Screenwriters: America's Storytellers in Portrait - Hardcover

Lumme, Helena; Manninen, Mika

4.2

5 ratings by Goodreads

9781883318185: Screenwriters: America's Storytellers in Portrait

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1883318181 ISBN 13: 9781883318185

Publisher: Angel City Pr, 1999

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Based on their major photo exhibits at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, award-winning authors Lumme and Manninen reveal the hidden talents behind Hollywood's most famous films. Forty-eight leading screenwriters are introduced in brilliant portrait photography and their own revealing words. From Billy Wilder (Sunset Boulevard), Ernest Lehman (North by Northwest), and Robert Towne (The Firm) to Oliver Stone (Platoon), Nora Ephron (Sleepless in Seattle) and Richard La Gravanese (The Horse Whisperer), 18 Academy Award winners and another 18 nominees are featured among these remarkable color and black & white portraits.

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Review:

Even if you don't agree with the editors that screenwriting is the toughest and riskiest profession in the movie business, this lovely book holds tremendous appeal. Screenwriters offers unique visual and verbal portraits of each of the 47 writers covered. The striking photographs presented here were exhibited at the Cannes Film Festival, as well as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. The book also offers brief comments from the screenwriters on the art of writing, particularly for the silver screen.

Paul Schrader, who wrote the screenplays for Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Affliction, claims, "Everybody wants to talk. It's like a compulsion." Nora Ephron, who scripted You've Got Mail, Sleepless in Seattle, and When Harry Met Sally..., compares writing for the screen to "delivering a great big beautiful plain pizza, then the director sees it and wants to add mushrooms, and others want to add green peppers and anchovies, until you have a pizza with everything and you think, 'Why didn't I lie down in traffic to prevent anyone's putting green peppers onto the pizza?'" Novelist Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, from whose pen flowed the Merchant-Ivory adaptations of Howards End, The Remains of the Day, and A Room with a View, maintains: "Whether I'm writing films or fiction, I feel I'm always the same writer with the same concerns--about making a story move; about establishing interesting characters and developing the relationship between them."

Reading this book, one realizes how little most of us know about screenwriters. Considering the media attention lavished upon actors and actresses, it is refreshing and revealing to hear from the people who craft the words uttered onscreen. Although we may have listened to screenwriters' words without recognizing their authors, this book gives us the chance to pay attention to their voices. --Raphael Shargel

From the Publisher:

This book salutes the men and women who have created hundreds of America's most beloved films. For the first time in the history of the much-documented film industry, this landmark book celebrates - in spectacular photographs and in the screenwriters' own unforgettable words - 47 of the film world's best writers including 18 Academy Award winners and 36 nominees for Best Screenplay.

The award winning author Helena Lumme and photographer Mika Manninen spent two years photographing and interviewing the 47 screenwriters featured in the book. Their idea was to present unique, intimate portraits of the writers and let them speak, not from behind a character, but in their own words.

In his contribution to SCREENWRITERS, Julius Epstein, who with his brother Philip and Howard Koch wrote Casablanca, shares the original ending to his Academy Award winning screenplay, and concludes: "We'll never know whether that line would have been better."Nora Ephron (You've Got Mail)" likens her creative process to making a pizza, Ted Tally (Academy Award winner for The Silence of the Lambs) lists his own TOP 10 COOL THINGS ABOUT BEING A SCREENWRITER, and Buck Henry (The Graduate, Catch 22, To Die For) puts it succintly, "Screenwriting is like having sex, only different."

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