Books like Kieslowski on Kieslowski — picked by fans

This book coined the maxim far and away the most quoted in Hollywood to this day: “Nobody knows anything.” I first read it the year before I broke in. My copy is heavily annotated with yellow highlighter and red pen; a black paperclip still marks the second of Goldman’s two capitalized maxims, “Screenplays are structure.” The value of this book to anyone wanting to understand – or survive in – Hollywood is that, ironically, Goldman, one of the most successful screenwriters and novelists in Hollywood history, knew almost everything, not only about screenwriting, but also the psychology, cautious care, and perilous feeding of actors, directors, executives, and the rest of the Hollywood zoo. It’s both a textbook and survival guide, illustrated with a veteran’s vivid stories about life behind the tinsel.

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.

Some Like It Hot, The Apartment, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard… Billy Wilder is my favourite filmmaker. I like the elegance of his storytelling and his bittersweet wit. In Wilder’s final years, Cameron Crowe conducted a series of interviews with the writer-director. From fleeing Nazi Germany to his admiration for Ernest Lubitsch, from the trials of working with Marilyn Monroe or Raymond Chandler to the joys of collaborating with Barbara Stanwyck, Jack Lemmon, and Charles Laughton, from his successes to his failures and on to the secret of what makes a good writing partner, Wilder needs little prodding to tell movie-making tales from Berlin to Paris to Hollywood.

As perfectly tragic as one of his Jazz Age characters, Fitzgerald drank himself to death before finishing this novel which in my opinion, could have been his best. Like Gatsby, Monroe Stahr is an eloquent, rich, and isolated character, pining for a mysterious woman. He is a hugely successful movie mogul in the golden age of Hollywood, and Fitzgerald’s contempt for the studio system’s treatment of writers is here on full satirical display. The sparse prose sparkles with diamond-like harshness and clarity as the doomed love affair plays out. I’m sure it's his least known novel since it is technically “unfinished,” but most editions publish Fitzgerald’s unfinished future chapters, his pass at the ending as well as his notes and outlines, making this a master class in novel writing.

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.” 

As an American film revolutionary, before there was Cassavetes, before there was Tarrantino, before there was Scorsese or Coppola or Ridley Scott or Christopher Nolan or Jane Campion or Todd Field—there was Elia Kazan. He ushered in a new post-World War II era of naturalism in acting. He gave us James Dean and Marlon Brando.

This book is culled from the actual diaries he kept during rehearsal and production for his theater and film projects. Windows into his hopes, his strategies, his self-doubts. As a creative person myself, I felt given permission to take ownership of my own ambitions, ideas, and fears.

The history of the Baltic Crusade cannot be understood in isolation from the Polish kingdom. This is the era when Poland recovers from the disasters begun by the Mongol invasions of the 1240s and begins its own eastward expansion.

As the title indicates, this is really the story of Casimir III, whose father arranged a Lithuanian marriage that brought peace on the eastern frontiers and later allowed him to expand toward Rus’ (especially Ukraine) when the minor states there collapsed. Casimir succeeded in everything except siring a legitimate male heir, even though that was the one task expected of every monarch in this era. He did leave behind a flourishing state, a powerful church, and a national goal of driving back those Germans (especially the Teutonic Knights) who had made great inroads into areas claimed as the national patrimony.

Yes, it’s almost a thousand pages long. But this sprawling magical historical novel by the Nobel Prize winner is one of the best books I’ve read in years. Following the rise and fall of the 18th-century Jewish mystic and would-be messiah, Jacob Frank, the novel paints a vivid picture of a vibrant multicultural society in Poland and beyond.

My Sister’s Mother is a family memoir set against the backdrop of forced evictions and deportations of Poles to forced labor camps in frozen Siberia. Russia invaded Poland two weeks after Germany did, and the two powers divided Poland between their countries. Soviet communists murdered thousands of Polish citizens, Polish military, and in 1940 deported hundreds of thousands of civilian Poles, in freezing cattle cars, to forced labor camps in Siberia.

Urbikas’ mother and older sister faced impossible circumstances imposed by Stalin’s brutal policies against Poles. The core theme focuses on motherhood, the relationship between a mother and her daughter, and how far a woman will go to survive and protect her child. Then, the story transitions into the epilogue of war for thousands of Poles: life in a displaced persons camp and growing up with inherited trauma and the challenges common to first-generation Polish immigrants.