Bøger af Patrick McGilligan

An exciting new collection of interviews with important screen artists.The acclaimed biographer of RobertAltman, GeorgeCukor, Alfred Hitchcock, Clint Eastwood, Oscar Micheaux and other major film figures, Patrick McGilligan is also a leading oral historian of film. His Backstory series devoted to screenwriters and Tender Comrades, focusing on blacklist survivors, helped set the standard for interview books.Still Film Crazy (After All These Years) is an informal sequel to Film Crazy, his earlier collection featuring some of the most famous names of the Golden Age. Spanning fifty years of reportage, these interviews date back to the 1970s, and include Ken Russell, Ralph Bakshi, Peter Weir and Oliver Stone, forgotten blacklist veterans, Clint Eastwood in his prime, a rare encounter with the star of Oscar Micheaux's last "race picture," several international auteurs, and a special section on French cinema, its love affair with Hollywood, and its own greatest films and filmmakers.

The acclaimed film biographer and author of Young Orson and Funny Man returns with the definitive look at the life and legacy of Woody Allen. The writer, director, and frequent star of more than fifty popular, award-winning, and internationally successful pictures over seven decades of filmmaking, Woody Allen is one of the most consequential American cultural figures of our time. Yet this national icon has fallen from grace nowadays. In this even-handed biography, Patrick McGilligan explores the public rise and fall of this hilarious comedian with a serious bent in his work, whose singularity and non-conformity has proved an Achilles heel.    This is the most comprehensive portrait of the creative prodigy that is Woody Allen. Drawing on exhaustive research, McGilligan brilliantly reconstructs Allen's misbegotten Brooklyn boyhood and salad days as a comedy writer for Sid Caesar and other television personalities, his struggles to connect with audiences as a bright stand-up comedian, his sidelines as a New Yorker writer and Broadway playwright, and his first side-splitting movies as writer, director, and star, leading to his Oscar-winning Annie Hall and golden years, in the 1970s and 80s, of making some of his best films still beloved by fans.  But it is also a scrupulous account of the darker side of Allen, his three marriages, famous liaisons and furtive flings, and especially his tumultuous personal and professional relationship with actress Mia Farrow, his affair with her daughter, Soon-Yi Previn, and the alleged abuse of his adopted daughter Dylan. McGilligan presents the known facts, parsing questions of guilt and innocence, and examines the case, with its charges and countercharges that accrue to the present day.  McGilligan's compelling biography astutely links the ideas and themes of Allen's career to his singular personality and character. He makes it clear Allen is a writer's writer, and that beyond the smoke and controversy, no American filmmaker has had a greater cultural impact; none has been as creative, productive, or influential in his lifetime.

Oscar Micheaux was the Jackie Robinson of film, the black D. W. Griffith--a bigger-than-life American folk hero whose important life story has been nearly forgotten today. The son of freed slaves, he roamed America as a Pullman porter before making his first mark as a homesteader in South Dakota--and going on from there to become the king of the "race cinema" industry, producing and/or directing nearly forty films during a time of Jim Crow segregation when African-American artists were not welcome in Hollywood.In this groundbreaking new biography, award-winning film historian Patrick McGilligan offers a vivid and fascinating portrait of a true pioneer of American culture who was equal parts visionary, hustler, huckster, innovator, and raffish Barnum-like showman--and the first great African-American filmmaker.

More than sixty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood. In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed, whose lives and careers were ruined, finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in cinematic courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors (including two members of the Hollywood Ten), seminal directors of film noir and other genres, starring actresses and memorable supporting players, top screenwriters, and many less known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here that, beyond politics, open a rich window into moviemaking during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The visionary filmmaker Nicholas Ray spent his lifetime creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish. This title presents portrait of Nicholas Ray - a man whose troubled life was punctuated by moments of creative genius.