There are telling meditations on Welles (as artist and con man) and Fassbinder (as subversive collaborator). One of the reasons this site is named "No Film School" is because of the widespread availability of excellent materials for self-teaching these days: almost every movie is available on disc or online, DVD special features often make for great learning tools, and there are plenty of books on the topic. Babitz was born and raised there in the 1950s by an artist mother and a father who played first violin in the 20th Century-Fox orchestra. ©2021 British Film Institute. Despite Fisher’s status as second-generation Hollywood royalty, she skewers the industry as mercilessly as she does the self-discovery nostrums of rehab culture. As a writer, Schulberg is a middle-rank welterweight – tough, rhythmic, sinewy – but he expertly contrasts Shep’s gauche left-wing earnestness with Halliday’s doomed ghostly grace. The novel both reconstructs and deconstructs the crime, a dazzling display of metafiction decades before the term was coined. Reno also watches and describes Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), but never names it. Eeriness and coincidence, however, were recurrent themes from the outset. Actor Maria Wyeth, estranged from her director husband (who got her started in the movies), floats through a series of increasingly traumatic events, and we know from the first pages it is all leading to murder and incarceration in a psychiatric institution. Out of the Past: Spanish Cinema After Franco John Hopewell, BFI, 1986 You should have read the cinema reviews before watching that movie. If you are a woman who belongs to the world of cinema, you’ve met Joel: he considers himself a good, enlightened guy with impeccable taste (“He had written articles in the student paper on labour unions. Stanley Kubrick makes a porno – that’s essentially the plot of Terry Southern’s riotously scabrous novel. This inventive novelised treatment of one of Asian cinema’s most fascinating characters, Yamaguchi Yoshiko, begins with her birth in China to Japanese parents in 1920 and follows her launch to stardom at the age of 16 by the Man’ei film company, established by the Japanese in the puppet state of Manchukuo during the 1930s. It is telling that European and Asian cinema of the 1960s profoundly influences the unsettling fictions of US novelist Don DeLillo. Frederick Wiseman’s documentary films offer an unparalleled, panoramic vision of society. A film adaptation of the novel never happened, but Royle took his surviving characters into a sequel, Antwerp, which takes Belgian surrealism as its theme. For someone who didn’t have the slightest clue as to how to operate within the Hollywood machine, however, Fitzgerald understood the spirit that animated the town, and it is perhaps precisely because he believed so fervently in the possibilities of cinema that he failed to become a successful – and impersonal – clockpuncher. One unforgettable scene follows her to a soirée where topless maids and turbaned dwarves serve champagne and oysters, and naked actresses make love on every surface: “Shmundies on parade,” as the beautiful Rose Sawyer so ripely puts it. This, her debut, a barely disguised memoir of her teenage years, is an elated love letter to a Hollywood “where 1 per cent work and 99 per cent live half lives of expectation”, seductive atomised snapshots of gossipy backlots, parties with Tony Curtis (“He has a kind of smug energy which is still endearing”), female friendships and doomed romances that radiate those twin elusive qualities in literature, music and light – “moments of such unrelated importance,” to quote Babitz, “that time ripples away like a frame of water. El cine de los sábados is a precisely observed, Fellini-esque portrait of the post-Civil War generation; it scrutinises, with brutal honesty but also warmth and humour, the cultural perversities and intellectual famine of life under Franco during the 1950s and 60s, when a window into other worlds through culture, and cinema in particular, was so desperately sought by many a Spaniard. As you might imagine, nearly half the titles are related in some way to Hollywood. British-born Collins moved permanently to LA in the 1980s claiming: “If you wish to be successful, there’s a place you should be at a certain time. The rather unpleasant 1970 film version of Myra Breckinridge, starring Mae West and Raquel Welch, has not tarnished the thunderbolt power of Vidal’s achievement in these two highly successful movie-mad novels, arguably his most original fictional works. Innocents and Others evokes both the randomness of life and the cruel, clear progression of history in a way that perfectly replicates our 21st century existence. The pair’s courtship follows them through a series of Los Angeles parties to Congo – where Kouhouesso is shooting a version of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, a remake of Apocalypse Now – and back again, ready for awards season. The eponymous heroine is a “chippy” shopgirl living in a New York tenement, who is discovered by a sleazy actor and eventually becomes June Day – a phenomenon in a fur coat. Their last encounter, after the ex-Olympian actor has been laid low by a series of strokes, is almost unbearably affecting. At his suggestion she goes undercover as a secretary to find out what’s really going on at the studio and encounters a cast of characters as colourful and ruthless as those of Collins’s earlier novels, the naughty and now notorious Hollywood Wives (1983) and Hollywood Husbands (1986). Budd Schulberg, in 1940, the year before he published What Makes Sammy Run?, called Promised Land “the most interesting and comprehensive novel yet to be written about Hollywood”. Wodehouse’s Laughing Gas) as it is to the moral put-down of its hedonism and ruthless box-office drive (F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Last Tycoon, Joan Didion’s Play It as It Lays, Carrie Fisher’s Postcards from the Edge). “You learn anything?” Ernest Stickley, the main character, is asked in the aftermath. Its owner will only sell if Lucky proves she’s got what it takes to survive in Hollywood. In some respects, Alec appears to be modelled on Alexander Korda, the hugely successful Hungarian-Jewish mogul who transformed the British industry in the 30s, but it’s hard to imagine the charismatic and cosmopolitan Korda being beset by the same sense of alienation and self-loathing that come to dominate Alec’s life and relationship to British society, and which drive the narrative of Miller’s novel. Do you usually eat something while you are watching a film at the cinema? Playwright Phillip Hardcastle is put under contract by mogul Napoleon Bott (based on Alexander Korda) and embarks on a crash course in the follies of the movie business, taking the reader with him. Narrated by Bukowski’s alter-ego Henry ‘Hank’ Chinaski in typically deadpan prose, the story details the maddening stop-start production process of the movie, dubbed ‘The Dance of Jim Beam’, as the reader tries to figure out the true-life identities of its thinly disguised cast of filmmaking folk. Under his director’s tuition, Isherwood’s fictional avatar comes to learn the craft of screenwriting, while Europe teeters on the brink of war and the director’s family is endangered. Viertel is sadly forgotten today: Isherwood’s loving portrait preserves him. It simply ripens to its inevitable explosion. Murnau cheats on Hans, however, and feels something devilish in the infidelity. The crisp prose of An Affair, Edited, from her collection Bad Behaviour, follows Joel, a twentysomething employee at a foreign film distributor in New York City (“a prestigious place to work”), as he recollects a university liaison with a girl named Sara after seeing her again, and ignoring her, on the street. The first African-American stars in late 19th-century American vaudeville, Walker and Williams played black comedy stereotypes, with light-skinned Williams in blackface. In Point Omega, however, the Möbius strip of relations is most evident. He also leaks info to the scandal mag Hush-hush (aka Confidential) and visits a brothel where the hookers are movie-star lookalikes. 20 Books About Movies Every Film Lover Should Own. It’s not surprising that he does, since Self is a monster of 1980s greed and mind-bending consumption – “200 pounds of yob genes, booze, snout and fast food,” his voiceover tells us – and he’s got a major toothache to add to all the self-inflicted comedowns. Stephen Volk’s script for the BBC’s ‘live’ poltergeist investigation Ghostwatch (1992) memorably blurred the edges between fact and fiction. Royle’s narrative structure plays back and forth with time (foreshadowing The Girl on the Train with its precisely dated chapters) and builds to a cross-cut climax set in a pre-Westfield Shepherd’s Bush. 6:15 AM 1/2/2017. In its pages Dennis Barlow, a minor poet, comes to southern California from England to work for the Megalopolitan film studio, only to find himself in the employ of a posh pet cemetery, the Happier Hunting Ground, and drawn in by the idiot allure of Aimée Thanatogenos, cosmetician for the dead at Whispering Glades, a spoof of state-of-the-art Forest Lawn cemetery. And the surrounding deadbeat hustlers, all hoping to turn some aspect of his legend into coin, include Hardin’s alienated son and a roadie Hardin hires to write a script recounting what happened to his equally alienated daughter when she ran off to India on a spiritual quest. That’s a line from ‘Dark Passage’.”. In Italy, Sandro is asked if his abstract images indicate he’s more of a “leg man” or an “ass man”, and Reno watches him take in the moment with glee as a story he’ll tell in the future. But it is easy to sigh. September is a very good month for books about film. Royle’s murder mystery is set in a cinephile’s London – one deeply indebted to the films and especially the buildings in which they are/ were projected – that is fading faster than an old Eastmancolor print. It’s a little surprising that the work of John Updike has been so slenderly represented in screen adaptations – not only because of his standing as one of the greatest of Great American Novelists, but because he was himself so fascinated by cinema. “I’m everything you’ve ever dreamed.”. What Holtby does particularly well – with unlucky-in-love heroine Muriel in the brilliant and underrated The Crowded Street (1924), for example, or with cinemagoing widow Mrs Brimsley in South Riding (1936) – is take a reader by the hand and lead them into the familiar space of the local picture palace. A love letter to the movies, Men is also a bittersweet critique of clichés about gender and race, best read alongside Zadie Smith’s recent Swing Time, which casts a similarly sceptical eye over our age of celebrity culture. Solange thinks he’s white.” The African-set scenes are both a hallucinogenic evocation of otherness and an object lesson in the arrogance of cultural appropriation. When I first read it as a nervy, aspirational teenager I was derailed too. He is certain he deserves to be more successful than he is. Comprehensive, presumably, in that it begins in 1857 with the settling of the Owens Valley, the source of Los Angeles’s water supply, and the subsequent massacring of the Native American population, and goes on to treat the coming of the movies to Hollywood around 1910 from the perspective of the Midwesterners who had arrived there a generation before, intent on establishing a godly community devoted to temperance and rising property values. for the 1980s. There are few writers who cut as sharply, as deeply, into the psychosexual currents of human relationships as Mary Gaitskill. Tolkin adapted his own novel for Robert Altman’s cameo-filled 1992 adaptation, and returned to the indelible Griffin Mill character again with his 2006 sequel The Return of the Player. A detective is accompanying an ex-client and his wife, who had been suspected of adultery. He explains to an interested outsider (apparently representing the author) how he cranks at different speeds for different effects, and through what is supposed to be his journal we see the offscreen drama involving an excitable Russian-born diva, Nesteroff, her jealous admirers and the boss of the Kosmograph studio, pushing for ever greater sensation and realism – which is finally achieved in a tragicomic climax where reality invades the set, while Gubbio continues impassively recording. It’s an immersive, sensory experience, in which 14-year-old non-conformist Moix comes to terms with his homosexuality through watching double-bills in the cinemas of the working-class red-light district of Barcelona where he grew up; here, Lana Turner, Marilyn Monroe and his beloved Bette Davis become celluloid matriarchs, equivalent to the real-life matriarchs who brought him up. Confidential is the third in Ellroy’s L.A. Quartet, alongside The Black Dahlia (1987), The Big Nowhere (1988) and White Jazz (1992) – all hard-boiled crime novels set in and around Los Angeles and covering a period from the mid-1940s to the 60s. 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