Books, 7/19.

For the New York Observer, Scott Eyman reviews Ian Scott's In Capra's Shadow: The Life and Career of Screenwriter Robert Riskin: "When two talents are yoked together, they abrade and jostle in unexpected ways, with the creative result often greater than the sum of the parts."

"You won't find Tom Schroeppel's face adorning the cover of Film Comment, Filmmaker, MovieMaker or any other film magazines that champion American cinema, yet, in his own way, Schroeppel has exerted a quiet influence on aspiring filmmakers in film schools across the country for the last twenty-five years. How? As the author of The Bare Bones Camera Course for Film and Video, one of the simplest - and by simplest, I mean best - textbooks to cover the basics of motion picture production." Paul Harrill interviews him for his site, Self-Reliant Filmmaking.

"There are hundreds of books that have been written to provide guidance and inspiration to filmmakers, but to me there are only four classics: Christine Vachon's Shooting to Kill, Robert McKee's Story, Judith Weston's Directing Actors and John Pierson's Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes." And now, writing at Zoom In Online, Reid Rosefelt adds a fifth title: John Anderson and Laura Kim's I Wake Up Screening: What to Do Once You've Made That Movie.

Update, 7/20: Edmund Fawcett in the Times Literary Supplement on Simon Callow's Orson Welles: Hello Americans: "Detail is occasionally dense, but Callow is too good a storyteller and too shrewd an observer to let the narrative flag for long. The end of the book invites not 'Ouf!', but 'What happens next?'."

Posted by dwhudson at July 19, 2006 3:00 PM