Book Description
Since his death, Andrei Tarkovsky (1932-86) has become increasingly recognized as one of the true masters of world cinema. In the Soviet Union of his era, where the collective was of the utmost importance, Tarkovsky dared to create his own provocatively original style of filmmaking. His nonrealistic, highly charged images continued to be a source of inspiration-not only for a new generation of filmmakers but also for poets, musicians, and painters-even after he defected to the West, where Nostalgia was shot in Italy in 1983. His last film, The Sacrifice, was filmed in Sweden with Ingmar Bergman's collaborators. This volume collects his great works, including Solaris, Mirror, Stalker, Nostalgia, The Sacrifice, and Ivan's Childhood. These scripts deepen and expand our understanding of Tarkovsky's films, for they map out the early stages and personages (some never embodied on the screen) and help to clarify the obscure characters, images, and sequences that are so central to this great filmmaker's unique work.
Filmography
Andrei Tarkovsky died in Paris in 1986. William Powell previously translated The Selected Writings of Sergei Eisenstein. He lives in London.
Customer Reviews:
The notes, not the music.......2001-03-19
In "Sculpting in Time" Tarkovsky says: "The literary element in a film is *smelted*; it ceases to be literature once the film has been made." Reading his screenplays, one has the sense of looking at a blueprint or a musical score. The two strongest elements of Tarkovsky's artistry--the extraordinary visuals, and the highly original conception of time--are necessarily missing.
So what is the value of this collection? For one thing, it includes the scripts of several unrealized projects, which allow you to imagine what these films might have looked like, or just to regret that they were never made. Similarly, you'll also find ideas and scenes that didn't make it into the finished films, or were altered from their original conception. The book also, in an indirect way, points out the relentlessly visual and indiosyncratic nature of AT's work. For example, reading the script of "Stalker", perhaps AT's most mesmerizing film, I thought that it could easily have been made into an episode of "Twilight Zone" by a lesser director. In other words, the plot is not the point; what makes the film a masterpiece lies beyond words and storylines. I suppose the same could be said for any great director, but with Tarkovsky I feel this even more strongly. Finally, the book also includes a fair amount of analysis and commentary. One serious omission: "Andrei Rublev" is not included, due to its length.
For these reasons, I recommend this book not to Tarkovsky neophytes, but to those who already know his films. The genius is up there on the screen; this book contains the sketches, jottings and blueprints that helped to put it there.
magic.......2000-09-29
Just saw The Stalker last night. Possibly the best movie I've seen in my life. Tarkovsky is a master of magic/symbolism/the human condition. No wonder he was Bergman's favourite. I really look forward to reading this book.
Take time for Tarkovsky.......2000-06-02
Unanimously hailed by the intellectual crowd as the greatest poet of modern cinema Tarkovsky's Collected Screenplays provides a blueprint into the mind of this genius. The density of his films typically filled with a cannon of symbolism and metaphors are revealed to us in a new light through his screenplays by lucid and coherent writing providing yet a distinctly new approach in understanding and appreciating his deeply felt themes on life. Without the element of time so inherent in film, the ability to rest on a thought or a remark by this incredible film-maker is what makes reading this book such a pleasure. In addition to this book I would recommend Sculpting in Time.
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Mike Figgis: Collected Screenplays 1: Stormy Monday, Liebestraum, Leaving Las Vegas
Mike Figgis
Manufacturer: Faber & Faber
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Similar Items:
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Paul Schrader: Collected Screenplays Volume 1: Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, Light Sleeper
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Ethan Coen and Joel Coen: Collected Screenplays 1: Blood Simple, Raising Arizona, Miller's Crossing, Barton Fink
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David Cronenberg: Collected Screenplays 1: Stereo, Crimes of the Future, Shivers, Rabid
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Naked and Other Screenplays
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PULP FICTION
ASIN: 0571210120 |
Book Description
Mike Figgis is known for his iconoclastic portrayals of outsiders. Stormy Monday (1988) depicts a janitor turned jazz club partner while in Liebestraum (1991) two affairs shed light on a 30-year old murder-suicide. But it was with Leaving Las Vegas (1995) that Figgis became a household name. The heartbreaking story of the friendship between a prostitute and a man drinking himself to death, the film garnered numerous accolades and awards including Oscar nominations for Best Screenplay and Best Director, and has since become a contemporary classic.
Book Description
These four early works by the internationally lauded filmmaking team deal with the subject for which they are best known: corruption and crime in situations that combine the real and the surreal with the hilarious. Of the scripts included here, Barton Fink--an intense look at the psychological ruin of a New York playwright trying to make it in 1940s Hollywood--is a masterful culmination of these themes.
Customer Reviews:
It's Raising Arizona.......2003-09-12
The best movie EVER! The straight script, I had hoped to stumble onto some dialogue that wound up on the cutting room floor but to no avail. Being interested in screenplay writing I was curious how the Coen's conveyed all of the sight humor into their screen play. If your looking for screen play examples (the how to write a screenplay books are worthless) this has been very helpful to me. Too bad their aren't any story boards to go with it.
Book Description
A collection of screenplays by this brilliant writer. Includes: The Hospital, Network, and Altered States.
Customer Reviews:
One of the greats -- a satirist and humanist.......2004-03-09
I have just finished this particular collection of screenplays, two of which are Academy Award winners and I am knocked out, just completely bowled over by them. I've always been a fan of Chayefsky, ever since I first saw NETWORK (included), perhaps his best known film. I hadn't seen THE HOSPITAL and caught only part of ALTERED STATES on television once. Let me say, they are every bit as dark and funny and pertinent to today as NETWORK.
Brief summaries: NETWORK is a satire on Network television, the story of a news anchor who goes crazy (or not so crazy) and the ensuing descent of his network as they play to the lowest common denominator for ratings. Through Peter Finch, Chayefsky has bequeathed us the immortal line, "I'm mad as hell, and I'm not going to take it any more." Fans of the film will notice this script contains some extra dialogue and one brief scene, all of which was probably shot, but which the great director Sidney Lumet saw fit to cut. It won the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay in 1976.
THE HOSPITAL script also won an Academy Award. Here Chayefsky satirizes a bevy of denizens in a large New York hospital complex and the activists of the surrounding neighborhood, making them all complicit in the killing of "God" who checked himself in as a patient. It's a fantastically snarky story, full of dialogue like
BOCK: What do you say Miss Drummond?
BARBARA: I expect you can call me Barbara, considering you ravished me three times last night.
BOCK: Three times?
BARBARA: Oh, look at him, pretending he didn't count.
Finally, there is ALTERED STATES, perhaps my favorite, which did not win any awards, and is considered somewhat of a failure as a film. Well there's a story behind that. Chayefsky, with his reputation (he also won a screenwriting Oscar for MARTY), was able to secure an unheard-of contract for the movie: not a single line could be changed. This is standard in theater, but film is considered a director's medium -- and the director, Ken Russel, was adamant about rewriting. He tried to change a few lines and Chayefsky shut him down. Russel retaliated by trying to film the dialogue in the worst way possible, having it interrupted by other sounds, turned down too low, having actors speak it in weird ways. After reading this script, one will agree this was a tragedy. ALTERED STATES is nothing less than Chayefsky's answer to every scientific and religious question. It packs a mind-blowing philosophical punch behind a science fiction story about a psychologist who regresses to a primitive consciousness. It is also completely, touchingly human in the end.
There are other volumes of his screenplays, teleplays and stageplays -- all of which I am now desperate to get my hands on and read. For anyone who reads screenplays, this book is an absolute essential. I'm going to keep it in a reverent place on my shelf. Staggeringly good. 5/5 stars!
Chayefsky Screenplays.......2000-02-03
If you love movies, if you want to write screenplays, how can you not read this collection? Paddy Chayefsky's talent, passion and rage leap off every page. His eye for the absurd is as fresh today as when his scripts were shot. Look at what's on TV today, then read NETWORK, written with amazing foresight, 25 years ago.
Book Description
Since the seventies Paul Schrader has been hailed as one of America's most gifted screenwriters. From his work with Martin Scorsese, such as The Last Temptation of Christ and Raging Bull, to the films of his own direction, such as Mishima and Affliction, Schrader has created a dark and affecting body of work that has had a profound effect on cinematic storytelling. The works in this volume represent some of his key moments as a writer and a director, including the script for what is perhaps his crowning achievement: Taxi Driver -- one of the most influential films of the seventies and an American classic.
Customer Reviews:
Great Collection Of Screenplays.......2004-10-13
Reading a Paul Schrader screenplay is like reading a book. His writing style is so natural that you don't feel you reading a script but a text that can stand by it's own. This should be required reading for all screenwriters.
Great Value.......2002-07-27
Paul Schrader positions Taxi Driver, American Gigolo, and Light Sleeper as the first three film in a quartet depicting, as he puts it, "...a certain character... who drifts on the edge of urban society, always peeping, looking into the lives of others. He'd like to have a life of his own, but doesn't know how to get one." This character is angry in his 20s (Taxi Driver), narcissistic in his 30s (American Gigolo), and anxious in his 40s (Light Sleeper). In his brief introduction to the collected screenplays for these three films, Schrader announces the existence of a fourth script that will show this "certain character" in his 50s, after which "I'll retire him. It's getting too difficult to finance existential character studies." Schrader finds the genesis for this character in his own strict Calvinist upbringing and subsequent escape to LA, where he says "I was not unlike Travis Bickle: a bundle of tightly wrapped contradictions." He thus wrote the script to Taxi Driver in a chapter format "because I wanted to capture the seeming randomness of Travis' life..." Several years later finds the script for American Gigolo in a conventional format because "I was `in' Hollywood... and wanted scripts that looked like everyone else's." Light Sleeper, being an independent film, was able to return to the chapter format (for better or worse). Both Taxi Driver and Light Sleeper were previously published as single volumes by Faber & Faber, and in the case of Taxi Driver, it's shame to have lost the 14 page dialogue between Schrader and Martin Scorcese that was in that book. Still, it's hard to complain about getting three Schrader scripts in one book, and judging from the "1" in the title, further Schrader collections are forthcoming.
Book Description
For over a decade, Hal Hartley's deadpan comedies and explorations of unlikely relationships of love and trust have been favorites with critics and indie film crowds alike. Gathered here in one volume for the first time are the screenplays for three of his most acclaimed films: The Unbelievable Truth, in which a young man returns home after serving time for murder; Trust, which follows a pregnant teen and the effect of her condition on her family; and Simple Men -- the film that first brought him widespread prominence -- in which two brothers go in search of their anarchist father.
Book Description
David Cronenberg has made a career of exploring the darker side of eroticism. Stereo, Crimes of the Future, and Rabid gave initial form to his fascination with the psychological aspects of death, disease, lust, and power. And, in 1975 Shivers gained Cronenberg widespread recognition and notoriety for his exceptionally chilling expressions of society's fears about the sexual revolution and its long-term ramifications.
Customer Reviews:
An essential for fans.......2004-07-19
I agree with everything the reviewer says in "A Must For Cronenberg Conpletists," but I would like to add that "Stereo" and "Crimes of the Future" are now available on DVD. Blue Underground very recently released Fast Company, Croneberg's drag racing film (try it, you'll like it!) and included the two short films on an extras disc. The transfers are excellent, and yes, Cronenberg fans should have these DVDs and the book of screenplays. The screenplay is especially helpful in understanding and appreciating "Stereo."
A Must for Cronenberg Completists.......2003-11-04
For a good part of the century, the vanguard thing for a writer to do was to renovate his medium importing techniques from film: montage, jump cuts, close-ups, slow motion, and so forth. But if the writer with cinematic influences has since become a familiar -- perhaps a too familiar -- type of artist, the literary director is still something of an anomaly. When asked for their influences, most directors cite other filmmakers, and yet David Cronenberg tends instead to name William Burroughs, Samuel Beckett, Philip K. Dick, the Existentialists. Before undertaking a career in film, there was a brief moment when Cronenberg even toyed with the idea of becoming a writer. In a series of fascinating interviews with Serge Grunberg, Cronenberg once admitted that he always dreamed of being an "obscure" writer along the lines of Kafka. But instead of languishing as an obscure writer, ultimately Cronenberg switched disciplines and became what he is today: a director remarkable less for his cinematic qualities -- you can't credit him with purism or much innovation in film technique -- than for the unique vision and literary sensibility he brings to his films.
Given this literary outlook, you might expect that Cronenberg's screenplays are writerly tours de force -- which they manifestly are not. In a slightly puzzled preface to this introductory volume of his screenplays, Cronenberg emphasizes that the screenplay is not the venue for literary pretention. "Screen prose," he writes, "is rigorously functional. Its focus is narrow, narrower than a haiku, and its purpose is very limited... In fact, profound, complex prose just gets in the way of the real business of a screenplay, and thus is generally derided, considered pathetic." Accordingly, the two screenplays of Cronenberg's first feature-length films -- Shivers and Rabid -- are best read in conjunction with the films themselves. They're study aids, production documents that can help in the analysis and understanding of the films -- and they're not much more than that.
But what about the screenplays for Stereo and Crimes of the Future, two of Cronenberg's early attempts at avant-garde cinema? Most readers won't have seen these films, since about the only way to get them is to purchase an nth-generation VHS from ebay. What's more, neither text was really a screenplay in the proper sense, since each was written not before but after the film was shot. So what are you to make of these ex post facto voiceover monologues? Are they hybrids of the writer that Cronenberg wanted to be and the filmmaker that he eventually became? Or are they just juvenilia?
The script for Stereo introduces a world similar to the one Cronenberg created in the film Scanners. Volunteers at the Canadian Academy for Erotic Inquiry submit to telepathy experiments that lead to unexpectedly erotic results -- to "omnisexuality," an "expanded form of bisexuality." As a text, the script closely prefigures the type of pseudo-scientific prose perfected by J.G. Ballard in The Atrocity Exhibition (aka Love and Napalm), which is ironic given that Cronenberg has claimed not to feel much affinity with Ballard upon first reading.
Crimes of the Future also introduces familiar Cronenberg themes -- essentially pathology and perversity. Here it is easy to detect a young cineaste deeply under the influence of Burroughs. For example, Cronenberg writes that a colleague's body "has begun to create puzzling organs, each one very complex, very perfect, unique, yet seemingly without function. As each is surgically removed, it is quickly replaced by another, equally mysterious. He has taken to breaking into the specimens room and stealing the jars containing the organs. His body, he insists, is a galaxy, and these creatures are solar systems. He becomes melancholy when they are far from him. His nurse says that his disease is possibly a form of creative cancer." This, of course, is almost a paraphrase of a famous passage from Naked Lunch.
Given the obvious immaturity of these early pieces and the narrow functionality of the screenplays of Shivers and Rabid, is it worthwhile to read -- to buy -- even to publish -- this first volume of Cronenberg's collected screenplays? For the casual fan, the answer is probably no. These screenplays will not give you literary kicks independent of the films. But for those who are fans of Cronenberg the director, these screenplays are indispensable for understanding how the would-be author became the cinematic auteur.
Cronenberg Asks "Why?".......2002-11-27
In the brief (page and a half) introduction to this collection of his first four feature scripts, David Cronenberg is clearly puzzled and typically provocative. One can almost hear him getting the phone call from the publishers saying they'd like to publish his first four scripts as a book, followed by a looooong pause, and then Cronenberg's response "Why?" For, as he quite fairly asks, "How can anyone possibly read a film script? A script is not writing. A script is a ghost of something not yet born." He elaborates: "Screen prose is rigorously functional.... its purpose is very limited.... Screenplays are scrutinized, not read.... elegance and beauty in screenwriting are qualities not responded to, not rewarded, not actually noticed..." Finally, after challenging the notion of a script as something to be read at all, he then goes on to question the reader: "How can you possibly approach reading these four odd scripts...? ...you have no function... What, in fact, are you?"
And he does have a point. After all, why exactly would anyone be interested in "reading" the scripts for Stereo (1969) and Crimes of the Future (1970), scripts that are nothing more than after the fact transcriptions of voice-over monologues. The only reason one can imagine is if the reader is attempting to chart the early fumblings of the stylish, but self-indulgent Canadian writer-director. However, even at eleven and four pages respectively, the "scripts" are tedious and pretentious in the extreme, and the idea of spending an hour watching the actual films (they are both just over an hour) strikes me as a singularly bad idea. More useful are the scripts for Shivers (1975) and Rabid (1977), solid horror/sci-fi pieces that clearly demonstrate Cronenberg's gradual progression to such works as The Brood, Scanners, and Videodrome. These, at least, can be examined and deconstructed by writers seeking to unlock the secrets of the decent horror script. Realistically though, it's hard to imagine anyone other than the hardcore Cronenberg fanatics finding this early work very interesting on the page. Those seeking to gain better insight into Cronenberg are much better off reading Chris Rodley's series of interviews with him in Cronenberg on Cronenberg.
Book Description
A collection of six television plays by this brilliant writer: Holiday Song, Printer's Measure, The Big Deal, Marty, The Mother, and The Bachelor Party. Includes an introduction and notes for each play by the author.
Customer Reviews:
Six Very Different Teleplays.......2005-02-21
Here in one volume all the plays that made Paddy Chayefsky a famous man, together with some insights by the author into how they got written. I had no idea, for example, that HOLIDAY SONG ws actually based on a Reader's Digest article about a man who encountered and reunited a husband and wife torn apart by Nazi violence in Europe during the war. Chayefsky says he was given this article to adapt, but basically disregarded every part of it. They didn't call it the "Golden Age" of TV for notbing.
What strikes me is that he was so young when he did his TV work, and yet he was able to write parts for the elderly very well. Will anyone who saw these productions ever forger the old cantor in HOLIDAY SONG, the veteran printer in the classic PRINTER'S MEASURE, or Cathleen Nesbitt quietly breaking your heart in THE MOTHER?
It's amazing that a man in his twenties and thirties could see so deeply into the future of his own heart and his own old age--an age which he didn't really live to see.
Customer Reviews:
very entertaining.......2004-01-25
This book came out with very little notice in April of 2002. Read now you can, for the first time, the screenplay to Korine's first film, Gummo. Features many scenes that didn't make it to the film and is about 90 pages. As well, the character of Bunny Boy actually talks. Too, there's the shooting script for julien donkey-boy, which is just a rough description of scenes, and a collection of quotes that seemed to have influenced this choice of writing (these, unlike the screenplays, are handwritten). There's also a more traditional screenplay for julien included. It's simply the finished film transferred to script form, and isn't actually written by Korine. Jokes is the screenplay for a new film that didn't work out. Contains only two chapters as the third chapter was never completed. It's all good, yes. Also features an introduction and something of a biography.
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Harold Pinter (Collected Screenplays)
Harold Pinter
Manufacturer: Faber and Faber
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Paperback
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ASIN: 0571207332 |
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