Adventures in the Screen Trade
10 best books like Adventures in the Screen Trade (William Goldman): Johnny Mnemonic: The Screenplay and the Story, How Not to Write a Screenplay: 101 Common Mistakes Most Screenwriters Make, Tales from the Script: 50 Hollywood Screenwriters Share Their Stories, Who the Devil Made It: Conversations with Legendary Film Directors, Cassavetes on Cassavetes, Writing Movies for Fun and Profit: How We Made a Billion Dollars at the Box Office and You Can, Too!, Final Cut: Art, Money, and Ego in the Making of Heaven's Gate, the Film That Sank United Artists, The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film, Making Movies, Hello, He Lied and Other Tales from the Hollywood Trenches
"I put the shotgun in an Adidas bag and padded it out with four pairs of tennis socks, not my style at all, but that was what I was aiming for: If they think you're crude, go technical; if they think you're technical, go crude. I'm a very technical boy. So I decided to get as crude as possible. These days, though,...
| Author | Denny Martin Flinn |
| ISBN | 1580650155 |
I looked at over a dozen books giving advice on how to write a screenplay for a feature film before I chose "How Not to Write a Screenplay." The other books were filled with fluffy, meaningless encouragement like "Before you turn in your Oscar-winning script..." My eyes couldn't roll back far enough into...
| Author | Peter Hanson |
| ISBN | 0061855928 |
Discover the secrets of Hollywood storytelling in this fascinating collection, in which fifty screenwriters share the inside scoop about how they surmounted incredible odds to break into the business, how they transformed their ideas into box-office blockbusters, how their words helped launch...
| Author | Peter Bogdanovich |
| ISBN | 0345404572 |
Peter Bogdanovich, director, screenwriter, actor and critic, interviews sixteen legendary directors of the first hundred years of film - from Allan Dwan and Raoul Walsh to Leo McCarey, Alfred Hitchcock and Sidney Lumet. The conversations brought together in this book give us a history of the movies....
| Author | John Cassavetes |
| ISBN | 0571201571 |
Since his death in 1989, John Cassavettes has become increasingly renowned as a cinematic hero--a renegade loner who fought the Hollywood system, steering his own creative course in a career spanning thirty years. Having already established himself as an actor, he struck out as a filmmaker in 1959...
This is the only screenwriting guide by two guys who have actually done it (instead of some schmuck who just gives lectures about screenwriting at the airport Marriott); “These guys are proof that with no training and little education, ANYONE can make it as a screenwriter” (Paul Rudd).
Robert...
| Author | Steven Bach |
| ISBN | 1557043744 |
Heaven's Gate is probably the most discussed, least seen film in modern movie history. Its notoriety is so great that its title has become a generic term for disaster, for ego run rampant, for epic mismanagement, for wanton extravagance. It was also the film that brought down one of Hollywood’s major...
| Author | Michael Ondaatje |
| ISBN | 0375709827 |
The Conversations is a treasure, essential for any lover or student of film, and a rare, intimate glimpse into the worlds of two accomplished artists who share a great passion for film and storytelling, and whose knowledge and love of the crafts of writing and film shine through.
It was on the...
| Author | Sidney Lumet |
| ISBN | 0679756604 |
lumet's an interesting guy to think about if one decides to make a film -- the guy's made some of the best films of our time. but for me, lumet provides a cautionary tale of what not to become.
12 Angry Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
The Verdict
Serpico
Before the Devil Knows...
Hello, He Lied and Other Tales from the Hollywood Trenches
| Author | Lynda Obst |
| ISBN | 0767900413 |
"Never go to a meeting without a strategy." "Ride the horse in the direction it's going." These are just two of the gems unearthed from the trenches of Hollywood by Lynda Obst, one of the most successful producers in the movie business today. In Hello, He Lied, Obst offers real, practical...
| Author | Peter Biskind |
| ISBN | 0684857081 |
However much is true, however much really happened that way, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How The Sex 'N' Drugs 'N' Rock 'N' Generation Saved Hollywood by Peter Biskind remains one of my favorite non-fiction reads. For those who hear "film history" and think Titanic, in 1967, the major American film studios...
| Author | Cameron Crowe |
| ISBN | 0375709673 |
In Conversations with Wilder, Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.
Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs,...
| Author | Robert Rodríguez |
| ISBN | 0452271878 |
In Rebel Without a Crew, famed independent screenwriter and director Robert Rodriguez (Sin City, Sin City 2, Once Upon a Time in Mexico, Spy Kids) discloses all the unique strategies and original techniques he used to make his remarkable debut film, El Mariachi, on a shoestring budget. This is both...
| Author | David Howard |
| ISBN | 0312119089 |
In The Tools of Screenwriting, David Howard and Edward Mabley illuminate the essential elements of cinematic storytelling, and reveal the central principles that all good screenplays share. The authors address questions of dramatic structure, plot, dialogue, character development, setting,...
| Author | Paul Joseph Gulino |
| ISBN | 0826415687 |
The great challenge in writing a feature-length screenplay is sustaining audience involvement from page one through 120. Screenwriting: The Sequence Approach expounds on an often-overlooked tool that can be key in solving this problem. A screenplay can be understood as being built of sequences...
The book title sums up this book perfectly. As much as I thought it was a "good book", the examples given were not ones I enjoyed reading and seeing pictures of. Now I know (in detail) how parts of Pulp Fiction and Psycho were carefully crafted to help the audience feel intensity and terror. The book was written...
| Author | David Trottier |
| ISBN | 1879505843 |
FOURTH EDITION
This is a fantastic addition to the aspiring (and maybe accomplished) screenwriter.
The book is broken down into sections, which author Trottier states you can read in any order (but suggests you go cover to cover if you can). Mostly I read the book from start to finish,...
| Author | Julia Phillips |
| ISBN | 0571216234 |
Julia Phillips became a Hollywood player in the freewheeling 1970s, the first woman to win the Best Picture Oscar as co-producer of The Sting. She went on to work with two of the hottest young directorial talents of the era: Martin Scorsese (Taxi Driver) and Steven Spielberg (Close Encounters of the...
| Author | Karl Iglesias |
| ISBN | 1580625509 |
Insider Secrets from Hollywood’s Top Writers
This book not only shows how to be a screenwriter, but what it's actually like to be one. An inspiration to all would-be screenwriters, this book is about living the screenwriter's life -- the habits, writing environments, creative processes,...
| Author | William M. Akers |
| ISBN | 1932907459 |
Abrasive title, but awesome book. If you're interested in writing or selling a screenplay, this book really is a must have. He tells you how to transform and beat your script into shape as well as letting you in on some of the little trade secrets to help you look like you're not a novice. It's also just a fun...
| Author | David Mamet |
| ISBN | 0140127224 |
According to David Mamet, a film director must, above all things, think visually. Most of this instructive and funny book is written in dialogue form and based on film classes Mamet taught at Columbia University. He encourages his students to tell their stories not with words, but through the juxtaposition...
| Author | Walter Murch |
| ISBN | 1879505622 |
In the Blink of an Eye is celebrated film editor Walter Murch's vivid, multifaceted, thought-provoking essay on film editing. Starting with what might be the most basic editing question - Why do cuts work? - Murch treats the reader to a wonderful ride through the aesthetics and practical concerns of...
| Author | Julie Salamon |
| ISBN | 0306811235 |
"A definitive portrait of the madness of big-time moviemaking."--Newsweek
When Brian De Palma agreed to allow Julie Salamon unlimited access to the film production of Tom Wolfe's best-selling book The Bonfire of the Vanities, both director and journalist must have felt like they were...
Among the many "how-to" playwriting books that have appeared over the years, there have been few that attempt to analyze the mysteries of play construction. Lajos Egri's classic, The Art of Dramatic Writing, does just that, with instruction that can be applied equally well to a short story, novel,...
