Sidney Lumet
Sidney Lumet was an Academy Award-winning American film director, with over 50 films to his name, including the critically acclaimed 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), Network (1976) and The Verdict (1982), all of which earned him Academy Award nominations for Best Director. He won an Academy Award for Lifetime Achievement in 2005, for his "brilliant services to screenwriters, performers, and the art of the motion picture".
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David Lynch
David Keith Lynch was an American filmmaker, visual artist, musician, and actor. He received acclaim for his films, which are often distinguished by their surrealist, dreamlike qualities. In a career spanning more than fifty years, he was awarded numerous accolades, including the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Film Festival in 2006 and an Honorary Academy Award in 2019. Described as a "visionary", Lynch was considered one of the most important filmmakers of his era.
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Lynch studied painting before he began making short films in the late 1960s. His first feature-length film was the independent surrealist film Eraserhead (1977), which saw success as a midnight movie. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Director fo -
William Friedkin
William Friedkin was an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director.
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Robert Rodríguez
Robert Anthony Rodriguez is an American director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician perhaps best known for making profitable, crowd-pleasing independent and studio films with fairly low budgets and fast schedules by Hollywood standards. He shoots and produces many of his films in Texas and Mexico.
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Michael Benson
Michael Benson is a journalist and maker of documentary films, including the award-winning Predictions of Fire (1995). His work has been published in the New York Times, the New Yorker, and Smithsonian, among other publications, and he has been a television (CNN) and radio (NPR) reporter. He is also the author of the Abrams bestseller Beyond: Visions of the Interplanetary Probes. He lives in New York City.
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Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information. -
Luis Buñuel
Luis Buñuel was born on 22 February 1900 in Calanda, a small town in the Aragón region of Spain. He was a visionary filmmaker and influential figure in the history of cinema, known for his distinctive style and bold exploration of themes such as surrealism, social criticism, and human nature.
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His family was wealthy and devoutly Catholic, a conservative environment that would later provide rich material for his critical and often subversive works.
Buñuel's education began in Jesuit schools, where he developed a critical view of religion that would pervade much of his later work. He moved to Madrid in 1917 to study at the University of Madrid, where he became part of an intellectual circle that included future luminaries such as Salvador Dalí -
Michael Mann
Michael Kenneth Mann is an American film director, screenwriter, author, and producer, best known for his stylized crime dramas. Mann has received numerous accolades including a BAFTA Award and two Primetime Emmy Awards as well as nominations for four Academy Awards and two Golden Globe Awards. His most acclaimed works include the films Thief (1981), Manhunter (1986), The Last of the Mohicans (1992), Heat (1995), The Insider (1999), Ali (2001), Collateral (2004), and Public Enemies (2009). He is also known for his role as executive producer on the popular TV series Miami Vice (1984–89), which he adapted into a 2006 feature film.
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Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and stylized violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
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Tom Shone
Tom Shone was born in Horsham, England, in 1967. From 1994 to 1999 he was the film critic of the London Sunday Times and has since written for a number of publications, including The New Yorker, The New York Times, the London Daily Telegraph, and Vogue. He lives in Brooklyn, New York."
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Kyle Buchanan
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The New York Times. Prior to joining The Times in 2018, he was a senior editor at Vulture, New York Magazine's entertainment website, where he covered the movie industry. A native of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.
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Peter Biskind
Peter Biskind is an American cultural critic, film historian, and journalist, best known for his tenure as executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996. He attended Swarthmore College and authored several influential books on Hollywood, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, some of which became bestsellers. In 2010, he published a biography of Warren Beatty titled Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Biskind is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, with work appearing in major publications like Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He served as editor-in-chief of American Film from 1981 to 1986. His books have been translated into over thirty languages. Despite his acclaim, som
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Ben Fritz
Ben Fritz is a reporter covering the entertainment industry for the Wall Street Journal. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times and Variety. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he lives in Los Angeles.
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Kyle Buchanan
Kyle Buchanan is a pop culture reporter and serves as The Projectionist, the awards season columnist for The New York Times. Prior to joining The Times in 2018, he was a senior editor at Vulture, New York Magazine's entertainment website, where he covered the movie industry. A native of Southern California, he lives in Los Angeles.
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William Friedkin
William Friedkin was an American film director, producer and screenwriter best known for directing The French Connection in 1971 and The Exorcist in 1973; for the former, he won the Academy Award for Best Director.
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Robert P. Kolker
Robert Phillip Kolker, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. He is author of A Cinema of Loneliness, The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and the Reimagining of Cinema, and editor of 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays and The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies.
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Sam Wasson
SAM WASSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M .: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman and two works of film criticism. He is a visiting professor of film at Wesleyan University.
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Mark Harris
Mark Harris’s first book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, was published this year. He writes the “Final Cut” column for Entertainment Weekly and has also written about pop culture for many other publications, most recently The New York Times, Details, GQ, Portfolio, The Washington Post, Slate, The Guardian, and The Observer Film Quarterly. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.
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By the way: He is not the author of Grave Matters. That's a very good book by a different Mark Harris. -
Elia Kazan
Credits of Turkish-born American stage and film director Elia Kazan include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) of Tennessee Williams and the movies On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955).
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This award-winning theatrical producer, screenwriter, and novelist co-founded of the influential actors studio in New York in 1947. Kazan won Academy Award thrice, Tony Award five times, and Golden Globes four times and received numerous awards and nominations in other prestigious festivals as the Cannes film festival and the Venice film festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elia_Kazan -
Syd Field
Sydney Alvin Field was an American screenwriting guru who wrote several books on the subject of screenwriting. He also conducted workshops and seminars on the subject of producing salable screenplays. Hollywood film producers have increasingly used his ideas on structure as a guideline to a proposed screenplay's potential.
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Ben Fritz
Ben Fritz is a reporter covering the entertainment industry for the Wall Street Journal. He previously worked at the Los Angeles Times and Variety. A graduate of Swarthmore College, he lives in Los Angeles.
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Julie Salamon
Julie Salamon has written thirteen books in many genres, including Unlikely Friends, an Audible Original released summer 2021. Her new children's book One More Story, Tata, illustrated by Jill Weber, was published by Astra's Minerva imprint in July 2024. She is working on a nonfiction book for Ann Godoff at The Penguin Press, that involves the crisis of urban homelessness and its intersection with history. Julie's other books include New York Times bestsellers Wendy and the Lost Boys and The Christmas Tree (illustrated by Jill Weber) as well as Hospital, The Devil’s Candy, Facing the Wind , The Net of Dreams , Innocent Bystander and Rambam’s Ladder. She has written two children's books, Mutt's Promise, and Cat in the City, also illustrated
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Quentin Tarantino
Quentin Jerome Tarantino is an Academy Award- and Palme d'Or-winning American film director, screenwriter and actor. He rose to fame in the early 1990s as an independent filmmaker whose films used nonlinear storylines and stylized violence. His films include Reservoir Dogs (1992), Pulp Fiction (1994), Jackie Brown (1997), Kill Bill (Vol. 1 2003, Vol. 2 2004), Death Proof (2007), and Inglourious Basterds (2009).
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Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic and aesthetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the rise of French New Wave cinema. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker since Jean Renoir. Bresson's influence on French cinema was once described by Jean-Luc Godard, quoting "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.
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Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Ran (1985), set in feudal Japan of director Akira Kurosawa, greatly influenced American and European filmmaking.
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This producer, screenwriter, and editor, regarded of the most important and influential in the history of cinema, directed thirty in a career, spanning 57 years.
Following a brief stint as a painter, Kurosawa entered the industry in 1936. After years of working as an assistant and scriptwriter, he made his debut in 1943 during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata, also known as Judo Saga. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the reputation of t -
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an award-winning and influential filmmaker, critically acclaimed worldwide. He was also a talented and sought-after film critic in France (most notably, his work for Cahiers du Cinema), and one of the founders of the French New Wave and the auteur theory; he remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he was also a screenwriter, producer or occasional actor in over twenty-five films.
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Robert Rodríguez
Robert Anthony Rodriguez is an American director, writer, producer, cinematographer, editor and musician perhaps best known for making profitable, crowd-pleasing independent and studio films with fairly low budgets and fast schedules by Hollywood standards. He shoots and produces many of his films in Texas and Mexico.
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Blake Snyder
In his 20-year career as a screenwriter and producer, Blake Snyder has sold dozens of scripts, including co-writing Blank Check, which became a hit for Disney, and Nuclear Family for Steven Spielberg. His book, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, was published in May, 2005, and is now in its eleventh printing. It has prompted "standing room only" appearances by Blake in New York, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Barcelona. Apparently it is not quite the last book on screenwriting youll ever need, as the eagerly awaited sequel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told, was published in October, 2007 shooting to #1 in the Screenw
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Robert McKee
Robert McKee began his show business career at age nine playing the title role in a community theatre production of MARTIN THE SHOEMAKER. He continued acting as a teenager in theatre productions in his hometown of Detroit, Michigan. Upon receiving the Evans Scholarship, he attended the University of Michigan and earned a Bachelor's Degree in English Literature. While an undergraduate, he acted in and directed over thirty productions. McKee's creative writing professor was the noted Kenneth Rowe whose former students include Arthur Miller and Lawrence Kasdan.
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After completing his B.A., McKee toured with the APA (Association of Producing Artists) Repertory Company, appearing on Broadway with such luminaries as Helen Hayes, Rosemary Harris and -
Andrei Tarkovsky
Andrei Arsenyevich Tarkovsky (Russian: Андрей Арсеньевич Тарковский) was a Soviet film director, writer and opera director. Tarkovksy is listed among the 100 most critically acclaimed filmmakers. He attained critical acclaim for directing such films as Andrei Rublev, Solaris and Stalker.
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Tarkovsky also worked extensively as a screenwriter, film editor, film theorist, and theater director. He directed most of his films in the Soviet Union, with the exception of his last two films which were produced in Italy and Sweden. His films are characterized by Christian spirituality and metaphysical themes, extremely long takes, lack of conventional dramatic structure and plot, and memorable images of exceptional beauty. -
Paul Schrader
Although his name is often linked to that of the 'movie brat' generation (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different. Schrader's strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was eighteen. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries - Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer Da Capo Paperback) rather than Saturday morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackp
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William Goldman
Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.
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William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays.
In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriti -
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.
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As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and anti -
Peter Biskind
Peter Biskind is an American cultural critic, film historian, and journalist, best known for his tenure as executive editor of Premiere magazine from 1986 to 1996. He attended Swarthmore College and authored several influential books on Hollywood, including Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down and Dirty Pictures, some of which became bestsellers. In 2010, he published a biography of Warren Beatty titled Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America. Biskind is a contributing editor at Vanity Fair, with work appearing in major publications like Rolling Stone, The New York Times, and The Washington Post. He served as editor-in-chief of American Film from 1981 to 1986. His books have been translated into over thirty languages. Despite his acclaim, som
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Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing).
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For his work on Apocalypse Now, Murch was the first person to receive a credit as "Sound Designer." Murch was also involved with the editing of Apocalypse Now Redux. In 1998, producer Rick Schmidlin chose Murch as his editor for the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. Murch is the author of a popular book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and is the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversa -
Thomas Pynchon
Thomas Ruggles Pynchon Jr. is an American novelist noted for his dense and complex novels. His fiction and non-fiction writings encompass a vast array of subject matter, genres and themes, including history, music, science, and mathematics. For Gravity's Rainbow, Pynchon won the 1973 U.S. National Book Award for Fiction.
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Hailing from Long Island, Pynchon served two years in the United States Navy and earned an English degree from Cornell University. After publishing several short stories in the late 1950s and early 1960s, he began composing the novels for which he is best known: V. (1963), The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), and Gravity's Rainbow (1973). Rumors of a historical novel about Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon had circulated as early as -
Walter Murch
Walter Scott Murch is an American film editor, director, writer and sound designer. His work includes THX 1138, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather I, II, and III, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Ghost and The English Patient, with three Academy Award wins (from nine nominations: six for picture editing and three for sound mixing).
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For his work on Apocalypse Now, Murch was the first person to receive a credit as "Sound Designer." Murch was also involved with the editing of Apocalypse Now Redux. In 1998, producer Rick Schmidlin chose Murch as his editor for the restoration of Orson Welles's Touch of Evil. Murch is the author of a popular book on film editing, In the Blink of an Eye, and is the subject of Michael Ondaatje's book The Conversa -
Roger Ebert
Roger Joseph Ebert was a Pulitzer Prize-winning American film critic and screenwriter.
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He was known for his weekly review column (appearing in the Chicago Sun-Times since 1967, and later online) and for the television program Siskel & Ebert at the Movies, which he co-hosted for 23 years with Gene Siskel. After Siskel's death in 1999, he auditioned several potential replacements, ultimately choosing Richard Roeper to fill the open chair. The program was retitled Ebert & Roeper and the Movies in 2000.
Ebert's movie reviews were syndicated to more than 200 newspapers in the United States and abroad. He wrote more than 15 books, including his annual movie yearbook. In 1975, Ebert became the first film critic to win a Pulitzer Prize for Criticism. -
François Truffaut
François Roland Truffaut was an award-winning and influential filmmaker, critically acclaimed worldwide. He was also a talented and sought-after film critic in France (most notably, his work for Cahiers du Cinema), and one of the founders of the French New Wave and the auteur theory; he remains an icon of the French film industry. In a film career lasting over a quarter of a century, he was also a screenwriter, producer or occasional actor in over twenty-five films.
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Lajos Egri
Lajos N. Egri (born June 4, 1888; died February 7, 1967) was the author of The Art of Dramatic Writing, which is widely regarded as one of the best works on the subject of playwriting, though its teachings have since been adapted for the writing of short stories, novels, and screenplays[...]
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Steven Jay Schneider
Steven Jay Schneider is a film critic, scholar, and producer with M.A. degrees in Philosophy from Harvard University and in Cinema Studies from New York University. He is the author and editor of numerous books on world cinema, most notably in the horror genre. They include Eurohorror, The Cinema of Wes Craven: An Auteur on Elm Street, Designing Fear: An Aesthetics of Cinematic Horror, Killing in Style: Artistic Murder in the Movies, Understanding Film Genres, and Traditions in World Cinema. He is also a consultant for film, television, and home video/DVD production companies, a curator for world horror film programs, and a staff member in development for Paramount Pictures. Among his recent titles are 501 Movie Stars and 501 Movie Director
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Akira Kurosawa
Rashomon (1950), The Seven Samurai (1954), and Ran (1985), set in feudal Japan of director Akira Kurosawa, greatly influenced American and European filmmaking.
Buy books on Amazon
This producer, screenwriter, and editor, regarded of the most important and influential in the history of cinema, directed thirty in a career, spanning 57 years.
Following a brief stint as a painter, Kurosawa entered the industry in 1936. After years of working as an assistant and scriptwriter, he made his debut in 1943 during World War II with the popular action film Sanshiro Sugata, also known as Judo Saga. After the war, the critically acclaimed Drunken Angel (1948), in which Kurosawa cast then-unknown actor Toshirō Mifune in a starring role, cemented the reputation of t -
Blake Snyder
In his 20-year career as a screenwriter and producer, Blake Snyder has sold dozens of scripts, including co-writing Blank Check, which became a hit for Disney, and Nuclear Family for Steven Spielberg. His book, Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You'll Ever Need, was published in May, 2005, and is now in its eleventh printing. It has prompted "standing room only" appearances by Blake in New York, Los Angeles, London, San Francisco, Seattle, Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, and Barcelona. Apparently it is not quite the last book on screenwriting youll ever need, as the eagerly awaited sequel, Save the Cat! Goes to the Movies: The Screenwriter's Guide to Every Story Ever Told, was published in October, 2007 shooting to #1 in the Screenw
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David Thompson
Librarian note:
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There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name. -
Robert P. Kolker
Robert Phillip Kolker, Professor Emeritus, University of Maryland, taught cinema studies for almost 50 years. He is author of A Cinema of Loneliness, The Extraordinary Image: Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick and the Reimagining of Cinema, and editor of 2001: A Space Odyssey: New Essays and The Oxford Handbook of Film and Media Studies.
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David Taylor
This is the author who writes about photography techniques & camera guides.
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http://www.amazon.com/David-Taylor/e/... -
Mark Harris
Mark Harris’s first book, Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood, was published this year. He writes the “Final Cut” column for Entertainment Weekly and has also written about pop culture for many other publications, most recently The New York Times, Details, GQ, Portfolio, The Washington Post, Slate, The Guardian, and The Observer Film Quarterly. A graduate of Yale University, he lives in New York City with his husband, Tony Kushner.
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By the way: He is not the author of Grave Matters. That's a very good book by a different Mark Harris. -
Peter Marcuse
Peter Marcuse is Professor of Urban Planning at Columbia University.
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Peter Marcuse was born in 1928, the son of book sales clerk Herbert Marcuse and mathematician Sophie Wertheim. They soon moved to Freiburg, where Herbert began to write his habilitation (thesis to become a professor) with Martin Heidegger. In 1933, in order to escape the Nazi persecution, they joined the Frankfurt Institut für Sozialforschung and emigrated with it first to Geneva, then via Paris, to New York.
He attended Harvard University, where he received his BA in 1948, with a major in History and Literature of the 19th Century. In 1949 he married Frances Bessler (whom he met in the home of Franz and Inge Neumann, where she worked as an au pair while studying at NYU).
In -
James Andrew Miller
JAMES ANDREW MILLER is an award-winning journalist and co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Those Guys Have All the Fun: Inside the World of ESPN; Live from New York: The Complete, Uncensored History of Saturday Night Live as Told by Its Stars, Writers, and Guests, which spent four months on the New York Times bestseller list; and Running in Place: Inside the Senate, also a bestseller. He has written for The Washington Post, The New York Times, Vanity Fair, and many other publications. He is a graduate of Occidental College, Oxford University, and Harvard Business School, all with honors.
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David Thomson
David Thomson, renowned as one of the great living authorities on the movies, is the author of The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, now in its fifth edition. His books include a biography of Nicole Kidman and The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood. Thomson is also the author of the acclaimed "Have You Seen . . . ?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films. Born in London in 1941, he now lives in San Francisco.
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Robert Towne
Robert Burton Towne was an American screenwriter, director, producer, and sometime actor. Born in Los Angeles, California, USA, and raised in the seaport town of San Pedro. He started acting and writing for legendary exploitation director/producer Roger Corman. Came into his own during the 1970s when he was regarded as one of the finest screenwriters in Hollywood. Began directing with mixed success in 1982. One of the best script doctors in Hollywood, he contributed crucial scenes to such films as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and The Godfather (1972).
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Roger Corman
Roger William Corman was an American film director, producer, and actor.
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Known under various monikers such as "The Pope of Pop Cinema", "The Spiritual Godfather of the New Hollywood", and "The King of Cult", he was known as a trailblazer in the world of independent film. - Wikipedia -
Frank Hauser
FRANK HAUSER is a retired freelance director living in London. Born
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in Wales in 1922, he attended Oxford University during the 1940s; worked as a
drama producer for the BBC; and, in 1956, formed the Meadow Players at Oxford.
He was Director of the Oxford Playhouse for seventeen years and directed
frequently in London and New York. In 1968, he received the award of Commander
of the Order of the British Empire (C.B.E.). -
Paul Schrader
Although his name is often linked to that of the 'movie brat' generation (Spielberg, Scorsese, Coppola, Lucas, De Palma, etc.) Paul Schrader's background couldn't have been more different. Schrader's strict Calvinist parents refused to allow him to see a film until he was eighteen. Although he more than made up for lost time when studying at Calvin College, Columbia University and UCLA's graduate film program, his influences were far removed from those of his contemporaries - Bresson, Ozu and Dreyer (about whom he wrote a book, Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu Bresson Dreyer Da Capo Paperback) rather than Saturday morning serials. After a period as a film critic (and protégé of Pauline Kael), he began writing screenplays, hitting the jackp
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Steven Cohan
Steven Cohan is Dean’s Distinguished Professor Emeritus of English at Syracuse University.
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Stefan Kanfer
Stefan Kanfer is the author of fifteen books, including the bestselling biographies of show business icons: GROUCHO; BALL OF FIRE (Lucille Ball); SOMEBODY (Marlon Brando); and TOUGH WITHOUT A GUN (Humphrey Bogart). He has also written many social histories, among them THE LAST EMPIRE, about the De Beers diamond company, and STARDUST LOST, an account of the rise and fall of the Yiddish Theater in New York.
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Kanfer also wrote two novels about World War II and served as the only journalist on the President’s Commission on the Holocaust. He was the first by-lined cinema critic for Time magazine, where he worked as writer and editor for more than two decades. He has been given many writing awards and was named a Literary Lion of the New York Publi -
Sam Wasson
SAM WASSON is the author of the New York Times bestseller Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M .: Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany's, and the Dawn of the Modern Woman and two works of film criticism. He is a visiting professor of film at Wesleyan University.
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Kenneth Turan
Kenneth Turan is the film critic for the Los Angeles Times and NPR’s Morning Edition, as well as the director of the Los Angeles Times Book Prizes. He has been a staff writer for the Washington Post and TV Guide, and served as the Times’ book review editor. A graduate of Swarthmore College and Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, he is the co-author of Call Me Anna: The Autobiography of Patty Duke. Turan teaches film reviewing and non-fiction writing at USC and is on the board of directors of the National Yiddish Book Center. His most recent books include Free for All: Joe Papp, The Public, and the Greatest Theater Story Ever Told and Never Coming To A Theater Near You. Turan lives in Los Angeles, CA.
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Michael Chekhov
His uncles Anton Chekhov, Mikhail Chekhov
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Mikhail Aleksandrovich "Michael" Chekhov was a Russian-American actor, director, author and theatre practitioner. He was a nephew of the playwright Anton Chekhov and a student of Konstantin Stanislavski. Stanislavski referred to him as his most brilliant student. -
David Mamet
David Alan Mamet is an American author, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and film director. His works are known for their clever, terse, sometimes vulgar dialogue and arcane stylized phrasing, as well as for his exploration of masculinity.
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As a playwright, he received Tony nominations for Glengarry Glen Ross (1984) and Speed-the-Plow (1988). As a screenwriter, he received Oscar nominations for The Verdict (1982) and Wag the Dog (1997).
Mamet's recent books include The Old Religion (1997), a novel about the lynching of Leo Frank; Five Cities of Refuge: Weekly Reflections on Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers and Deuteronomy (2004), a Torah commentary, with Rabbi Lawrence Kushner; The Wicked Son (2006), a study of Jewish self-hatred and anti -
Syd Field
Sydney Alvin Field was an American screenwriting guru who wrote several books on the subject of screenwriting. He also conducted workshops and seminars on the subject of producing salable screenplays. Hollywood film producers have increasingly used his ideas on structure as a guideline to a proposed screenplay's potential.
Buy books on Amazon -
William Goldman
Goldman grew up in a Jewish family in Highland Park, Illinois, a Chicago suburb, and obtained a BA degree at Oberlin College in 1952 and an MA degree at Columbia University in 1956.His brother was the late James Goldman, author and playwright.
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William Goldman had published five novels and had three plays produced on Broadway before he began to write screenplays. Several of his novels he later used as the foundation for his screenplays.
In the 1980s he wrote a series of memoirs looking at his professional life on Broadway and in Hollywood (in one of these he famously remarked that "Nobody knows anything"). He then returned to writing novels. He then adapted his novel The Princess Bride to the screen, which marked his re-entry into screenwriti -
Jack Handey
Jack Handey is an American humorist. He is best known for his Deep Thoughts, a large body of surrealistic one-liner jokes, as well as his "Fuzzy Memories" and "My Big Thick Novel" shorts. Many people have the false impression that Jack Handey is not an actual person, but a character created by Saturday Night Live or a pen name used by National Lampoon.
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Robert Bresson
Robert Bresson (French: [ʁɔbɛʁ bʁɛsɔ̃]; 25 September 1901 – 18 December 1999) was a French film director known for his spiritual, ascetic and aesthetic style. He contributed notably to the art of film and influenced the rise of French New Wave cinema. He is often referred to as the most highly regarded French filmmaker since Jean Renoir. Bresson's influence on French cinema was once described by Jean-Luc Godard, quoting "Robert Bresson is French cinema, as Dostoevsky is the Russian novel and Mozart is the German music.
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John Gregory Dunne
John Gregory Dunne was an American novelist, screenwriter and literary critic.
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He was born in Hartford, Connecticut, and was a younger brother of author Dominick Dunne. He suffered from a severe stutter and took up writing to express himself. Eventually he learned to speak normally by observing others. He graduated from Princeton University in 1954 and worked as a journalist for Time magazine. He married novelist Joan Didion on 30 January 1964, and they became collaborators on a series of screenplays, including Panic in Needle Park (1971), A Star Is Born (1976) and True Confessions (1981), an adaptation of his own novel. He is the author of two non-fiction books about Hollywood, The Studio and Monster.
As a literary critic and essayist, he wa -
Alexander Mackendrick
Alexander Mackendrick was an American-Scottish director and professor. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts and later moved to Scotland. He began making television commercials before moving into post-production editing and directing films, most notably for Ealing Studios where his films include Whisky Galore! (1949), The Man in the White Suit (1951), The Maggie (1954), and The Ladykillers (1955).
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After his first American film Sweet Smell of Success (1957), his career as a director declined and he became Dean of the CalArts School of Film/Video in California. He was the cousin of the Scottish writer Roger MacDougall. -
Bong Joon-ho
Bong Joon-ho (Korean: 봉준호; per Korean naming conventions, the surname Bong appears first) is a South Korean film maker and screenwriter who won the Palme d'Or at the 2019 Cannes Film Festival for Parasite. For his 2013 film Snowpiercer, he was given Best Director awards by the Baeksang Arts Awards, Blue Dragon Film Awards, Director's Cut Awards, Korean Association of Film Critics Awards, and the Asia-Pacific Film Festival, in addition to Best Screenplay by Busan Film Critics Awards.
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Martin McDonagh
While still in his twenties, the Anglo-Irish playwright Martin McDonagh filled houses in New York and London, was showered with the theatre world's most prestigious accolades, and electrified audiences with his cunningly crafted and outrageous tragicomedies.
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Dave Itzkoff
Dave Itzkoff is a culture reporter for The New York Times who writes frequently about film, television and comedy. He is the author of three books including, most recently, Mad As Hell: The Making of Network and the Fateful Vision of the Angriest Man in Movies. His fourth book, Robin, a biography of Robin Williams, will be published in May.
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Elia Kazan
Credits of Turkish-born American stage and film director Elia Kazan include A Streetcar Named Desire (1947) of Tennessee Williams and the movies On the Waterfront (1954) and East of Eden (1955).
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This award-winning theatrical producer, screenwriter, and novelist co-founded of the influential actors studio in New York in 1947. Kazan won Academy Award thrice, Tony Award five times, and Golden Globes four times and received numerous awards and nominations in other prestigious festivals as the Cannes film festival and the Venice film festival.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elia_Kazan -
Orson Welles
George Orson Welles, best known as Orson Welles, was an American film director, actor, theatre director, screenwriter, and producer, who worked extensively in film, theatre, television and radio. Noted for his innovative dramatic productions as well as his distinctive voice and personality,
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Welles is widely acknowledged as one of the most accomplished dramatic artists of the twentieth century, especially for his significant and influential early work—despite his notoriously contentious relationship with Hollywood. His distinctive directorial style featured layered, nonlinear narrative forms, innovative uses of lighting such as chiaroscuro, unique camera angles, sound techniques borrowed from radio, deep focus shots, and long takes.
Welles' -
Thomas Schatz
Tom Schatz is the Mary Gibbs Jones Centennial Chair (and interim chairman) of the Department of Radio-Television-Film at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been on the faculty since 1976, and is the Executive Director of the University of Texas Film Institute. He has written four books about Hollywood films and filmmaking, including Hollywood Genres: Formulas, Filmmaking, and the Studio System; The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era; and Boom and Bust: American Cinema in the 1940s. Schatz edited the four-volume collection, Hollywood: Critical Concepts, and he also serves as series editor of the Film and Media Studies Series for the University of Texas Press. Schatz's writing on film has appeared in num
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Jean Stein
Jean Stein (1934 – April 30, 2017) was an American author and editor.
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Librarian’s note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. -
Mark Cousins
Mark Cousins is an author, film critic, producer, and documentary filmmaker. He is the former director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival and a regular contributor to Prospect, Sight and Sound, and The Times. His latest film is a 14-hour documentary about female filmmakers, Women Make Film.
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Charles Bramesco
Charles Bramesco is an author whose writing has been published in Vanity Fair, Newsweek, The Guardian, The Verve, New York Magazine, and others.
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He is also a well known for TV and movie critic. -
Leo Braudy
Leo Braudy is among America's leading cultural historians and film critics. He currently is University Professor and Leo S. Bing Chair in English and American Literature at the University of Southern California. He lives in Los Angeles.
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John Sayles
John Thomas Sayles is an independent film director, screenwriter, novelist and short story writer who frequently plays small roles in his own and other indie films.
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David Taylor
There is more than one author by this name in the Goodreads data base.
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For the veterinarian, please see David Taylor -
Andrew Sarris
Most famous for his 1962 essay "Notes on the Auteur theory" which popularized this film criticism technique in America. He wrote for the Village Voice criticing films and literature before bringing the Auteur theory from France to America and employing it in analysis of Hitchcock's film Psycho.
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He wrote for The New York Observer until 2009 and was a professor at his alma mater, Columbia University where he taught courses on Internationl Film, Hitchcock, and American Cinema.
Trivia: The evil overlord from Galaxy Quest was named after him! -
Yusef Komunyakaa
Yusef Komunyakaa (born April 29, 1947) is an American poet who teaches at New York University and is a member of the Fellowship of Southern Writers. Komunyakaa is a recipient of the 1994 Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, for Neon Vernacular and the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. He also received the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Komunyakaa received the 2007 Louisiana Writer Award for his enduring contribution to the poetry world.
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His subject matter ranges from the black general experience through rural Southern life before the Civil Rights time period and his experience as a soldier during the Vietnam War.
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David Corbett
David Corbett is the author of seven novels: The Devil’s Redhead (nominated for the Anthony and Barry Awards for Best First Novel) Done for a Dime (a New York Times Notable Book and nominated for the Macavity Award for Best Novel), Blood of Paradise (nominated for numerous awards, including the Edgar), Do They Know I’m Running (Spinetingler Award, Best Novel—Rising Star Category 2011), The Mercy of the Night, The Long-Lost Love Letters of Doc Holliday (nominated for the Lefty Award for Best Historical Mystery), and The Truth Against the World (June, 2023).
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David’s short fiction and poetry have appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, with two stories selected for Best American Mystery Stories.
In 2012, Mysterious Press/Open Road Media -
Ronald Bergan
Ronald Bergan is a regular contributor to The Guardian and the author of several critically acclaimed books on film, including biographies of directors Francis Ford Coppola, Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein, and the Coen brothers.
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Tim Wendel
Tim Wendel is an award-winning novelist and journalist. He is the author of 16 books, including Rebel Falls: A Novel, Summer of '68: The Season When Baseball, and America, Changed Forever, and Castro's Curveball. His stories have appeared in Gargoyle and The Potomac Review, and his articles in The New York Times, Esquire, GQ, Washingtonian and USA Today. A longtime writer-in-residence at Johns Hopkins University, Tim teaches fiction and nonfiction writing. Tim has worked has worked on both coasts, covering everything from the Olympics to the America's Cup. More information and his blog can be found at www.timwendel.com."
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Sergei Eisenstein
Sergei Mikhailovich Eisenstein was a Soviet film director and film theorist, a pioneer in the theory and practice of montage. He is noted in particular for his silent films Strike (1925), Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), as well as the historical epics Alexander Nevsky (1938) and Ivan the Terrible (1944, 1958). In its 2012 decennial poll, the magazine Sight & Sound named his Battleship Potemkin the 11th greatest movie of all time.
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Eisenstein was among the earliest film theorists. He believed that editing could be used for more than just expounding a scene or moment, through a "linkage" of related images. He developed what he called "methods of montage":
1) Metric
2) Rhythmic
3) Tonal
4) Overtonal
5) Intellectual
Eisenstein's articles -
Glenn Frankel
As a boy growing boy up in Rochester, NY, I loved movies, especially Westerns and most especially John Ford's The Searchers. Everything about it thrilled and frightened me---most especially John Wayne's towering performance. I grew up to become a journalist and a foreign correspondent for the Washington Post, and when I came back to the United States in 2006 I wanted to write a book about America. And what could be more American than The Searchers? The book did surprisingly well, and I found myself working in my own little sub-genre: books that combine the making of a classic film with a momentous era in American history. Next up was the making of High Noon and its connection to the Hollywood blacklist, a time of vicious rhetoric and false
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Peter Wollen
Peter Wollen was an English film theorist and filmmaker. He studied English at Christ Church, Oxford. Both political journalist and film theorist, Wollen's Signs and Meaning in the Cinema (1969) helped to transform the discipline of film studies by incorporating the methodology of structuralism and semiotics. He taught film at a number of universities and was Professor Emeritus at the University of California, Los Angeles, at the time of his retirement.
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Richard Schickel
Richard Schickel is an important American film historian, journalist, author, filmmaker, screenwriter, documentarian, and film and literary critic.
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Mr.Schickel is featured in For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism. In this 2009 documentary film he discusses early film critics in the 1960s, and how he and other young critics, rejected the moralizing opposition of Bosley Crowther of The New York Times who had railed against violent movies such as Bonnie and Clyde.
In addition to film, Schickel has also critiqued and documented cartoons, particularly Peanuts.
Schickel was a recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1964. He has also lectured at Yale University and University of Southern California's School of Film and Televi