Saving Private Ryan: The Men, The Mission, The Movie (Newmarket Pictorial Moviebook) - Softcover

Spielberg, Steven; James, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 155704371X ISBN 13: 9781557043719

Publisher: Newmarket Press, 1999

Synopsis

Over 50,000 sold—the only illustrated companion book to the extraodinary film. Includes excerpts from Stephen Ambrose's books, screenplay extracts, and commentary by Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Matt Damon, Janusz Kaminski and others. 100 illustrations, 130 color plates.

About this title

Review

The photos and snippets of dialog and celebrity quotes in this tie-in book to Steven Spielberg's D-day film Saving Private Ryan are a continuation of the movie by other means. (Be forewarned that the book reveals one major plot point concerning Matt Damon's Private Ryan character.) If the color pictures look a bit washed-out compared to, say, Disney's The Art of Mulan, that's the idea--Spielberg renounced his razzle-dazzle visual magic in order to convey a brute reality honestly. "I didn't want to shoot the picture as a Hollywood gung ho Rambo kind of extravaganza," Spielberg says in the book. "Janusz [Kaminski, the cinematographer] stripped all the glossy filters and the filaments from the lenses so they were just like the kind of lenses they actually used in the Second World War. We shot a lot of the war sequences with the shutter speed used by those Bell and Howell cameras of the 1940s for making newsreels.... If we've done our jobs, [the audience] will think we were actually on the beach on D-day." Time magazine opined that the film boasts "quite possibly the greatest combat sequence ever made."

The photos in this book give an inkling of that impact, and also evince the intense empathy for the GIs that won Spielberg the allegiance of the leading historian Stephen E. Ambrose, whose stunning book Citizen Soldiers was the director's prime influence. "I wanted to write about the lives of the GIs," Ambrose said in an Amazon.com interview. "Books are always written from the generals' point of view, but I'm sick of the generals and their point of view. It's more refreshing to be with the guys who did the fighting." After seeing the film or reading this book (or the novelization Saving Private Ryan), you may not feel refreshed, but you will be enlightened. And you will immediately want to read two other sagas of ordinary heroism by Ambrose, D-day and Undaunted Courage, his ode to Meriwether Lewis.

Saving Private Ryan is, in a sense, a companion volume to Tim O'Brien's masterpiece Going After Cacciato, about soldiers hunting down a deserter during the Vietnam War. Spielberg's story of GIs risking their lives hunting down an endangered dogface to save his life helps measure what it was that Americans lost between World War II and Vietnam. --Tim Appelo

About the Author

Steven Spielberg (Introduction)
The renowned director and producer of Schindler's List has also directed, among other acclaimed films, Lincoln, War Horse, Saving Private Ryan, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, Jurassic Park, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Amistad, and Jaws. He established the Shoah Foundation in 1994, inspired by his experience while filming Schindler's List.

Dreamgirls is directed by Bill Condon from a screenplay he adapted from the stage musical's original book by Tom Eyen. Condon (Oscar® winner for his screenplay for Gods and Monsters, which he also directed) received another Oscar® nomination for his screenplay adaptation of Chicago. He more recently wrote and directed Kinsey.

David James's photographs previously appeared in the moviebooks of Memoirs of a Geisha, Chicago, and Saving Private Ryan.

About this edition

• Publisher: Newmarket Press
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 155704371X
• ISBN 13: 9781557043719
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 96