books about films?

[matt35mm]

Moi aussi, in preparation for Ms. Vachon's visit to San Francisco.

Yo también.

Wait, also in preparation for her appearance there or just reading the book?

[MacGuffin]

Moi aussi, in preparation for Ms. Vachon's visit to San Francisco.

Yo también.

Wait, also in preparation for her appearance there or just reading the book?

I haven't heard about her coming to L.A., so I'm just copying mod.

[matt35mm]

I haven't heard about her coming to LA, so I'm just copying mod.

Oh.  God, Mac, do you always have to wait to hear about what's going on?  Why don't you bother to search information out?

http://www.booksoup.com/authorevents.asp

Skip down to September 28th.  She'll be there at 7pm.  Have fun.

[MacGuffin]

God, Mac, do you always have to wait to hear about what's going on?  Why don't you bother to search information out?

Because the LA Times only had book signing listings up until Sept. 22nd in the Book Review.

[matt35mm]

God, Mac, do you always have to wait to hear about what's going on?  Why don't you bother to search information out?

Because the LA Times only had book signing listings up until Sept. 22nd in today's Book Review.

(Sigh)  You're welcome.

I kid... I kid... I bow down to you as King of Information at XIXAX.

[modage]

i dont think i'm going to see her, (even though it's only $10 and they're showing Boys Dont Cry too) but i did enjoy the book.  hope to read Shooting to Kill ASAP.

[Ravi]

Please stop building quote ziggurats.

[modage]

A KILLER LIFE: INDIE PRODUCER CHRISTINE VACHON - Mon Sept 25 - 7pm

Special 2 for 1 ticket offer. Buy one ticket online or at the box office and get a 2nd free at the box office!

Come see Christine Vachon's Academy Award winning film BOYS DON'T CRY on the big screen then stick around post-screening when she will take your questions from the stage. Afterwards Vachon will sign copies of her new book A KILLER LIFE: HOW AN INDEPENDENT FILM PRODUCER SURVIVES DEALS AND DISASTERS IN HOLLYWOOD AND BEYOND, available for sale that evening in the Walter Reade lobby.  http://www.filmlinc.com/wrt/onsale/akillerlife.html

[MacGuffin]

How was the wine and cheese?

[matt35mm]

How was the wine and cheese?

... not that good...

[MacGuffin]

Vachon produces a real-life page turner
Source: Hollywood Reporter

NEW YORK -- It's hard to know how Christine Vachon does it. Surely it's not easy being the mother of a 7-year-old daughter, producing four films in the summer alone (including longtime collaborator Todd Haynes' star-filled Bob Dylan-inspired epic "I'm Not There") and promoting her new autobiography with a title that sums up her attempt to juggle it all: "A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond."

She has been working this hard for more than two decades and there still is much on the horizon at her Killer Films, which she leads with partners Pamela Koffler and Katie Roumel and primary funding from John Wells. Her upcoming projects include Julian Schnabel's "The Lonely Doll," a biopic of children's author Dare Wright; an adaptation of Brad Land's college hazing memoir "Goat"; and Helen Hunt's directorial debut, "Then She Found Me," in which the actress will play a school teacher.

In her book, indie film guru John Pierson, top film execs like Bob Berney and directors including Mark Romanek and John Cameron Mitchell have contributed odes to her perseverance. Even former Focus Features co-president David Linde added a few pages, despite a section where Vachon details her grudge over his company's "Far From Heaven" Oscar campaign.

"In a business filled with narcissistic, deceitful misanthropes, Christine is the antidote: a truthful voice driven by pure passion for film," says longtime collaborator and producer Ted Hope, who will be interviewing Vachon on Oct. 19 at the Hamptons International Film Festival.

Vachon's tough, no-nonsense style even has inspired grudging respect from those she has battled, including Harvey Weinstein with whom she argued over the final cut of Haynes' "Velvet Goldmine."

"I feel like on every movie, Killer Films has to be ruthless," she says. "But to me, ruthlessness implies one goal above all others, though, and usually in the kind of movies we make it's a lot more complicated than that. It's about protecting the filmmakers' vision but also massaging the talent, making sure the financiers are happy ..."

Despite her reputation, Vachon bends over backward to be diplomatic in her book, and often withholds names to protect the not so innocent. "A lot of people are surprised by how it's sort of a tell-all, but not in a way that exacts revenge," she says, yet jokes that "my last book will be posthumous."

Vachon worked on "Killer Life" with co-writer Austin Bunn for about three years. "I don't think either of us expected us to be such a long, drawn-out process, but just as we were about to conclude it something else would come up," she says. "Otherwise, it would have encompassed the shooting of Todd's movie, the release of Tommy O'Haver's 'An American Crime' and (Tom Kalin's true crime tale) 'Savage Grace.' There was just too much." She did manage to include a chapter expressing her understandable dismay over producing the second Truman Capote biopic, Douglas McGrath's "Infamous."

The book follows how Vachon's expertise has grown with the industry. "There's a lot more equity financiers who are funding at every single level," she says. "I know a lot more about how to mix foreign financing, soft money or German funds with equity and our distributors than I ever thought I would need to know."

"I'm Not There" came together this way after many stops and starts. "It was just a million different pieces and very hard to keep it all on track," she says. "Now everything's fine." But when asked what advice she would give to aspiring producers, her game face disappears. "Don't do it," she sighs.

[MacGuffin]

Book Review:

Hollywood Monster Rampage: Art vs. Egos
By JANET MASLIN; New York Times

David Mamet's "Bambi vs. Godzilla" takes its title from a two-minute animated short (actually "Bambi Meets Godzilla") in which the monster crushes the innocent little fawn. This would make a fine metaphor for the way the film business treats artists if it didn't mean miscasting Mr. Mamet in Bambi's role. As the lacerating essays in this uneven but icily hilarious collection make clear, he is far better suited to stomping on Tokyo.

"Bambi vs. Godzilla" is devoted to pet peeves, some of them standard. No surprises here: Mr. Mamet abhors crass producers, meaningless spectacles, focus groups, ambitious studio drones and specious screenwriting. About one particularly bad sequel, he says: "Jewish law states that there are certain crimes that cannot be forgiven, as they cannot be undone. It lists murder and adultery. I add this film."

That Jewish law is invoked more than once here. And the book repeats itself on certain points, like Mr. Mamet's boundless admiration of "The Godfather." Perhaps the repackaging of redundant journalism in book form (much of this material comes from his column for The Guardian of London, though some originally appeared in Harper's Magazine) belongs on the same list of transgressions, but no matter. Mr. Mamet writes with insight, idiosyncrasy and a Godzillian imperviousness to opposition.

Like Sidney Lumet's "Making Movies" and William Goldman's books of advice on filmmaking, Mr. Mamet describes the process from the ground up, with a keen eye for evidence of the absurd. He claims to have seen a sign on a movie set reading, "Gum is for principal cast members only," since this is a business that never forgets about pecking order. And after promising to offend several groups with one thesis, he suggests that the hallmarks of Asperger's syndrome ("early precocity, a great ability to maintain masses of information, a lack of ability to mix with groups in age-appropriate ways") add up to the job description of a movie director.

Mr. Mamet, who has nothing but disgust for the emphasis on backstory and characterization that can turn a movie into mush, also notices how much the idiom of the modern screenplay overlaps with that of the personals column, so that a character may be described as "beautiful, smart, funny, likes long walks and dogs, affectionate, kind, honest, sexy." This filler, he says, winds up "replacing dialogue and camera angles, the only two aspects of a screenplay actually of use."

Much of "Bambi vs. Godzilla" is devoted to separating useful and useless aspects of the filmmaking process. "It is enough to drive one to the fainting couch," he says about Hollywood's paralyzing practice of making films of increasing expense and diminishing worth. When he sees a poster that lists the names of 18 producers, he wonders whether "the film, perhaps, is being made no longer to attract the audience but to buttress or advance the position of the executive." If this kind of bureaucrat has replaced the old-fashioned intuitive mogul, "it is not that the fox has taken over the henhouse but, if I may, that the doorman has taken over the bordello."

With entertaining bitterness Mr. Mamet skewers the kind of person destined to succeed in this corporate culture. And a figure skewered by him winds up sounding as tough and treacherous as someone from a Mamet play. "The young bureaucrat-in-training" is apt to learn "that success comes not from pleasing the audience but from placating his superiors until that time it is reasoned effective to betray them." As for the screenwriter-in-training at film school, "one can study marching, the entry-level skill of the military, until one shines at it as has none other," he writes. "This will not, however, make it more likely that one will be tapped to be the Secretary of the Army."

If such opinions are apt to disappoint anyone looking to Mr. Mamet for career advice, they will delight those who share his cynicism. Is there a worthwhile message to be found within the big, vacuous blockbuster? Yes: "You are a member of a country, a part of a system capable of wasting two hundred million dollars on an hour and a half of garbage. You must be somebody." He finds this brand of wastefulness equally conspicuous in current moviemaking and military strategy.

If Hollywood's idea of entertainment is actually "tincture of art," and if studio executives "want, in effect, to find the script for the hit of last year," how can a serious filmmaker stay afloat? By recognizing the vital difference between stimulation and drama, for one thing. ("One may sit in front of the television for five hours, but after 'King Lear' one goes home.") By resisting demands for arbitrary alterations in one's work, the kinds of changes that raise doubts about the work's seriousness. What would happen, he asks, to an architect who was similarly accommodating? ("Would you mind moving the staircase? Thank you. Now would you mind moving the skylight?") And by understanding the etiquette of betrayal, Hollywood style. "Should the project go awry," he writes, "you will be notified by a complete lack of contact with those in whose hands its administration has rested."

Some of "Bambi vs. Godzilla" is painfully contorted. ("What shibboleth, you wonder, will I list to augment your umbrage?") Some of it goes nowhere. But most of this sharp, savvy book is amusing and reassuring. Somebody with a keen knowledge of gamesmanship knows exactly how Hollywood's games are played. And refuses to play by the rules.

[The Perineum Falcon]

Is anyone aware of any books on production design, costume, hair, make-up, etc and all that goes into it?

The more engaging the better, biographical or technical, but it ultimately doesn't matter.

Also, I'd like to recommend to any of you interested in making film, please pick up a copy of Josef von Sternberg's Fun in a Chinese Laundry. It may be listed as an "auto-biography," but he speaks very little of his life before film, and doesn't give specific accounts of each of his films, so prior knowledge of his work is hardly neccessary (although, you should REALLY pick up that new Criterion box set). He gives an entertaining history of his personal practices with the medium, all the while imparting some very good advice on everything from Lighting to how to deal with actors.

[Champion Souza]

I got something out of this book about Production Designers.  It's an interview book - mostly anecdotes but some theory too.

By Design

[The Perineum Falcon]

Thanks a lot!