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 It's the season for hefty coffee-table books focused on movie genres, a single movie or a single star. Bookstore shelves are weighted down with this stuff, much of it little more than puffery. But there are exceptions. A few of the current gems include no pictures at all; others are essentially photo collections with explanatory text. Here's a roundup of half a dozen movie books of more than usual substance: edited by Christopher Silvester (Grove Press, $37.50). Silvester edited this exceptional anthology, which uses more than 150 pieces from many sources to trace the history of the film industry from 1905 to the late 20th century. It starts with Fred J. Balshofer's memoir, "Eluding the Patent Agents," about the early days of silent films, and ends with John Brodie's "Tough Love," a 1997 Premiere piece about a "boy wonder" agent hooked on cocaine. F. Scott Fitzgerald writes about being an alcoholic screenwriter, Mervyn LeRoy remembers deciding to film "The Wizard of Oz," and William Goldman addresses the ubiquity of useless studio meetings. A focus on such financial wipeouts as "Heaven's Gate" tends to take over at certain points, but the stories of disaster-prone directors and power-driven actors are irresistible.
by Richard Rickitts (Billboard Books, $75). What? Yet another pricey picture book about the history of visual effects? Yes, but Rickitts' sophisticated, handsomely illustrated survey goes beyond the usual suspects. Along with "Titanic" and "Jurassic Park," Rickitts provides a revealing glimpse at "Citizen Kane" (more than 50 percent of it was "optically improved or tinkered with"), as well as the crucial contributions made by James Whale and John P. Fulton (who worked together to create 1933's "The Invisible Man"), Fritz Lang ("Metropolis" and "Woman on the Moon") and special-effects animators from "Gertie the Dinosaur" to "Prince of Egypt." This is one special-effects book that deserves to be called definitive.
edited by Jim Shepard (Perennial, $15). Literary superstars and lesser-known writers try to find words that match the images that have captivated them, often since childhood. In his piece on "The Wizard of Oz," Salman Rushdie admits that his first story, written in Bombay when he was 10, was "Over the Rainbow"; the "Oz" film, not the book, "was my very first literary influence." Susan Sontag grapples with R.W. Fassbinder's epic-length "Berlin Alexanderplatz," which she compares to Erich von Stroheim's "Greed." Most interesting are a couple of writers facing ridicule for their choices. Charles Baxter has seen "The Night of the Hunter" with audiences that laughed at it, but he still finds it "one of the strangest and most affecting and most memorable things ever put on the screen." Lorrie Moore doesn't care that most of the adults she knows despise "Titanic": "The movie traffics in cliches, but it does so fluently; the cliches here are sturdy to the point of eloquence."
by Otto Lang (Elton-Wolf Publishing, $34.95). Producer-director Otto Lang, who now lives in West Seattle, has visited six continents, and he took his camera with him while making such movies as "Tora! Tora! Tora!" and the Cinerama epic, "Search For Paradise." This collection of gorgeously reproduced color photos ends with a cheeky tribute to the one continent Lang hasn't visited. After wishing that "maybe I could still bum myself a ride to Antarctica," he includes a picture of penguins at Woodland Park Zoo.
by Jan Stuart (Simon & Schuster, $26). For some movie buffs, the DVD event of the year was the release of Robert Altman's "Nashville," available on video for the first time in its original wide-screen glory. Stuart's book about the making of Altman's 1975 Bicentennial epic is an excellent companion piece to the disc. It manages to cover every base imaginable: the genesis of the film, the reaction of the country-music world (then and now), the controversies surrounding the assassination scene, and the many fortuitous accidents of casting (Ronee Blakley replaced Susan Anspach, earning an Oscar nomination for becoming, in effect, the soul of the movie). Written with Altman's cooperation, this may be the year's best book about the making of a film classic.
(several contributors, Newmarket Press, $22.95). Hollywood's first Roman epic in ages finally gets a souvenir book that resembles the lavish (and much cheaper) programs that were sold at first-run theaters playing "Ben-Hur" and "Spartacus" four decades ago. The authors, including Scott, Sharon Black and Walter Parkes, pay tribute to the past, using pictures and posters from the golden-age epics to acknowledge the inspirations for "Gladiator." They also attempt to distance themselves from that era, finding "Cleopatra" (1963) "interminable" and trying to avoid "a theatricality that wouldn't be appropriate now." There's also a surprisingly honest attempt to establish how much of "Gladiator" is historically accurate. The rest of the book is taken up with color illustrations and storyboards that demonstrate how modern digital effects were used to recreate ancient Rome. |
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