With Richard Schickel as the canny and intelligent guide, these conversations take us deep into Scorsese's life and work. He reveals which films are most autobiographical, and what he was trying to explore and accomplish in other films.
Through extensive, exclusive interviews with Eastwood (and the friends and colleagues of a lifetime), Time magazine film critic Richard Schickel has penetrated a complex character who has always been understood too quickly, too superficially. Schickel pierces Eastwood's monumental reserve to reveal the anger and the shyness, the shrewdness and frankness, the humor and powerful will that have helped make him what he is today. of photos.
Long-time film critic Richard Schickel takes an unabashedly opinionated look at the men who have changed the way we look at film. He explores their contributions to the art of filmmaking. Photos.
Here, Time's legendary film critic Richard Schickel profiles seven extraordinary actors, reading between their well-spoken lines: Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, James Cagney, Charlie Chaplin, Gary Cooper, Douglas Fairbanks Sr., and Sir Lawrence Olivier. All of their lives, Schickel writes, could be made into an epic film.
“The single most illuminating work on America and the movies” (The Kansas City Star): the story of how a shy boy from Chicago crashed Hollywood and created the world’s first multimedia entertainment empire—one that shapes American popular culture to this day. When Walter Elias Disney moved to Hollywood in 1923, the twenty-one-year-old cartoonist seemed an unlikely businessman—and yet within less than two decades, he’d transformed his small animation studio into one of the most successful and beloved brands of the twentieth century. But behind Disney’s boisterous entrepreneurial imagination and iconic characters lay regressive cultural attitudes that, as The Walt Disney Company’s influence grew, began to not simply reflect the values of midcentury America but actually shape the country’s character. Lauded as “one of the best studies ever done on American popular culture” (Stephen J. Whitfield, Professor of American Civilization at Brandeis University), Richard Schickel’s The Disney Version explores Walt Disney’s extraordinary entrepreneurial success, his fascinatingly complex character, and—decades after his death—his lasting legacy on America.
After six decades of writing about film, acclaimed critic Richard Schickel generously shares Keepers, a history of film as he’s seen and lived it. Here is a tour of his favorites from Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs to Pulp Fiction, and a master class in what makes a film soar or flop. Schickel reminds us of the subjective art of film criticism, highlighting above all the true gems, the immortal moments of transcendent “movie magic”—the scenes, characters, lines, shots, scores, and even lighting cues—that have stuck with him over a lifetime of movie-watching. Buster Keaton, His Girl Friday, Ingrid Bergman, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, Stanley Kubrick—Schickel reveals all the films and the forces behind them that have kept him coming back for more.
A new kind of film emerged from Hollywood in the early 1940s, thrillers that derived their plots from the hard-boiled school of crime fiction but with a style all their own. Appearing in 1944, 'Double Indemnity 'was a key film in the definition of the genre that came to be known as film noir. Its script creates two unforgettable criminal characters: the cynically manipulative Phyllis Dietrichson (Barbara Stanwyck) and the likeable but amoral Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray). Billy Wilder's brilliant direction enmeshes them in chiaroscuro patterns, the bright California sun throwing shadows of venetian blinds across dusty rooms, shafts of harsh lamplight cutting through the night. Richard Schickel traces in fascinating detail the genesis of the film: its literary origins in the crime fiction of the 1930s, the difficult relations between Wilder and his scriptwriter Raymond Chandler, the casting of a reluctant Fred MacMurray, the late decision to cut from the film the expensively shot final sequence of Neff's execution. This elegantly written account, copiously illustrated, confirms a new the status of 'Double Indemnity' as an undisputed classic.
Richard Schickel's text, combining critical analysis and a re-interpretation of all the available biographical information, masterfully maps the intersections where a great star's personal history and his screen personality met in a style as elegant, graceful and witty as the actor himself.
Features photographs from the private archives of the Hollywood icon and includes coverage of his Oscar-winning performance in "The African Queen," his relationship with Lauren Bacall, and the ongoing legacy of "Casablanca.
A full color book chronicles more than 60 films spanning five decades; features more than 200 images, including never-before-seen photos from Clint Eastwood's personal collection; and begins with an introduction by the legendary actor and director himself.
Few figures in film and theater history tower like Elia Kazan. Born in 1909 to Greek parents in Istanbul, Turkey, he arrived in America with incomparable vision and drive, and by the 1950s he was the most important and influential director in the nation, simultaneously dominating both theater and film. His productions of A Streetcar Named Desire and Death of a Salesman reshaped the values of the stage. His films -- most notably On the Waterfront -- brought a new realism and a new intensity of performance to the movies. Kazan's career spanned times of enormous change in his adopted country, and his work affiliated him with many of America's great artistic moments and figures, from New York City's Group Theatre of the 1930s to the rebellious forefront of 1950s Hollywood; from Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy to Marlon Brando and James Dean. Ebullient and secretive, bold and self-doubting, beloved yet reviled for "naming names" before the House Un-American Activities Committee, Kazan was an individual as complex and fascinating as any he directed. He has long deserved a biography as shrewd and sympathetic as this one. In the electrifying Elia Kazan, noted film historian and critic Richard Schickel illuminates much more than a single astonishing life and life's work: He pays discerning tribute to the power of theater and film, and casts a new light on six crucial decades of American history.
He transformed a nickelodeon novelty into a new art form and a powerful, glamorous American industry. He codified the rules and techniques of screen story-telling, and pioneered the conventions that brought films to life, from surging spectacle to soul-baring close-ups. A poor farm boy from the South, Griffith rose to fame with The Birth of a Nation, a cinematic masterpiece stained by the racism that infected his heritage. Though he went on to direct some of the most legendary films of the silent era, Griffith was doomed by his over-reaching drives, and he died an embittered man, shunned by the community he had largely created. His story is told here with unsparing truth and compelling narrative sweep.
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