Customer Reviews:
A great book!.......2000-04-05
Being a fan of all things film, I was naturally overjoyed when my girlfriend recently presented me with this book. Having seen the three great films featured in it, I approached the text with high expectations and was most definately not let down. My favourite part of the book is the introduction by Burns, wherein he writes openly of how he came to be a film-maker and also how he eventually made his debut feature and finally got it distributed. The standout of the three scripts is 'The Brothers McMullen', which presents an amusing look into family life and relationships that just about everyone can identify with. The film, which won the Best Picture Prize at the 1995 Sundance Film Festival, is equally amusing to read as it is to watch, as are the other two scripts, 'She's the One' and 'No Looking Back'. As a film student myself, I found this book to be great reading and count it as one of my favourite script compilations (along with 'Clerks & Chasing Amy : Two Screenplays' by Kevin Smith). I thoroughly recommend it for anyone who has any kind of interest in film, as it certainly a great read.
Customer Reviews:
Wallmart On-Line.......2005-10-08
I never received the product despite desperately trying to correct your error in persisting to consider my two-year's old address current. And because you refuse to have any vital contact with your customers but merely treat them as numbers I've decided never to do business with your Brave New World monolith again. Thanks for nothing. The money I lost due to your policy of disconnectedness from your buyers was well worth the result.
Three screenplays by the Modern American Chekov.......2002-04-28
I still remember watching "To Kill a Mockingbird" in the theater, absolutely stunned that the jury had convicted Tom Robinson when it was so clear, so perfectly clear and obvious to even a kid in grade school, that Atticus Finch had proved he was innocent. Horton Foote's screenplay for "To Kill a Mockingbird" is one of three collected in this volume, along with "Tender Mercies" and "The Trip to Bountiful." They represent three different types of screenwriting experiences since the first is adapted form a novel, the second from Foote's own stage play, and the third a work originally conceived as a film. Perhaps it is somewhat ironic that Foote won Oscars for the two adaptations. All three reflect Foote's emphasis on character development and dialogue rather than action and spectacle.
I taught Harper Lee's novel "To Kill a Mockingbird" and screened the movie for an assignment in which students had to compare and contrast the novel with the film. Perhaps the best testament I can give to the quality fo Foote's script is that while students would always come up with favorite scenes from they book they wish had been in the film (number one choice was the hermaphrodite snowman the kids built), there was never a serious argument that Foote had left out something important. For me what stands out is how Foote picked up on one of my favorite parts of the novel, which was the nobility of Jem. The story is primarily about Scout and Atticus, not to mention Boo Radley, but it was Jem who also impressed me, and Foote captures that nobility in several key scenes. If you have a copy of the screenplay, then it is a lot easier to help students with that particular assignment, which always produces solid results.
Great Book.......1999-06-23
This is a really great book for people who like Foote's work. If you do not especially enjoy reading Foote (or watching his plays), I would not suggest this book. The character devolopment in each of the stories is fanatical and the introductions show what was happening at the time when he wrote each play. Also, you get three plays in one book. For a Foote fan, not much could be better.
Book Description
Krzystof Kieslowski's Three Colors trilogy earned him the deserved reputation as "one of the world's premier film-makers' (Independent). In these films, based on the colors of the French flag and the principles of liberty, equality and fraternity--the three ideals of the French Revolution--Kieslowski has crafted three parables of contemporary existence. In Blue, Julie loses her child and husband in a car crash. In order to shield herself from the intensity of her grief, she strips away all remnants of her former life. This attempt is doomed to failure as music inexorably brings her back to a purpose in life. In White, Karol, a Polish hairdresser, is divorced and abandoned by his beautiful French wife and finds himself destitute on the Paris streets. He meets a fellow Pole, who ingeniously smuggles him back to Warsaw in a suitcase. Working on the black market, he soon rises to the top of Poland's emerging capitalist class. Still obsessively haunted by the image of his wife, Karol sets out to make her pay the price for her betrayal. The third and final part of the trilogy, Red, explores a strange, tentative relationship that gradualy grows between a beautiful young model and an embittered, retired judge. It is through the wisdom of her innocence that he finds the courage to engage with life again. Kieslowski brings the trilogy to a close with an event that weaves the disaparte threads into a seamless work of art.
Customer Reviews:
Three colors, three emotions.......2004-05-06
Cinematic genius Krzystof Kieslowski wrote and directed his own films, including the famed Three Colors Trilogy, made up of "White" ("Blanc"), "Red" ("Rouge") and "Blue" ("Bleu"). Taking the three concepts behind the French flag (liberty, equality and fraternity), Kieslowski created a colorful, emotional masterwork.
In "Blue," Julie loses her composer husband and her young daughter in a horrible car crash. Enveloped in her grief, she leaves her country mansion and takes a small apartment in Paris. But the haunting memory of her husband's music -- and the love of his former coworker -- keep drawing her back to her old life.
In "White," Polish immigrant (and born loser) Karol Karol is divorced by his sexy, ruthless wife Dominique. She takes all his money, his home, sleeps around and rubs it in his face, and leaves him penniless in the street. But Karol turns the tables on his beautiful Dominique when he becomes a rich man, and begins to spin an elaborate plot against her.
In "Red," the warm-hearted model Valentine accidently runs over a pregnant German shepherd. She takes the dog to its owner, but finds that he's a cold-hearted, callous ex-judge who uses a radio to spy on his neighbors. Valentine's disgust prompts the judge to turn himself in, and a strange friendship is struck between the embittered old man and the idealistic model... one that will change both their lives.
Obviously, reading the scripts for the Three Colors Trilogy can't quite recreate the experience of actually watching the film. The characters -- especially Julie and Valentine -- don't seem as rich without Juliette Binoche and Irene Jacob. And what words can recreate the swell of shimmering violins whenever Julie fades out? But Kieslowski's screenplays hint at the splendor and grandeur of his visions for these films. He brings the words to life in a way that few screenwriters can, and his descriptions of the characters and how they look, act, feel is phenomenal.
The Three Colors Trilogy is a modern classic of cinema, with its haunting characters and beautiful direction. So check out the wonderful screenplays that launched those films. Beautiful, heartfelt.
No question about it -- pick up this book!.......2000-04-19
This book is a screenplay of Kieslowski's famous movie trilogy. The films are amazing, and the book is no less terrific. It has three great, interweaving stories, all great read by themselves but a masterpiece when read together. This is one book I will read over and over again, and so will anyone else interested in a great script or story.
Book Description
Here are three of the filthiest-and yet, in their own way, sweetest—screenplays ever written: Pink Flamingos, Desperate Living, and Flamingos Forever. Intermixed with the scripts are dozens of classic stills from the films.
In Pink Flamingos, Waters's muse and leading lady, Divine, a 300-pound cross-dresser who could turn your stomach in one scene and break your heart in the next, competes with her family for the title of "filthiest people alive"—as readers will see, it's really anyone's game. Desperate Living is a perverse fairy tale featuring gun-toting lesbians, leather-clad castle guards, and a repulsive queen who has her own daughter gang-raped among other atrocities. Flamingos Forever is the unproduced sequel to Pink Flamingos, set fifteen years after the original, when the rivalry for "filthiest people alive" is revived; it was never filmed, Waters tells us, because by the time it was written, too many of the original cast had died—this book is the only chance for Water's fans to read it.
Book Description
Smoke (starring Harvey Keitel, William Hurt, Forest Whitaker, and Stockard Channing) tells the story of a novelist, a cigar store manager, and a black teenager who unexpectedly cross paths and end up changing each other's lives in indelible ways. Set in contemporary Brooklyn, Smoke directly inspired Blue in the Face, a largely improvised comedy shot in a total of six days. A film unlike any other it stars Harvey Keitel, with featured performances by Roseanne, Lily Tomlin, Lou Reed, and Michael J. Fox. Lulu on the Bridge (Auster's solo directorial debut, again starring Harvey Keitel, with Mira Sorvino, Willem Dafoe, and Vanessa Redgrave) opens with the accidental shooting of jazz musician Izzy Maurer during a performance in a New York club. Izzy is then led on a journey into the strange and sometimes frightening labyrinth of his soul. Both thriller and fairy tale, Lulu on the Bridge is above all a story about the redemptive powers of love.
Book Description
Much of the magic surrounding his legendary name had vanished by the time F. Scott Fitzgerald—forty-one years old, deeply in debt, full of remorse that “I had been only a mediocre caretaker of most things left in my hands, even of my talent”—mounted a third assault on the money of Hollywood and, by writing this adaptation of Remarque’s Three Comrades, proved that the writer, if not the man, had survived the famed “crack-up.”
The screenplay for Three Comrades, starring Robert Young, Margaret Sullavan, Franchot Tone, and Robert Taylor, ultimately was the result of the collaboration of E. E. Paramore and producer Joseph Mankiewicz, though Fitzgerald fought to salvage as much of his original script as possible. By his own reckoning, only about a third of the final script was his, and “all shadows and rhythm removed.”
The script published here is the one Fitzgerald tried desperately to save. Neither Mankiewicz nor Paramore has written a line. This script is, of course, valuable to those who would know the complete Fitzgerald. It also proves fascinating as a study of adaptation, showing which scenes Fitzgerald chose to dramatize to catch the essence of the Remarque story as well as showing how he made visual what the novelist could place in the heads of his readers.
Series editor Matthew J. Bruccoli provides the background in an illuminating Afterword and in an appendix containing eight scenes that resulted from the collaboration of Mankiewicz, Paramore, and Fitzgerald.
Average customer rating:
- Great writing at any Price!
- Contemporary master
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Color of Money, Sea of Love, Night and the City: Three Screenplays
Richard Price
Manufacturer: Grove Press
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William Goldman - Four Screenplays
ASIN: 0802136699 |
Book Description
The recent success of Freedomland and Clockers has established Richard Price as one of America's most accomplished novelists. Critics have praised both his uncanny ear for the cadences and pitch of dialogue and his insight into the deeper recesses of the American soul. Perhaps more than any novelist today, Price has captured the undercurrents of our culture and society. Bringing these talents to the art of screenplays, Price has also emerged as one of the foremost talents in screenwriting. Now, with this collection of his three best-known screenplays, readers can see for themselves why many movie critics have come to consider Richard Price today's most preeminent screenwriter. Introduced with a revealing interview of Price by the critic Neal Gabler, this volume includes Price's screenplays for The Color of Money (1986), which starred Paul Newman and Tom Cruise and won an Academy Award nomination for best screenplay; Sea of Love (1989), which starred Al Pacino and Ellen Barkin and became a major critical and commercial success; and Night and the City (1992), which starred Robert De Niro and Jessica Lange and again attracted rave reviews for Price's screenwriting.
Customer Reviews:
Great writing at any Price!.......2001-07-12
Screenwriting gurus are forever trying to define "great screenwriting." And screenwriting students are always asking the gurus: What is great screenwriting? I would advise guru and student alike to CUT TO the chase and pick up this book...it's a fine example of GREAT SCREENWRITING. Lean, to the point, and always moving forward.
Contemporary master.......2000-07-31
Richard Price is among the most talented of Hollywood screenwriters working today. His ability to infuse characters with even the smallest unique trait infuses them with depth and reality that few other writers are able to capture.
His recent rewrites of such scripts as "Shaft" and "Ransom" prove the level of quality he is able to bring to even the most mainstream films.
Average customer rating:
- wonderful book
- Hollywood Jock is worth a read
- Most honest book about the Hollywood writer experience
- Hollywood Jock Scores With Readers
- Wild, uneven ride into Hollywood weirdness
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Hollywood Jock: 365 Days, Four Screenplays, Three TV Pitches, Two Kids, and One Wife Who's Ready to Pull the Plug
Rob Ryder
Manufacturer: Harper Paperbacks
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ASIN: 0060791500
Release Date: 2006-06-27 |
Book Description
Rob Ryder made that pledge to his wife, and he was determined to stick to it. As technical consultant on blockbuster sports films, he had seen up close how the film business works and what kind of chaos can, and usually does, ensue. And now he was ready to take it on!
Hollywood Jock is the suspenseful, dramatic, outrageous, and honest true story of the year when Rob Ryder, screenwriter, laid it all on the line -- and kicked, scratched, wheeled, dealed, and fought like hell to hit the Tinseltown big time. It is a chronicle of schmoozing producers, shopping screenplays, corralling sports legends, and dodging irate actors -- a fascinating perspective on the highs, the very lows, and the behind-the-scenes madness that makes the world of Hollywood so endlessly compelling . . . and infamously brutal.
Customer Reviews:
wonderful book.......2007-05-07
I LOVED THIS BOOK! All right, so the author went to Princeton, where he played on the basketball team. We won't hold that against him, especially since the team he played on almost beat #1UCLA in the NCAA's(lost by a point.) Perhaps that near victory prepared him for life as a Hollywood screenwriter, where he suffers the "plight of intermittent reinforcement": every once in a while he'll get a rat's pellet of reward, just enough to keep him "bashing his head into a cinder-block wall."
See the way I'm quoting the author? This is the kind of book where you underline all the time. (Mine is NOT a library copy, I own it.) Some samples:
Comparing how men and women cross a dance floor differently when they're drunk. A man will "do these flanking motions, like a sailboat tacking upwind, stumbling left...then heading back right, like you improve your odds of finding your destination by covering more territory somehow..." A woman will cross "like she's on a mission, walking that straight line.. putting one foot in front of the other, steps short and quick, knowing as long as she keeps leaning forward and staying focused she's gonna finally get there."
Or his example of "due diligence:" "When people are young, they sleep together before getting married to find out how good the sex is gonna be. Second time around, it's to find out how bad's the snoring. Due diligence."
Quoting a teacher friend of his: "Moviemaking is the slow disintegration of a good idea."
Quoting another friend's mother: "Closed mouths don't get fed."
Quoting a doctor on why his friend developed a lump in his scrotum (non-malignant--this book is for laughs, not for downers): "Forget firefighters, forget steelworkers. Writing's the worst--high stress, constant rejection, alcoholism, drug abuse, heart disease, phlebitis, self-contempt, you name it, plus you sit around on your balls all day."
Part of the book is based on columns the author wrote for espn.com. That means he writes short, snappy chapters, which make it an easy read. He also puts in web addresses that will help writers and others with their work. And he's not afraid to personalize the book, be it his relationship with his wife (Where did he find such an angel?!), his sons, or his genuine feelings about our troops in Iraq (sadly, though the book chronicles the year 2005, the troops are still there.) But mainly it's funny. Who knew watching some other guy face constant rejection could be so entertaining?
Finally, Ryder actually had me hooked so much that I HAD TO KNOW what happened to the one screenplay he finally managed to sell. What's the exciting climax? I won't tell you, because you'll have such a great time finding out yourself. You'll also learn a whole lot about the in's and out's of the screen trade, viewed through the lens of a sports consultant, but, most enjoyably, as seen through the eyes of a sensitive, funny, compassionate writer who's been there, done that. If you're anything like me, once you've finished this book, you'll quickly give it to someone you care about so they can love it, too.
Hollywood Jock is worth a read.......2006-10-29
Hollywood Jock is an easy read, filled with the amusing adventures that Ryder has encountered in his quest to write screenplays of interest in Hollywood. Anyone even remotely interested in sports and show business will find the book entertaining and funny. This book seems like a natural premise for a TV sitcom. Maybe Ryder will get lucky and HBO will agree.
Most honest book about the Hollywood writer experience.......2006-10-23
This book is a gem!
HOLLYWOOD JOCK should be mandatory reading in every college Screenwriting class. Every starry-eyed writer heading to Los Angeles needs to know what to expect, and Rob Ryder's experience is what so many LA scriptwriters confront. Had I read Ryder's eloquent book before spending my dozen years in Hollywood, I would at least have been prepared for the experience.
What's most instructive is that Ryder has such a masterful command of both story and prose -- and deep insight into sport. His so his insider story of how Hollywood actually works at the script level helps explain why we see so few quality studio films.
But most of all, HOLLYWOOD JOCK is simply a crackling great read, whether or not you plan to be a Hollywood writer. It's the real deal about Hollywood, and it's about time someone told that story and so well. Kudos to Rob Ryder!
Hollywood Jock Scores With Readers.......2006-07-06
Hollywood Jock is the kind of book that needed to be written. Most other books are by better known screenwriters that only highlight the ups of their careers, while Hollywood Jock reviews it all. At times you just wish someone would drop some money into his lap to see what he can do, and by the end you're surfing the net finding out what he's up to now. If you're intrested in movies and the people behind the camera, pick up this book. If you don't care at all, still, read this book. The stories alone are worth the read.
Wild, uneven ride into Hollywood weirdness.......2006-07-06
If "Hollywood Jock" were a movie, the log line would run: "A sports-mad writer gets a shot at redemption when his wife gives him a year to sell a project to Hollywood."
This book collects the 34 "Hollywood Jock" columns written wrote for ESPN.com, and another 19 that continues the story of Rob Ryder, Hollywood Hustler. We follow him as he tries to sell anyone he can get ahold of on the merits of scripts such as "Zulu Wave," about a black surfer in apartheid-era South Africa, "94 Feet of Hell" that takes you inside a fictional college basketball game; and businesses such as a 4-on-4 summer pro basketball league. He's calls on agents for pro athletes who want to get into producing, directors he has worked with (such as Rob Shelton, who directed "Bull Durham" and "Tin Cup"), production companies, money managers, agents, anyone who knows anyone with two cents to rub together who might be able to get a movie launched.
When he's telling his war stories, Ryder is a genial companion, and you can sympathize with his struggles to get his projects off the ground.
But "Hollywood Jock" is also a mess, a shapeless diary that's as chaotic as the way Hollywood puts together movies. The "wife gives him a year to make good" conceit holds no drama or emotion -- and once he loses his paying gig at ESPN.com, the chapters move away from the look at Hollywood and pro sports and becomes a recitation of e-mails, meetings, appointments and cancellations, writing sessions and what Elmore Leonard would call stuff readers would skip over.
If you can handle that, "Hollywood Jock" is a good example of how Hollywood works and how it doesn't.
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Avalon, Tin Men, Diner: Three Screenplays
Barry Levinson
Manufacturer: Atlantic Monthly Press
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Seabiscuit: The Screenplay
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Diner
ASIN: 0871134357 |
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