America's Film Legacy: The Authoritative Guide to the Landmark Movies in the National Film Registry - Softcover

Eagan, Daniel

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0826429777 ISBN 13: 9780826429773

Publisher: Continuum, 2009

Synopsis

America's Film Legacy is a guide to the most significant films ever made in the United States. Unlike opinionated "Top 100" and arbitrary "Best of" lists, these are the real thing: groundbreaking films that make up the backbone of American cinema. Some are well-known, such as Citizen Kane, The Jazz Singer, All Quiet on the Western Front, The Birth of a Nation, and Boyz n the Hood. Others are more obscure, such as Blacksmith Scene, The Blue Bird, The Docks of New York, Star Theatre, and A Bronx Morning. Daniel Eagan's beautifully written and authoritative book is for anyone who loves American movies and who wants to learn more about them.

About this title

About the Author:

Daniel Eagan has worked for Warner Bros., MGM, and other studios as a researcher and story analyst. He edited HBO's Guide to Movies on Videocassette and Cable TV (HarperCollins) and MGM: When the Lion Roars (Turner Publishing), to which he also contributed articles. He currently writes for Smithsonian and Film Journal, and lives in New York City.

Review:

"I've always thought of my films as a kind of privatehistory, a record of things that interested me, music, people, events,sometimes politics. They allowed me to watch like a cat, and not haveto be a reporter. What made it risky was not explaining anything. WhenI got rid of the script and the narration in the early films, and wentout hunting for films with a camera they were seen as sort of dicey andunorthodox and unfortunately for us, unsaleable, at least to TV. Thatwas what got us into theaters.
I really welcome the existence of the National Film Registry and Daniel Eagan's wonderful book—America's Film Legacy—aboutit. The NFR's determination to collect these early experimental worksand not let them disappear is really collecting and preserving thehistory of our times. I believe that films will eventually be our mostimportant artifact. They may well become a new language."
-D A Pennebaker

"This valuable and highly readable book will serve equally well as aprimer for newcomers to film history and a refresher course for moreexperienced viewers on the vast spectrum of American cinema. Best ofall, it will introduce novices and veterans alike to a number ofoffbeat and unjustly-forgotten titles on the National Film Registry."
-Leonard Maltin

"A book on the National Film Registry will be a wonderful asset."
-Leonard Kamerling, co-director, The Drums of Winter

"Daniel Eagan informs as well as entertains in this lively, opinionated reference guide to a treasure trove of cinema history in the Library of Congress's National Film Registry."
-John Canemaker, Academy Award-winning animator, director, and author

"America's Film Legacy is a brilliant, insightful and invaluable breakthrough book which makes American film history and the men and women —both the legendary and the all but unknown—who created it, come to life in fresh and vivid detail. This superb book offers a startling and wise appreciation of the essence of their film achievements."
-Terry Sanders, Two-Time Academy Award-winning Filmmaker

"The opportunity to revisit and be inspired by the past is one of the purposes behind the National Film Registry. The 1915 film The Italian was preserved from a single paper copy. If prints were readily available at the time I made The Godfather, I would have enjoyed having access to it. I'm proud that The Godfather and The Godfather Part II join The Italian on the Registry, an attempt to preserve our cinematic heritage. America's Film Legacy doesn't just explore the films on the Registry, it ties together the past and the present, showing how the great movies of today can be built on the those of an earlier era."
-Francis Ford Coppola
"The Library of Congress' National Film Registry is the most important list today in the recognition of American film as art, entertainment and cultural history. Daniel Eagan's America's Film Legacy is the first book on this subject and it is essential reading for anyone wanting to know the remarkable breadth of accomplishment throughout the 120 years of the history of the cinema. Every film fan and every library should have a copy of this book."
-Dennis Doros, Co-founder and VP, Milestone Film & Video
"America's Film Legacy is a valuable guide to the films chosen to represent the range, style, and diversity of subject matter of American cinema."
-Frederick Wiseman, Documentary Filmmaker
"Want a definitive list of the most significant U.S. movies? A panel ofexperts convened by the Library of Congress has chosen 500, from Citizen Kane to Duck and Cover. Daniel Eagan's lucid analysis of these works provides a comprehensive film history in one volume."
-TIME Magazine
The great, the historic, and the lousy (but, alas, influential) all find their place in this engrossing survey of titles selected by the Library of Congress's National Film Registry. Eagan chronologically catalogues 500 Registry films, from 1893's 30-second Blacksmithing Scene to 1995's Fargo, jumbling Hollywood classics together with obscure art films, cartoon shorts, documentaries, industrial and student films, newsreel footage from the Hindenburg disaster and the Zapruder film. Each entry includes complete cast and credits lists and an engaging one- to two-page historical and interpretive essay. These are packed with biographical thumbnails of actors and directors and making-of narratives—from screenplay rewrites to on-set feuds and hysterics to final-cut showdowns—that buffs and scholars will delight in. Eagan dutifully assesses the artistic merits of each film (yes, even Animal House) in critiques that abound in pithy and sometimes contrarian opinions... The result is an erudite, perceptive, always entertaining cinematic encyclopedia.
-Publishers Weekly [STARRED REVIEW]

About this edition

• Publisher: Continuum
• Publication date: 2009
• ISBN 10: 0826429777
• ISBN 13: 9780826429773
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 832