Books like Kazan on Directing — picked by fans

Make a list of great American movies of the 20th century—Sidney Lumet has directed a lot of them. 12 Angry Men. Dog Day Afternoon, Serpico, Network, The Wiz, The Verdict, and so many more. When his book came out in 1995, there had never been a book like it.

Sidney Lumet was giving away his secrets? Wow. I purchased it immediately. When I learned that Mr. Lumet was to appear at a book signing in my city, I arrived early, toting my precious, already dogeared volume, and stood in line to get it signed. For all these years since its publication in 1995, it has stood at or near the top of best-selling books about making movies.

Krzysztof Kieślowski’s films pose the central human question—why must I, and everyone I love, die? And yet, his work is not dark or depressing but rather full of the joy of life. I happen to believe that connection to the knowledge of my mortality gives me a fuller life.

I respond deeply to his films—Decalogue, The Double Life of Veronique, and the Three Colours trilogy. Before his death, at 54, he collected these stories of his own life, offering insights into the history of his native Poland as well as thrilling glimpses into his unique creative process. Favorite quote: “I keep persuading younger colleagues to examine their own lives. The years in which you don’t work on yourself like this are, in fact, wasted.”

David Lynch was not a filmmaker of “weird.” He was a filmmaker of compassion. His chief artistic tool was to embrace his instinctive connection to his subconscious. This slim volume is impossible to summarize.

All I can say is that it relaxed me, centered me, and opened me to a deep permission to pay attention to the impulses of my subconscious mind.

John Cassavetes is a kind of saint in the world of independent films. With his spouse, Gena Rowlands, he made films—A Woman Under the Influence, Faces, The Killing of a Chinese Bookie—that launched a revolution in American filmmaking.

This collection of Cassavetes’ writings and conversations opened my understanding of art and life at the deepest level. This is the quote that I’ve kept with me always: “[When you compromise your vision, you create] a lack of confidence in your innermost thoughts… These innermost thoughts become less and less a part of you and once you lose them then you don’t have anything else.” 

I recommend this book because it is one of the few works that systematically analyzes different facets of individual identity by illustrating how movie makers consciously and strategically prioritize the images they showcase onscreen.

Nothing we see is by coincidence nor accident and the authors remind me of the audience’s responsibility in remaining as active participants, constantly questioning rather than blindly accepting the images we see onscreen.

An editor of my book, Brian Neve has written extensively on the Hollywood Left, with many books, articles, and chapters devoted to filmmakers such as Cy Endfield, Elia Kazan, Robert Rossen, and Joseph Losey, or more broadly to politics and American cinema. A useful complement to the Ceplair & Englund volume, this astute, engaging, and empirically-grounded study explores how a generational cohort of radical and liberal creative practitioners—including Kazan, Losey, Rossen, Abraham Polonsky, Jules Dassin, John Huston, and Orson Welles—were energized by the political culture of the Depression era and sought, in different ways, to navigate the industrial and commercial constraints of Hollywood to produce socially-engaged films. This project was brutally stifled by the blacklist, with many filmmakers forced to choose between exile or collaboration. 

Another book focusing on the medium of film, but again the lessons to be learned about good storytelling are universal. Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick directed such classic Ealing comedies as The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, also the Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. After retiring from filmmaking in 1969, he spent nearly 25 years as a professor at CalArts in Los Angeles where he helped students to write better stories and communicate them effectively through the craft of filmmaking.

This book is compiled from Mackendrick's legacy of masterly handouts and lectures. One section I found incredibly insightful is his comparison of two versions of a key scene from the script of Sweet Smell of Success (initially written by Ernest Lehman and subsequently rewritten by Clifford Odets), seeing how increased tension between the characters is achieved.

Sets, props, and costumes are not only part of the historical film’s allure but play an important role in the construction of the historical narrative; to ignore this element of screen history is criminal. Sprengler’s book gives “visual pastness” the attention it deserves, delving into the form and function of costumes in Far From Heaven and the cars in Sin City (to name just two examples). Sprengler approaches the topic through the lens of nostalgia, adding another layer to the examination of history on screen. As someone who is fascinated by 1950s history and the representation of the 1950s on screen, Sprengler’s focus on this decade is a bonus. 

The year before Errol Flynn blew into Hollywood, the “pre-Code” era ended. What was the “pre-Code” era? It was the period in the early 1930s when Hollywood rode the cliff, making movies about sensational topics like adultery, pay-for-play, drug use, and more. Many of the pictures included a scene or two with leading ladies scantily clad and even braless. Leading men were often scoundrels.

This book entertainingly details both the point of view of studios struggling to remain relevant in the depths of the Great Depression by creating salacious products and the outcry from alarmed parents who took their kids to the movies only to cover their eyes and rush them back out again.

The author backs up his narrative with eye-popping photos illustrating just what was so shocking about the pre-Code era. This interesting period of Hollywood history ended abruptly and, unfortunately, with the puritanical “Production Code” that ushered… show more.

We’ll be honest. We don’t really remember the romantic drama Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. But we won’t forget this book by Dunne, who wrote the film with his wife, Joan Didion. This is a forthright look at the writer’s lot in Hollywood. It’s a manual for massaging egos and dealing with conflicting notes, told with bracing honesty.

Sometimes, you take a job because you need health insurance. Sometimes, a movie that starts out based on the tragic true story of newscaster Jessica Savitch becomes a glossy sudser in which she lives. Sometimes, a troubled project becomes a hit despite itself. That’s always show business.