Film Business

The co-founder and longtime president of Pixar updates and expands his 2014 New York Times bestseller on creative leadership, reflecting on the management principles that built Pixar’s singularly successful culture, and on all he learned during the past nine years that allowed Pixar to retain its creative culture while continuing to evolve.

Kate Telman is a senior executive officer in The Business, a powerful and massively discreet transglobal organisation whose origins predate the Christian Church. Financially transparent, internally democratic it wants to buy its own state in order to acquire a seat at the United Nations. Kate's job is to keep abreast of current technological developments and her global reach encompasses Silicon Valley to the remote Himalayas.

Robert Iger became CEO of The Walt Disney Company in 2005, during a difficult time. Competition was more intense than ever, and technology was changing faster than at any time in the company’s history. His vision came down to three clear ideas: Recommit to the concept that quality matters, embrace technology instead of fighting it, and think bigger - think global - and turn Disney into a stronger brand in international markets.

Upstart sheds light on the many successes and some of the challenges involved in navigating a top creative business in an ever-changing technological landscape. While it provides insights for those within the industry, this book also offers broader lessons intended for all entrepreneurs and business leaders.

Driven, reserved businesswoman Mackenzie Watson has one goal—take over her family company and secure her little sister's future. The only wrinkle is her late grandmother's decree that her company's CEO must be married. Adding marriage into Mack's well-ordered life is a recipe for disaster. Her oh-so-logical solution? She'll just hire a woman to be her wife for a year. Besides, maybe a little chaos is exactly what she needs . . .

Whether a novice curious about the cartoon production process, a visual arts student who has not yet experienced that big break, or a seasoned professional looking for valuable insight, Animation Development is the go-to guide for creating the perfect pitch.

The Business is a tale of drugs, prostitution, and a young girl's fight for survival - against all the odds. Imelda Dooley is scared. She's played hard and fast and now she's been caught. She's pregnant and now she's on her own. Her father, not a man to mess with, will see that somebody pays for this. And it's not going to be her. So Imelda Dooley tells a lie. A lie that literally causes murders. When Mary Dooley's husband is killed in the night's events, she knows she must graft to keep the family afloat. And graft she does.

When did documentaries get glamorous? Documentary Superstars looks at the history of documentaries and traces their transition from hands-off to in your face. Exclusive interviews with Michael Moore, Morgan Spurlock, Errol Morris, George Clooney, Sacha Baron Cohen, Morgan Freeman, Al Gore, and more of the biggest names in the field show the impact of the documentary style on mainstream movies and on our society.

Right now, you may have the secret to changing the way people look at your business. If you are looking for new ways to drive traffic to your business, this is the book for you. It may be you want an understanding of how the video marketplace works and how to improve your current business processes. This book will reveal many great ways to make your business better and to expand your viewership in short order.

The Directors, Take Three offers dozens of masterful insights on the craft of directing from such renowned filmmakers as Robert Altman, Wes Craven, Alan Parker, Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, and Barry Levinson. Here are details of their experiences making a variety of classic films from Nashville to Nightmare on Elm Street, Rain Man to Raging Bull, and Pee Wee's Big Adventure to Schindler's List.

As the cofounder of Creative Artists Agency, Michael Ovitz earned a reputation for ruthless negotiation, brilliant strategy, and fierce loyalty to his clients. He reinvented the role of the agent and helped shape the careers of hundreds of A-list entertainers, directors, and writers. But this personal history is much more than a fascinating account of celebrity friendships and bare-knuckled deal making. It's also an underdog's story: How did a middle-class kid from Encino work his way into the William Morris mailroom and eventually become the most powerful person in Hollywood?

After Steve Jobs was unceremoniously dismissed from Apple, he turned his attention to a little-known graphics art company that he owned called Pixar. One day, out of the blue, Jobs called Lawrence Levy, a Harvard-trained lawyer and Silicon Valley executive to whom he had never spoken before, in the hope of persuading Levy to help him get Pixar on the right track. What Levy found in Pixar was a company on the verge of failure. To Pixar and Beyond is the extraordinary story of what happened next.

A single dad, a model, and a comedian walk into a bar.... They’re all Owen Brodie. It’s only funny if you aren’t the hilarious struggling comedian who has been hired to be his son’s nanny for the stand-up tour.

Act: The Modern Actor’s Handbook is the result of 30 years of one of North America’s most renowned acting teachers teaching some of the world's most talented screen actors. This is a full tour through the concepts at the heart of Rotenberg’s techniques: states of being, primaries and secondaries, images that you elaborate up or distill down, modifiers, actions and beats, and more. Although his methods loosely draw on the great acting teachers like Hagen and Meisner back to Stanislavski, he teaches new techniques suited to the best of today’s screen actors.

While scores of books have been written about Elvis Presley, this is the first meticulously researched biography of Tom Parker written by someone who knew him personally. And for anyone truly interested in the performer many consider the greatest and most influential of the 20th century, it is impossible to understand how Elvis came to be such a phenomenon without examining the life and mind of Parker, the man who virtually controlled Elvis' every move.

Unlike their younger brother, André, whose star as a comedian is rising, neither Dwayne nor Brick Duquesne is having luck with his career - and they're unluckier still in love. Former child star Dwayne has just been fired from his latest acting role and barely has enough money to get by after paying child support to his spiteful former lover, while Brick struggles to return to his uninspiring white-collar job after suffering the dual blows of a health emergency and a nasty breakup with the woman he still loves.

This book is for everyone who's ever wondered if there isn't supposed to be more to life. 130 pages that will leave you inspired, hopeful, energized about life, and filled with calm and clarity. It's about a life-changing evening spent in a small cafe that has three unusual questions on the back of the menu. Why are you here? Do you fear death? Are you fulfilled?

While other books give you tips on how to “write funny,” this book offers a paradigm shift in understanding the mechanics and art of comedy and the proven, practical tools that help writers translate that understanding into successful commercial scripts. The Hidden Tools of Comedy unlocks the unique secrets and techniques of writing comedy. Kaplan deconstructs sequences in popular films and TV that work and don’t work and explains what tools were used (or should have been used).

In How Star Wars Conquered the Universe, veteran journalist Chris Taylor traces the series from the difficult birth of the original film through its sequels, the franchise’s death and rebirth, the prequels, and the preparations for a new trilogy. Taylor provides portraits of the friends, writers, artists, producers, and marketers who labored behind the scenes to turn Lucas’s idea into a legend.

Today's world wants to know you and the real story behind why you do what you do. Whether you have a product to sell, a company mission to share or an audience to entertain, people are far more likely to engage if you deliver a well-crafted story with an emotional core. Bobette Buster is a story consultant, lecturer and screenwriter who works with major studios and in top film programmes all over the world. She shares the tools used by some of the world's best storytellers and helps you apply them to your own.