What happens in the dark between the screen and the audience that makes movies so exciting to so many? Jon Boorstin believes that every movie is really three movies running at once: the "voyeuristic" movie (the logic of the film), the "vicarious" movie (the emotional hold of the film), and the "visceral" movie (the primal thrill the film elicits). Here he examines these elements using his own experiences as well as those of well-known film makers - from Hitchcock to Spielberg - to demonstrate how the moviemaking process works. He shows how film makers use light, space and sound to create a world; tells what makes an actor a star; explains why he thinks "Citizen Kane" is a great film and what he feels is wrong with the ending of "Fatal Attraction". The book is illustrated with stills from films and line-drawings of film techniques.

The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work

Humor & Entertainment

Boorstin, Jon

Movies

HARPER/COLLINS

Part urban history, part thriller, part character study, this mesmerizing novel delves into the young life experiences of William James, the seminal nineteenth-century American thinker whose ideas have so profoundly influenced American thought. After suffering a devastating mental collapse at the age of thirty, James emerged from the ordeal more confident and focused, but no one has been able to account for the transformation. Author Jon Boorstin imagines those missing months, taking James on an adventure in the rough streets of nineteenth-century Manhattan. In that bustling milieu James is forced to test his ideas against the harsh realities of an unforgiving city coming into its own. An evocative re-creation of Old New York and an illuminating look at a young man on the path to greatness, BoorstinÂ's novel is spellbinding literary entertainment.

The Newsboys' Lodging-House: or The Confessions of William James--A Novel

Literature & Fiction

United States

Penguin??Books

Considers what happened in the life of foremost nineteenth-century American psychologist William James in the months after he suffered a devastating mental collapse, in a story that takes him to the side of street urchins in New York, where he works to save a troubled nine-year-old. 25,000 first printing.

The Newsboys' Lodging-House: or The Confessions of William James , A novel

Genre Fiction

VIKING

A filmmaker presents a satirical novel about Hollywood that follows the career of a young screenwriter whose script attracts a star and a top studio head, which turns out to be a mixed blessing

Pay or Play

Carroll & Graf Pub.

Mabel and Me is a novel about the Movies―a sharply observed, historically accurate, deliciously intimate story set in the earliest days of motion pictures. Beautifully told, this is a tale of Mack, his coming of age with the Movies, and his passionate, destructive, and ultimately liberating love for one of the very first movie stars, the sweetheart of slapstick―Mabel Normand. Theirs is the story of the birth of the modern movie age. It’s a story they lived together. Day in, day out. Until they didn’t. Mabel Normand was the model for the modern woman: her brief life, from slapstick girl to box-office bonanza to drug addict to modern savvy star, embodied the evolution of the Movies. She was the Queen of Comedy, a flapper a decade before flappers, the first to have her name emblazoned in the title of a picture, the first director of Charlie Chaplin’s tramp―not to mention the person who convinced Mack Sennett to give Chaplin his first break, immediately recognizing his comic genius. Mabel was the first woman allowed to be both beautiful and funny, the model for the modern comedic star, and she was shockingly sexy at the time. Watching Mabel on screen was like “being slapped in the face with a perfumed glove.” Author Jon Boorstin portrays her love affairs―all fact-based, particularly her defining, explosive relationship with Mack Sennett―with humor, poignancy, and drama. Mabel and Me takes us directly inside the world of the birth of the Movies, inside the world of Hollywood 1912. We become obsessed with motion pictures, in love with their mesmerizing power. Entertaining, heartfelt, and unexpected, Boorstin’s novel delivers us to the first moments of filmmaking and recreates the sense of all that was happening on film and behind the scenes for the very first time. Written in a voice that’s side by side with Hollywood’s premier female movie star, one that’s close to her, and from a perspective that’s often privy to what Normand is thinking―even when she starred with Chaplin in the first feature-length comedy ever made. About Jon Boorstin: His first novel, Pay or Play, was called “the definitive send-up of Hollywood” by Publishers Weekly in a coveted starred review. His second, The Newsboys’ Lodging-House, won the New York Society Library Award for Historical Fiction. Boorstin has also written a book of practical film theory, Making Movies Work, which is used in film schools all over the world. The work of an Oscar®-nominated documentary filmmaker and longtime screenwriter and producer, Mabel and Me is the culmination of Boorstin’s lifelong affair with the Movies.

Mabel and Me: a Novel About the Movies

Angel City Press

MAKING MOVIES WORK is a fascinating and accessible guide for both filmmakers and serious film fans. It is about how filmmakers think about film. "Through thoughtful examination of the filmmaker's art, Jon Boorstin enhances our sense of enjoyment and appreciation of the results.--Robert Redford.

Making Movies Work: Thinking Like a Filmmaker

Silman-James Pr

Pay or Play, now in its first paperback edition, is a wickedly funny satire of the Hollywood film industry and its peculiar marriage of vision and ambition that breeds great accomplishment-and humiliating catastrophe. Screenwriter Elmo Zwalt, his psyche "like a clenched fist," was living on peanut butter and bananas atop the Hollywood Freeway when he finally finished his Very Good Script, The Agonizer. Better than Shakespeare, or even Ben Hecht, it grabbed you by the throat and hauled you panting and screaming through ninety minutes of sex and violence. Elmo wanted to direct it, but so did every director who wanted to gross a hundred million domestic, including Chris Parrott, the lauded auteur of the sorts of films that critics called "wrenching." Then the movie is made-and Elmo finds himself in bizarre company as his script goes from concept to reality. Led by his agent, Jack Doberman, formerly the night man in the mailroom at Consolidated Creativity, Elmo pinwheels through the Hollywood firmament of silky studio execs; conniving agents; desperate producers; control-freak stars; a documentary director snatched from his teaching post at a Vermont junior college, whose documentary about plywood, through believable twists and turns, wins an Oscar; and a host of other unforgettable Tinseltown characters. Hollywood insiders like to say that making the movie deal is harder than making the movie. But, as Elmo learns, there are always exceptions.

Contemporary

Siles Pr

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boorstin, Jon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Boorstin, Jon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Boorstin, Jon. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

The Hollywood Eye: What Makes Movies Work

The Newsboys' Lodging-House: or The Confessions of William James--A Novel

The Newsboys' Lodging-House: or The Confessions of William James , A novel

Pay or Play

Mabel and Me: a Novel About the Movies

Making Movies Work: Thinking Like a Filmmaker

Pay or Play