CULTURE & LIFE
Film & Cinema
13 books
The best film books aren't about movies — they're about how the impossible thing gets made and who gets destroyed making it. Goldman and Lumet tell you how the work actually works; Biskind and Harris chronicle the eras (the New Hollywood, 1967) when it all changed at once. The directors speak for themselves — Kurosawa, Tarkovsky, Wilder via Crowe, Welles via Jaglom — and Bach's Final Cut is the great cautionary tale of a single film sinking a studio. It's a list for anyone who stays through the credits. Start with Adventures in the Screen Trade, then Easy Riders, Raging Bulls for the wildest era.
-
What Makes Sammy Run?
Budd Schulberg
Budd Schulberg’s debut novel about shameless, unadulterated ambition introduced Sammy Glick to the world. For decades to come (there was a popular Broadway musical adaptation twenty years later), Sammy Glick was a pop culture archetype. Schulberg himself grew up as Hollywood royalty—his father was one of the original movie moguls—and this novel is sharp with insider savvy.
-
Conversations with Wilder
Cameron Crowe
There are many reasons to be thankful for Cameron Crowe. Chief among them is this collection of interviews with the legendary director Billy Wilder. A must.
-
Adventures in the Screen Trade
William Goldman
Another one on the short list of great movie book, this is a look at the life of one of the most successful screenwriters of his time. Informative, entertaining, and very funny.
-
Hitchcock/Truffaut
François Truffaut
François Truffaut was part of a generation of French filmmakers that began as movie critics. The enthusiast never left him. His interviews with Alfred Hitchcock were very influential to generations of movie fans—hugely important.
-
Final Cut
Stephen Bach
One of the best books ever written about the movie industry—and from an insider, no less. Final Cut captures the craziness of Hollywood in the late ’70s with the perfect storm of a movie disaster, Michael Cimeno’s Heaven’s Gate. Briskly told with unyielding common sense, Bach, the former studio executive, proves there are second acts in American life.
-
Making Movies
Sidney Lumet
Sure, Lumet was the quintessential New York filmmaker—12 Angry Men; Serpico; Dog Day Afternoon—and as such had a reputation as anti-Hollywood. But Lumet was simply a New York-based director—plenty of his movies were set outside of Gotham, such as Murder on the Orient Express, The Verdict, and The Morning After. He was an economical, commercial filmmaker; this guide to the craft is succinct and illuminating.
-
Pictures at a Revolution
Mark Harris
The idea seems thin at first—pick five movies and write a book about how they represent Hollywood at the moment—but Mark Harris turns the conceit into something you can’t put down. This examination of The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?, and Dr. Doolittle is fantastic fun. The sections on Bonnie and Clyde have special resonance around these parts, as the film was written by Esquire alum Robert Benton and David Newman. Meanwhile, the section on Mike Nichols and The Graduate is a high point. And while you're at it, do yourself a favor and pick up Harris’s excellent biography of Nichols. Required reading for anyone who wants to act, direct, or get up on stage and try to be funny.
-
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls
Peter Biskind
Peter Biskind’s engaging account of Hollywood in the 1970s is literary popcorn. It's got sex, drugs, rock ’n’ roll, and a generation of young hotshot American filmmakers, including Steven Spielberg, Brian DePalma, George Lucas, and Martin Scorsese. Biskind’s tale is lurid and hard to put down. You’ll want to bathe when you’re finished, then queue up a film festival of classics from the era.
-
The Big Picture
Ben Fritz
After a Sony Pictures hack exposed thousands of internal emails, Wall Street Journal reporter Ben Fritz had access no entertainment journalist had ever had before. What he found was a company — and by extension an entire industry — that had stopped betting on original ideas and started betting on intellectual property: sequels, franchises, adaptations, superheroes. The book is not a polemic but a business analysis, and it's more disturbing for that. Fritz doesn't argue that Hollywood sold out; he shows the specific spreadsheets and boardroom decisions that made the transformation feel rational at every step. Nothing explains the current state of cinema — why theaters look the way they do — more precisely than this. The "why it matters now" entry on this list.
-
Something Like an Autobiography
Akira Kurosawa
Kurosawa covers only the first half of his life — up to Rashomon in 1950, the film that introduced him to the world — and the restraint is the point. Where most director memoirs work backward from fame, this one tracks the formation of an artist before anyone was watching: the painting, the failed writing, the long apprenticeship, the three years spent as an assistant director before he shot a single foot of film himself. What emerges is a portrait of how mastery actually develops, not as inspiration but as accumulation. The prose is spare and precise in exactly the way his films are. Crosses naturally to the Craft, Skill & Mastery list for readers interested less in film specifically than in how excellence is built.
-
Story
Robert McKee
McKee's book has been dismissed by serious writers for thirty years, which is a reliable sign that it threatens something. Story is not a manual for formula screenwriting — it is a structural theory of why narrative works at all, why certain stories produce catharsis and others produce nothing, and what the actual difference between a premise and a theme is. The screenwriting examples are the least interesting parts; the underlying argument about how human beings process meaning through conflict and resolution applies to every form of storytelling. Novelists quote it. Journalists quote it. McKee himself is notoriously difficult in person, which the reader should interpret as additional evidence that he knows he's onto something. The craft entry that earns its place by transcending its genre.
-
Sculpting in Time
Andrei Tarkovsky
Tarkovsky made Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Stalker, and The Sacrifice — films that operate at a different frequency than almost anything else in cinema — then wrote a book explaining his theory of what film is for. His argument is that cinema is the only art form that captures time itself, not space or narrative but duration as experienced by a consciousness, and that this makes it either the most spiritual or the most dangerous medium ever invented. The writing is dense and the book requires patience, but the reader who has found the other entries on this list too thin on ideas will find this one almost too thick. The artsy-fartsy entry, mandatory and unashamed. Read Hitchcock/Truffaut first for contrast — the two men's ideas about cinema are almost perfectly opposed.
-
My Lunches with Orson
Henry Jaglom
In the early 1980s, filmmaker Henry Jaglom started secretly recording his weekly lunches with Orson Welles at Ma Maison in Los Angeles. Welles was old, broke, and unable to get a film made; Jaglom was young and connected and trying to help, unsuccessfully. What survives is seventy-odd conversations in which Welles holds forth on Chaplin, Brando, Dietrich, Kubrick, Hollywood, wine, food, and the specific humiliation of being a genius in a business run by accountants. He is alternately hilarious and devastating. The humor entry on this list — Welles at a table with a good bottle is funnier than most comedians — but underneath the performance is a genuine portrait of what it costs to make uncompromising work. The deep cut. Almost nobody has read it.