-marked-danger-200004

There’s a BFI Film Classics on it by James Naremore. Haven’t read it so can’t say if it treads the same ground as the Vanity Fair piece.

Didn't know! Will immediately look for it (even though I still haven't read the making-of-Wanda book I bought over a year ago).

Just remembered BFI Film Classics/BFI Modern Classics: Search and Destroy

Is there a good single history about the classic Hollywood studio system? Realised the other day I've picked up stuff mostly from dvd bonus features, so have a grasp of Warner in the 30's, Columbia in the 50's, early Universal, MGM, but have never looked at the whole shebang.

That Thomas Schatz book already mentioned a few posts up by Dan W, The Genius of the System.

Andrew Sarris - You Ain't Heard Nothin' Yet

xpost

Is there a good single history about the classic Hollywood studio system?

This isn't EXACTLY what you're looking for, but I still don't know of another book that's so packed with hard facts and figures about classical Hollywood cinema, including chapters on all the major studios and their finances:

https://books.google.co.uk/books/about/The_Hollywood_Story.html?id=rvVhEJmbfrsC

I suspect I may well have contributed to some of those earlier threads on this topic that WmC linked to, so am going to limit myself to ten recentish books:

The Essential Raymond Durgnant edited by Henry K Miller - excellent selection of key essays by one of the greatest of all film critics, put together by an ex-ilxor - how could it miss!
A Short History of Cahiers Du Cinema - Emilie Bickerton - extremely useful magazine history that also serves as a concise study of the nouvelle vague.
Euro Gothic - Jonathan Rigby - One of a series of three authoritative surveys of the English, American and European horror movie. Rigby is a tidy writer and an exhaustive researcher, and this one in particular assembles a lot of facts and history all in one place really for the first time in English.
2001: A Space Odyssey - Peter Kramer (BFI monograph). Yes, lots of good entries in this series, but Kramer really did seem to find new things to say about Kubrick and 2001 here.
The Richard Burton Diaries edited by Chris Williams - pure entertainment and perfect lavatory reading.
Warner Bros The Making of an American Movie Studio - David Thomson - he has written many careless and scattershot things in the last ten years or more, but the subject keeps Thomson more focused here, and he is on home ground writing about siblings, power, greed and old Hollywood.
My Lunches With Orson - Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles - table talk tittle-tattle that Welles would almost certainly have not want published like this - he comes across as peevish, bitchy, quite racist and grumpy - but also of course fascinating, funny, insightful, unpredictable.
The Bodies Beneath - William Fowler and Vic Pratt - well-written and entertaining survey of all sorts of British film and television oddities that will definitely have you scouring YouTube looking for old Sooty and Sweep shows.
Once Upon a Time in the West: Shooting a Masterpiece - Christopher Frayling - everything Frayling writes in and around cinema is worth reading, but this large-size illustrated hardcover is gorgeous to look at too, and obviously essential for fans of the film (and who isn't?).
Murderous Passions/Flowers of Peversion - Stephen Thrower - stonking two volume critical filmography of Jess Franco. The amount of research and devotion involved is staggering - and suitably mad and excessive, considering the subject/author.

My Lunches with Orson is so fun, i forgot about that one

One that seems obvious but I haven't seen it mentioned in any of these threads is This Is Orson Welles, which is Peter Bogdanovich interviewing Welles.

Images by Ingmar Bergman is excellent, and goes together well with the interview compilation Bergman on Bergman by Björkman et al.

Seconding the phenomenal Murderous Passions (I haven't read the second volume). And The Richard Burton Diaries, which is so endlessly enjoyable it has its own Twitter account.

I like Alex Cox's book on spaghetti westerns 10,000 Ways to Die as well as a more comprehensive book on the genre called Any Gun Can Play by Kevin Grant.

I saw Bogdanovich give a reading of maybe a new edition of that first one maybe twenty years ago, which was entertaining. Seems like only yesterday.

Shepperton Babylon by Matthew Sweet is a lot of fun and quite funny

W-w-wait, Mattthew Sweet?

Yup

Danny Peary's Cult Movies 1, 2 & 3 and Guide for the Film Fanatic were essential through my 20's.

I loved Geoff Dyer's Zona, a book-length meditation on Tarkovsky's Stalker.

The Matthew Sweet who wrote Shepperton Babylon is not the same Matthew Sweet who recorded Girlfriend.

I loved Geoff Dyer's Zona, a book-length meditation on Tarkovsky's Stalker.

― joni mitchell jarre (anagram),

seconding

I'm not sure of David Thomson's rep these days, but his Welles and Bette Davis critical bios have insights. So does his recent Sleeping With Strangers: How the Movies Shaped Desire .

The Matthew Sweet who wrote Shepperton Babylon is not the same Matthew Sweet who recorded Girlfriend.

Boyd McDonald, Cruising the Movies
Michael Koresky, Films of Endearment
Armond White, Make Spielberg Great Again ... whatever, AW's Spielberg writings through the years are essential

I remember enjoying Zona, but haven't retained any impressions from it except a quasi-joking tone of "dear Reader, please forgive me for calling your attention to this utterly obscure cultural artifact", as if the film isn't generally regarded as a masterpiece of world cinema.

#4 on the ILX all-time movies poll ... super deep cut

Unfortunate timing with this thread. Have only read the Mitchum bio but it's an all-timer.

The great Lee Server, author of superb bios of Robert Mitchum, Ava Gardner and most recently Johnny Roselli has passed away. Lee was a friend and mentor—and I feel terrible that he's gone. Heartfelt condolences to his wife and family.

— Alan K. Rode (pronounced ROE-DEE) (@alancinephile) January 13, 2022

(xpost) I'm reading Thomson's How to Watch a Movie right now, a Christmas gift. (He's given me permission to write the sequel, How Not to Watch a Movie: drifting off on your recliner, rewinding and watching the same five-minute stretch 17 times until you shut it down and pick it up again tomorrow.)

Robin Wood - Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan
Robert B Ray - A certain tendency of the Hollywood cinema, 1930-1980
Mark Harris - Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

co-sign Robin Wood's book

That Harris book was so good it kicked off my ILE Oscar year polls.

The book that kicked it all off for me was the 1981 edition of Movies on TV by Steven H. Scheuer. Our family got it as a gift for donating to the Buffalo PBS station. The writing is just capsule reviews, terse but very evocative, and almost certainly this is the first place I heard of Godard, Buñuel, Robert Kramer, Brakhage etc. (apparently, someone thought that The Art of Vision was likely to be broadcast on TV in 1981, there's a review of it in here). To save space, movies that received less than two stars out of four had no review, but even that ignited my curiousity: "The Last Movie? One star? How bad can it be?"

I had at least one copy of Scheuer's guide. He was Maltin's rival for a while before dropping out--many more eccentric entries than Maltin.

Just ordered a copy of Murderous Passions based on the recommendations here. Looks fun. Also picked up "Have You Seen" for three quid in the local Oxfam and looking forward to depositing on the toilet shelf.

I've had the Lee Server book on the shelf for 20 years since the paperback came out, it's worth reading? Was put off by the bulk, and the suspicion that it was one of those flip post-Swingers bios like Rat Pack Confidential.

RIP Lee Server. As stated above, the Mitchum bio is one of my all-time faves. Dunno about flip - it doesn't do too much hand wringing about its subject's bad behaviour but doesn't glorify it either. I did finish it liking him less than before, his 60's right wing turn and contempt for his own profession got a bit tiring. Crazy anecdote after crazy anecdote, though, just off memory:

-Mitchum's early life including a stint on a chain gang and writing a sympathetic play about a union leader.

-Mitchum sharing a spliff w/ a younger actor in a hotel room while listening to Sgt.Pepper. Said young actor starts to try to explain the yoof to him, Mitchum just smiles going "I know, man"; "can't believe I was enough of an idiot to try to lecture ROBERT MITCHUM on hipness"

-Mitchum's encounter with a trans belly dancer; when warned off her he replies "I don't care what's in her pants man, she's hot!" - equally gross and progressive, I guess?

-As mentioned above: Aldrich and Mitchum working on some b movie, Aldrich going into full creative crisis and Mitchum telling him "don't you understand what we're doing here? We're doing a gorilla movie. People watch them to see me beat up some thugs and get the girl. That's all this is." Aldrich replies in sadness "I don't want to make gorilla movies", and Mitchum just kinda shrugs.

Also some really great turns of phrase like describing a Mitchum/Dean Martin film as a "summit of indifference".

Server also contributed to the super fun Big Book Of Noir, and he has a book called Asian Pop Cinema which is worth tracking down - pretty cool that even in 1999 he managed to include South Korea, the Philipines and Taiwan cinema.

Oh, did he pass? RIP. The Mitchum book and the Ava Gardner one are both grebt as is The Big Book of Noir.

I remember the punchline of one story as "I don't care about plumbing!"

Also, two anecdotes you overlooked are the one about the bumping landing before shooting Out of the Past when he said "Anybody got any gage?" and the one where he got to LA first because his brother got arrested by a railroad bull. When his rother finally arrives, Bob is in the tub taking a bubble bath, smoking a cigar, reading Hollywood Confidential and says "What kept you?"

bumpy

brother

More than bumpy, no brakes. Plane knocked over an outhouse. Two men were out cold.

Finished David Thomson's How to Watch a Movie. Really liked it--the title's a come-on, it just wanders around and doesn't really try to guide you about anything (thankfully), and even though I wasn't always sure what point Thomson was trying to make at any given moment, I liked the mix of personal anecdote and unanswerable (meta-) questions, and the mix of films suited me fine.

I wonder if he's got ghost writers or grad students. No way this guy has been so prolific the last three years. No detracting from quality: I read Sleeping With Strangers in 2020 and shared excerpts with students then.

Three books in three years, 200-300 pages each, two published during a pandemic, doesn't seem that far-fetched to me. Some people rhyme slow, some people rhyme quick.

Also, the way David Thomson watches a movie is to frenziedly masturbate every time Nicole Kidman appears on screen, and you probably don't need a whole book telling you how to do that.

I love my DT books but this is v true

there's a good bit in a rosenbaum review of the dyer stalker and mars-jones ozu books where he is taken aback that both writers seem to regard thomson as an unquestionable expert

That's because both of them don't know much about film and are weak critics but were indulged by their publishers.

Dyer's Stalker book works because he isn't a film critic.