100 Books Like Making Movies

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.

“You never really succeed,” Andrew W. Marlowe tells the editors of Tales from the Script, “You always fail at a higher level.” So: first you can’t finish your script, then you can’t get it read, then you can’t sell it, then you can’t get it made, then it’s made – but badly. Or, in Marlowe’s case, it’s made into Air Force One and you’re asked to repeat the trick. “Even when you get to the top there’s this realization: ‘Okay, the view is great, but tomorrow I gotta get up and start climbing the mountain again.’” If you find that depressing, don’t be a screenwriter. If you see it as a challenge, read on…

I must have read a hundred books about story structure over the years. Somehow, perhaps because of some story-related blind spot on my part, none of them ever seemed to stick.

My problem was always the middle. Middles can sag. It seems that a story's interior becomes little more than the wasteland a protagonist must traverse to get from the mystery of a beginning to the ultimate challenge of an ending.

Yorke's Into The Woods celebrates the middle. He reminds us that the essential crux of a story lies in its midpoint. Right at the heart of an effective story, he argues, lies a fundamental transformation, a change so great that the protagonist emerges with new powers into a new world.

Furthermore, by analysing stories in five acts rather than three, he allows for an elegant symmetry in which the first and fifth, second, and fourth acts mirror one another.… show more.

Once upon a time, in a small apartment in Brooklyn, an unemployed, unproduced, unagented writer sat down to start a script. Three days later he finished it. Twelve months of rewrites and he sold it. Four years later it was made. And a year after that it won the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay. But, Michael Arndt notes in his modest introduction to the shooting script, this isn’t “a rewards-of-virtue narrative”; it’s a story about the razor-thin line between success and failure – and how, as Dwayne says in the movie, you should “do what you love and fuck the rest”. Words to live – and write – by.

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.

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.”

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.