Making Movies - Hardcover

Lumet, Sidney

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679437096 ISBN 13: 9780679437093

Publisher: Knopf, 1995

Synopsis

From one of America's most acclaimed directors comes a book that is both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on 40 years of experience on movies ranging from Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Verdict, Lumet explains the painstaking labor that results in two hours of screen magic.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

About this title

From the Inside Flap

America's most acclaimed directors comes a book that is both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on 40 years of experience on movies ranging from Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Verdict, Lumet explains the painstaking labor that results in two hours of screen magic.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

Reviews

Award-winning director Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon; The Verdict) serves as an unpretentious, anecdotal and sometimes irascible gide to the knotty process of getting a story on the screen. Brushing aside the auteur theory, he insists that filmmaking is a collaborative art involving technicians, actors and writers. Drawing upon almost 40 years' experience, the author lucidly explains the technical and aesthetic considerations in set design, cinematography and editing. As Lumet's movies are ample testimony to his love of language and actors, he unsurprisingly singles out such hyperbolic talents as screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and actors Al Pacino and Katharine Hepburn, from whom he coaxed one of her bravest performances?as the crumbling matriarch in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. But Lumet is not star-struck: "If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third star is the camera." Remarkably informative and engrossing, even if film is not your bag. It's all here: lights, camera, action.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Lumet is not the first filmmaker to write about filmmaking in order to praise it as an art form, but he may be the first to cover the process in detail from beginning to end, without missing any point of the action. That doesn't mean a reader will know how to make a feature film after reading the book. Lumet's approach is to provide a framework for both his memoirs as a film director and his argument for the purity of filmmaking, though he would probably deny both charges. Two aspects of the work are invigoratingly revealing: the ongoing discussion of his films and the last chapter, "The Studio: Was It All for This?" For all the talk about technique, camera lenses, art decorators, camera operators, and so on, the excitement of the book lies in Lumet's encounters with other artists. Rather than attempt to glean instruction from the story about using only one take to get a dolly shot of a moving train for Murder on the Orient Express, most readers will prefer the fun of simply riding the dolly with camera operator Peter McDonald or listening to the account of the time the crew and Lumet agonized on the set of The Fugitive Kind when it took Brando 34 takes to complete a scene. Lumet writes, "He looked at me and smiled as only Brando can smile, so that you think daybreak has come." The final chapter on the studio offers a harrowing look at the kind of greed people can fall into given the chance to operate with endless amounts of money. At the close, Lumet seems to be letting people know that what he has described is moviemaking, and he shows us how the studios threaten it. Bonnie Smothers

Lumet's book is about the agonizing and ultimately rewarding art of filmmaking. And who better to elucidate the process than a legendary director, with credits such as 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon, and Prince of the City? Lumet discusses writers and actors, camera and editing techniques, art direction and sound. Yet Making Movies is anything but a clinical textbook. Lumet's career straddled the shift between studio management and the rise of financiers and talent agencies: he's seen both worlds and candidly reveals his predilections, including his disdain for teamsters, critics, and market researchers. He alludes to the tension between film as art and as business and shows that filmmaking is ultimately a capricious, collective enterprise with no sure formulas. Although overly mechanistic at times, Lumet is most lucid in examples drawn from his own experiences. A fascinating look at the artist at work; recommended for film studies collections.
-?Jayne Plymale-Jackson, Univ. of Georgia Libs., Athens
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1995
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679437096
• ISBN 13: 9780679437093
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 220