“You must watch a lot of movies”.
I hear this phrase a lot, usually after I’ve just dazzled a room by dropping some sort of movie knowledge bomb. I do see a lot of movies, but only slightly more than the average person I reckon. Most of my fundamental movie knowledge comes from books.
In the internet age, when a lot of movie information is readily accessible, it can be easy to dismiss the value of books about movies. I spent an embarrassingly large percentage of my teenage years ploughing through pretty much every text in the Auckland Central Library’s film section, and I don’t think there’s a better way to have learnt about the aspects of film making and history that really interest me.
In today’s blog, I’m gonna highlight some of my favourite books about movies and why I love them so much.
Very few people need to be alerted to the existence of Peter Biskind’s Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, one of the most well-known books about movies to be published in the last twenty years. But I must cite it here as it is such an invaluble text for any movie lover.
With often exhaustive detail, Biskind chronicles the creatively rich period in the 1970s that saw the rise of filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola and Brian De Palma.
There are arguments for and against the book’s overall quality as a work of literature, but it’s just so darn gossipy it’s impossible to put down. Essential reading.
Biskind’s Down and Dirty Pictures – which attempted to apply the same scrutiny to the early ‘90s era exemplified by Quentin Tarantino, Miramax and the rise of independent cinema – is less successful as an encapsulation of a movement, but still packed with plentiful juicy tidbits. Although I did find myself reading from the index a bit.
I found his most recent book, Star: How Warren Beatty Seduced America, a fascinating read, but I find Warren Beatty a fascinating character. Biskind spends a bit too much time focusing on Beatty’s famously prolific sex life (he even presents a logarithm to work out exactly how many women the legendary lothario bedded), and veers a little too close to hagiography. I enjoyed it, though.
Both Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Star have a bit of overlap with Mark Harris’ awesomely readable Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood aka Scenes From a Revolution: The Birth of the New Hollywood.
This book examines the making, release and reception of the five films nominated for Best Picture at the 1968 Academy Awards. They are five movies that effectively encapsulate the end of the old Hollywood and the beginning of the new: Bonnie and Clyde; Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner; In The Heat of the Night; Dr. Doolittle and The Graduate.
Harris is a fantastic writer who unearths many hitherto unknown tidbits about all five movies while intelligently presenting his hypothesis of this year and these movies as a turning point for Hollywood. He’s slightly classier than Biskind, but the book is not without its juicy parts. Highly recommended.
Empire magazine contributing editor Kim Newman is one of my favourite film critics of all-time. Arguably the world’s foremost authority on horror films, he has a wonderful egalitarian sensibility that lumps the smallest of horror movies in with big budget Hollywood output.
In the late ‘80s, he published Nightmare Movies, a seminal tome on horror films that covered the twenty years following the release of Night of the Living Dead in 1968. Then last year, he published a brand new edition which included the earlier book, aswell as a newly written second half covering the twenty five or so years since it was first released.
Instead of re-writing the first half to reflect how his opinions (and the context) of the films discussed have changed in the past twenty-five years, he heavily indexes his own writing to provide modern-day commentary. Occasionally he admits he was wrong, other times he points out how prescient he was. It’s fascinating stuff.
The many horror trends to have come about in the last twenty years (ironic horror; J-Horror; torture porn; found-footage) provide ample grist for Newman to dive into in the second half of the book. His style is very readable – he’s sardonic and reverential at the same time. All hail King Newman.
David Hughes also writes for Empire, and he has published two books that cover one of my favourite subjects: movies that never got made. Tales From Development Hell (which was updated just this year) and The Best Sci-Fi Movies Never Made go into detail on numerous films that were posited, but fell over for some reason or another.
A lot of the info in these two books is available on the internet, but I still say they are both essential reading for anybody interested in such things.
If there’s any one style of film book specifically rendered redundant by the internet, it is the film guide. My tattered old 1994 edition of Mick Martin and Marsha Porter’s Film and Video Guide proved an invaluable resource in the pre-IMDB era as it cross-referenced actors and directors in the index. The series has long since gone out of print, but Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide is still being published.
Of all the movie guides, the only one I still pay attention to these days is the Time Out Film Guide, of which the 2011 edition appears to be the last. Stink. These guides went a step further than the ingrained cynicism of many film guides (ahem, Halliwell) to assess each film on its own merits.
Matte painting is something I’m endlessly fascinated by, and there exists a glorious coffee table book which covers the entire history of the artform: The Invisible Art, by Mark Cotta Vaz and Craig Barron. Lushly produced (and with a pricetag to match! I borrowed it from the library), it contains many works reproduced on clear pages to illustrate how the matte paintings fitted so seamlessly into existing sets. Now that digital mattes have consigned matte painting to the history books, The Invisible Art can be treated as such.
Kind of like the movie world‘s version of the widely-read Motley Crue biography The Dirt, Charles Fleming’s High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess is shamelessly entertaining book that has made the rounds. It’s about the legendary producer of hits like Top Gun and Flashdance, and confirms everything bad you have heard about Hollywood powermongers.
It kind of overshadowed the similarly-themed (and better-researched) Hit and Run (about how producers Peter Guber and Jon Peters ran Sony Pictures into the ground), which is a great read in its own right.
These are just a few books of particular interest to me. There are innumerable further titles that I love (including this one, anything by David Thomson; and plenty others I look forward to read. I have just started delving into Monsters In The Movies by legendary director John Landis (An American Werewolf In London; The Blues Brothers), and I like what I see so far.
There are two iconic movie books I found to be vastly overrated: The late Taxi Driver producer Julia Phillips’ You’ll Never Eat Lunch In This Town Again, a supposed “tell-all”, is self-indulgent and boring, and there’s far too much space between the sections involving anyone interesting.
I was very excited to read Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy, which chronicles the making of Brian De Palma’s 1990 adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s Bonfire of the Vanities, a notorious flop, as De Palma is one of my favourite directors. But Salamon goes into FAR TOO MUCH detail, and endlessly strains to relate to the central theme of the book to everybody she mentions. I could barely make it to the end.
Anyway, now that we’ve finished on a negative note, what are YOUR favourite books about movies?
