Film Acting

For anyone who has ever wanted to take an acting class, "this is the best book on acting written in the last twenty years" (David Mamet, from the Introduction). This book describes a technique developed and refined by the authors, all of them young actors, in their work with Pulitzer...

Academy Award-winning actress and New York Times bestselling author Shirley MacLaine shares a dazzling memoir in photographs, chronicling her extraordinary life with 150+ images from her personal archive With more than seventy years on the silver screen, Shirley MacLaine has, as she says, seen...

A revealing and refreshing memoir of Hollywood in the 1970s, written and read by Susanna Moore. In 1963 after the death of her mother, seventeen-year-old Susanna Moore leaves her home in Hawai’i with no money, no belongings, and no prospects to live with her Irish grandmother in Philadelphia...

Fifty years ago, a little boy was cast in a movie with some of Hollywood's brightest stars. The movie: It's a Wonderful Life; the boy: Jimmy Hawkins; today, he tells his story. Through personal recollection, careful research, and interviews with cast and crew, actor Jimmy Hawkins, who played four-year-old Tommy Bailey, takes you behind the scenes for a first-hand look at the American movie classic It's a Wonderful Life.

Cuando Carrie Fisher redescubrió los diarios que había escrito durante el rodaje de La Guerra de las Galaxias, la primera película de la trilogía Star Wars, le asombró descubrir unos ingenuos poemas de amor y unas cándidas reflexiones que apenas reconocía. Hoy Carrie Fisher ha pasado a la historia como actriz e icono pop, pero en 1976 solo era una chica de diecinueve años perdidamente enamorada de su compañero en la pantalla, Harrison Ford.

A sweeping, witty, and wise novel following an actress and a writer-director—told through the plays they make together and the time they spend apart You could probably run cities on the energy generated between directors like him and actresses like her. When Frida Slattery and John Reddan meet...

Created by established Chicago actor and teacher Chris Agos, Acting in Chicago demystifies the question of how to earn a full-time living as an actor. Learn about the seven ways Chicago actors make money actually acting, how much career actors can earn, agents, casting directors, essential investments to make (and which to skip), the actors' union, and much, much more. This edition adds new information on self-taped auditions, how Chicago actors can prepare for a move to Los Angeles, and how to get a child actor into the business.

For readers of David Nicholls and Sally Rooney comes a new love story that's at once tender and electrifying—told by everyone but the main characters. When Clara and Seb first cross paths in a London square, it’s the start of something exciting. Clara, an aspiring director stuck in an...

Recommended by agents and acting coaches, Acting in Chicago, 4th Edition demystifies the question of how to build a rewarding, sustainable, and profitable acting career. Everything you need to make a full-time living as a Midwest-based actor is at your fingertips in this updated edition.

The riveting story of the rivalry between the two most renowned actresses of the nineteenth century: legendary Sarah Bernhardt, whose eccentricity on and off the stage made her the original diva, and mystical Eleonora Duse, who broke all the rules to popularize the natural style of acting we...

When Rupert Murdoch, executive chairman, News Corporation, blew up more than $870 million buying Star TV from Richard Li in the early 1990s, analysts were dismayed. Why on earth had Murdoch invested in a pan-Asian broadcaster that was neither fish nor fowl? More than twenty-five years later...

A cinephile's dream: the chance to follow legendary director Woody Allen throughout the creation of a film--from inception to premiere--and to enjoy his reflections on some of the finest artists in the history of cinema. Eric Lax has been with Woody Allen almost every step of the way. He...

From the celebrated film critic and author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film--an essential work on the preeminent, indispensable movie directors and the ways in which their work has forged, and continues to forge, the landscape of modern film. Directors operate behind the scenes, managing...

An Esquire Best Book About Hollywood A USA TODAY Best Book of 2021 “A lovely and loving book.”—Will Schwalbe, New York Times bestselling author of The End of Your Life Book Club "I'm not sure I have ever read a book about movies that is as tender and open-hearted as Films of Endearment...

Bestselling author A. E. Hotchner's intimate account of his 53-year friendship with his pal Paul Newman. A. E. Hotchner first met Paul Newman in 1955 when the virtually unknown actor assumed the lead role in Hotchner’s first television play, based on an Ernest Hemingway story. The project...

RYAN O’NEAL AND FARRAH FAWCETT. One of the most storied love affairs in Hollywood history, their romance has captivated fans and media alike for more than three decades. Fans of each other from afar, Ryan and Farrah met through her husband, Lee Majors, and fell passionately in love. Soon...

Only one performance style has dominated the lexicon of the casual moviegoer: "Method acting." The first reception-based analysis of film acting, Imagining the Method investigates how popular understandings of the so-called Method—what its author Justin Rawlins calls "methodness"—created an exclusive brand for white, male actors while associating such actors with rebellion and marginalization. Drawing on extensive archival research, the book maps the forces giving shape to methodness and policing its boundaries.

Jeff Corey (1914-2002) made a name for himself in the 1940s as a character actor in films like The Killers (1946). Everything changed in 1951, when he was summoned before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Corey refused to name names and was promptly blacklisted, which forced him to walk away from a vibrant livelihood as an actor and embark on a career as one of the industry's most revered acting instructors. In Improvising Out Loud: My Life Teaching Hollywood How to Act, Corey recounts his extraordinary story.

Even as actresses become increasingly marginalized by Hollywood, French cinema is witnessing an explosion of female talent - a Golden Age unlike anything the world has seen since the days of Stanwyck, Hepburn, Davis, and Garbo. In France, the joy of acting is alive and well. Scores of French actresses are doing the best work of their lives in movies tailored to their star images and unique personalities. Yet virtually no one this side of the Atlantic even knows about them. Viewers who feel shortchanged by Hollywood will be thrilled to discover The Beauty of the Real.

Despite increasing corporate mergers and bottom-line thinking, the entertainment business will never function like a bank or an insurance company because it is an industry rooted in imagination. Rules are meant to be broken. The best work is often produced in an environment where plans change by the minute and nothing seems to make sense. To wit, those who choose this profession must alter preconceived notions of work itself, sometimes discovering that fantasy and horror describe both movie genres and life on the job.