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This weekend, two new genre movies open in theaters nationwide: A Good Day to Die Hard, Bruce Willis' worst John McClane adventure yet, and Beautiful Creatures, the latest young-adult adaptation that's hoping to catch some of that residual Twilight momentum. Both films serve very specific audiences—the former caters to adrenaline fiends who prefer mindless action over story or character, while the latter taps into the common fantasy of meeting Prince Charming as evil witches try to stifle the romance.
They're both the kind of movie, that, if you don't have a strong background in cinema, could keep you engaged for the duration. They're loud and bright enough. But the more you watch, the sharper your senses become. You evolve as a filmgoer and what entertained you as a kid ceases to hold your attention. You attain more refined appreciation by watching lots of movies. But an important means to determine what you should watch (and how you should watch it) is reading about cinema.
Whether you're interested in reading backstage stories straight from the filmmakers' and actors' mouths, or learned criticism from seasoned professionals, the following list of 30 Non-Fiction Books About Movies to Read Before You Die has exactly what you'll need.
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Written by Matt Barone (@MBarone) and Ross Scarano (@RossScarano)
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Hollywood Babylon
Author: Kenneth Anger
Original publication date: 1965
Gay experimental filmmaker Kenneth Anger is a force of nature. He made his first short, Fireworks, when he was just 20. Its homoerotic imagery—including a roman candle bursting through a fly, and gang of sailors—got Anger arrested on obscenity charges. The case eventually came before the California Supreme Court. It was decided that, duh, film is art.
Anger, who was born in Santa Monica, grew up in the shadow of Hollywood. The secrets and glamour and gossip intoxicated the young artist. Hollywood Babylon, a tome of true lies, "exposes" scandals dating as far back as the silent era.
As this is Kenneth Anger, a famous conjurer, it can be difficult to tell what's apocryphal and what's fact. But it's all melodramatic and gorgeous, like a heavily made-up star demanding her close-up. —RS
Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock 'N' Roll Generation Saved Hollywood
Author: Peter Biskind
Original publication date: March 3, 1998
Nowadays, we all know legendary filmmakers like Martin Scorsese, Francis Ford Coppola, and Dennis Hopper for their important, long-lasting contributions to cinema. Back in the 1960s and '70s, though, they were young, hungry, free-wheeling directors on the rise, snorting cocaine, partying hard, and working even harder to establish themselves as Hollywood's most promising new wave.
The days when The Godfather and Mean Streets were as-yet-unreleased passion projects are explored in serious detail by Biskind's lively Easy Riders, Raging Bulls. The author spoke to practically every major player from that era, including Warren Beatty, Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich, and William Friedkin; through a seamless mixture of his own reporting and their candid words, Easy Riders, Raging Bulls sheds light on the days when Hollywood's new class was on the verge of game-changing greatness. —MB
Pictures at a Revolution
Author: Mark Harris
Original publication date: February 18, 2008
Mark Harris' Picture at a Revolution does more for behind-the-scenes insight than any DVD or Blu-ray special features could ever do. The former Entertainment Weekly editor (and current EW columnist) focuses on five motion pictures that signaled a change in Hollywood's ideologies and major studios' ways of functioning: The Graduate, Bonnie and Clyde, the disastrous Doctor Doolittle, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and In the Heat of the Night.
Before their respective productions started, Hollywood was in bad shape, facing stiff competition from European film markets and desperately seeking a new renaissance. As Pictures at a Revolution elaborates upon, the American Civil Rights Movement and other social struggles triggered a powerful surge of fearless creativity, mostly channeled through artists like Warren Beatty, Sidney Poitier, and Mike Nichols, all of whom Harris profiles here. —MB
Shock Value: How a Few Eccentric Outsiders Gave Us Nightmares, Conquered Hollywood, and Invented Modern Horror
Author: Jason Zinoman
Original publication date: July 7, 2011
Even the most casual of horror fans know a lot about the classics Night of the Living Dead, The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Halloween, and Carrie. There's certainly been no shortage of analytical and historical books written about all of them, not to mention countless TV specials and documentaries. But nothing that came before Jason Zinoman's Shock Value compares to its endlessly revelatory nature. By the time you reach its final pages, you'll reach its finish line with more firsthand filmmaker's anecdotes than ever heard before.
Zinoman, a New York Times critic/reporter, had the privilege of spending hours with directors like Wes Craven, Tobe Hooper, George A. Romero, and Brian De Palma. From those recollections, the author creates in the reader new contexts, thematic importance, and historical relevancy for those filmmakers most significant projects.
The book's strongest section covers De Palma's Carrie, delving deep into the reclusive director's previously concealed mommy-and-daddy issues to illuminate his penchant for voyeuristic visuals. —MB
Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film
Author: Peter Biskind
Original publication date: March 3, 1998
Peter Biskind is one hard-nosed, intrepid Hollywood reporter. A veteran writer for outlets like the now-defunct Premiere, Rolling Stone, and Vanity Fair, Biskind knows how to pull unfiltered, all-encompassing anecdotes and stories from all of his sources.
For Down and Dirty Pictures, he zeroed in on the gods of the Sundance Film Festival—Robert Redford, Quentin Tarantino, and Steven Soderbergh—to recount the late 1980s/early '90s rise of American independent film. And his reporting is top-notch, unveiling all of the trials, tribulations, disappointments, and victories of the filmmakers and move-makers who turned movies like Reservoir Dogs, sex, lies, and videotape, and Clerks into modern classics.
Which brings us to the real star of Down and Dirty Pictures: Harvey Weinstein, the hard-nosed, bullish, brilliant marketing and negotiating mastermind behind Miramax, and now The Weinstein Company (along with his brother, Bob). Packed with firsthand accounts of Weinstein's greatest wig-outs, backdoor deals, and emotional terrorist moments (recalled by those who lived through them, including Harvey himself), Biskind's book captivates with its fly-on-the-wall access. —MB
Rebels on the Backlot: Six Maverick Directors and How They Conquered the Hollywood Studio System
Author: Sharon Waxman
Original publication date: February 1, 2005
They're six of the most exciting directors working today: Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, David Fincher, David O. Russell, Paul Thomas Anderson, and Spike Jonze. Before they went on to win Oscars, drop classics, and influence generations of filmmaking newbies, that group of cinematic shotcallers all broke into Hollywood's consciousness during the same whirlwind decade: the 1990s.
The New York Times reporter Sharon Waxman kept close tabs on those gents throughout that decade, and the result is Rebels on the Backlot, a frank and entertaining look at how movies like Boogie Nights, Pulp Fiction, Traffic, and Being John Malkovich went from buzzed-about screenplays to seminal uses of celluloid. —MB
Midnight Movies
Authors: J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum
Original publication date: 1983
There's no greater cathedral for adventurous, genre movie aficionados than a crowded, rowdy theater at the stroke of midnight. It's the time when all bets are off, as the projectionist puts on daring, left-of-center films to the delight of folks who worship figures like Dr. Frank-N-Furter and Divine.
The "midnight movie" is a phenomenon that goes back decades and still thrives inside urban art-house venues and at film festivals. In this joyous, impeccably researched look at cinema's weirdest craze, J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum use key movies like David Lynch's Eraserhead, Jim Sharman's The Rocky Horror Picture Show, John Waters' Pink Flamingos, and Alejandro Jodorowsky's El Topo to examine how once-misunderstood works of art have endured against all commercial odds.
Co-authors J. Hoberman and Jonathan Rosenbaum share the distinction of being prestigious film critics who've always embraced the medium's strangest offerings. As a result, Midnight Movies reads as a real love letter to a subject in need of more popular affection. —MB
The Monster Show: A Cultural History of Horror
Author: David J. Skal
Original publication date: October 15, 2001
Anyone who even flirts with the idea of calling his or herself a horror movie lover needs to read David J. Skal's stellar history book, The Monster Show. It permanently rests at the top of the genre's syllabus.
Skal (who also wrote the magnificent Hollywood Gothic: The Tangled Web of Dracula from Novel to Stage to Screen) is an old-school head, so The Monster Show's chapters on the rise of German expressionism in the 1920s, the dawn of Universal Monsters (i.e., Dracula, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, etc.) in the 1920s, and the subsequent black-and-white-cinema decades are the book's strongest, most passionately constructed sections.
His tireless research provided him with a finely tuned, seemingly on-the-scene closeness to the pre-production happenings and filmmaking shoots of movies like The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, Freaks, Dracula, and Frankenstein. —MB
Nightmare Movies: Horror on Screen Since the 1960s
Author: Kim Newman
Original publication date: 1985
How passionate is British journalist Kim Newman about the horror genre? He wrote a 630-page tome about damn near every single scary movie that's been released since 1960, one that covers so much ground that the reader has to wonder how Newman has ever gotten any sleep. The man watches every kind of horror flick, from the greats to the schlock that Mystery Science Theater 3000 wouldn't even entertain.
Broken down into categories, Newman's Nightmare Movies reviews each and every one of them with no-holds-barred honesty and snappy, humorous writing. —MB
The Other Hollywood: The Uncensored Oral History of the Porn Film Industry
Authors: Legs McNeil and Jennifer Osborne
Original publication date: 2006
No, that's not a fake book cover we've designed to throw you off. Yes, we are putting an oral history of the porno flick alongside books graced by names like Truffaut, Hitchcock, Lumet, and Bazin. Hear us out.
Whether you're a lotion-abusing skin flick junkie or a prudish square, there's no denying that the adult film industry is successful and impactful enough to warrant some kind of historical retrospective. And there's no better one than The Other Hollywood, a vibrant and comprehensive walk through the entire spectrum of skin cinema, ranging from 1950s nude photoshoots to the movies that today's kids sneak into sex shops to buy and stash under their mattresses.
It's not G-spots and secondhand seductions. The Other Hollywood focuses primarily on the T&A game's dark side, touching upon suicides, Mafia hits, and other tragedies that've offset all of the orgasms, cheap sets, and bad acting. —MB
The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock
Author: Donald Spoto
Original publication date: 1983
One visit to your local bookstore's "Film" section will show you just how many Alfred Hitchcock biographies and critical studies have been published since the iconic director's 1980 passing. But the only Hitch bio you'll ever need to read is Donald Spoto's exhaustive, revealing The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock.
Utilizing a great deal of in-person access and interviews with his subject, Spoto leaves no formative stone unturned, starting with Hitchcock's childhood days, spanning through his pre-fame years right into his decades of Hollywood prominence, and closing off with his bitter, far-from-grace final years.
Admirably, Spoto pays as much attention to the man's flaws as he does his many gifts, painting a portrait of an enormous talent who also happened to be extremely insecure misogynist, and a merry, sometimes cold-hearted prankster. —MB
Hitchcock/Truffaut
Author: François Truffaut
Original publication date: 1967
Two directors, one long conversation. This book, one of cinema's holiest texts, consists of a conversation between French film critic/director François Truffaut and American auteur Alfred Hitchcock. As the French are largely responsible for sparking serious study of American cinema, the pairing makes total sense.
The conversation reveals remarkable details about Hitch's most famous films: Psycho, North By Northwest, Rear Window, and all the other greats. In fact, the pair works through the bald man's filmography movie by movie.
A cinephile is a person who loves movies, who feels perpetually unsastisfied by the hole's in their viewership history. —RS
This is a book for cinephiles.
Goddess: The Secret Lives of Mariyln Monroe
Author: Anthony Summers
Original publication date: 1984
Few personalities exist so strongly in the popular imagine like Marilyn Monroe. She continues to live on so powerfully, that we feel like we know her by osmosis. But how well do we really know the late, almighty Marilyn? The truth of the matter is that America's most famous pin-up lived a dark, insulated life, battling through bouts of depression, drug use, troubled romantic relationships, and familial hardships.
Benefiting from interviews with, per his own reports, more than 600 people who knew the real Norman Jean Mortensen (her government name), Anthony Summers pieced together Goddess, the definitive look at Monroe's closed-door experiences. The BBC-trained reporter holds nothing back, chronicling her sexual trysts with John F. Kennedy and his brother, Robert, and presenting a theory that her August 1962 death (widely believed to be from a anti-depressant overdose) had connections to some big-name associates' foul play.
Be warned, though: Goddess, which includes tons of exclusive pictures, comes complete with Monroe's autopsy photo. —MB
Making Movies
Author: Sidney Lumet
Original publication date: March 19, 1996
In theory, the proposition of reading a filmmaker's verbose analysis of his own career sounds like a recipe for a masturbatory disaster. Sidney Lumet's Making Movies is the exception. When your impressive filmography includes gems like 12 Angry Men (1957), Serpico (1973), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976), you're afforded the space to speak. In Lumet's case, there's an added bonus: He's one hell of a writer.
Told with enthusiasm, Lumet's lean, precise account of the lessons he learned on his various movie sets walks the line between tutorial and psychological study. Aspiring filmmakers who read Making Movies will gain a better understanding of the requisite do's, don'ts, and sanity-retainers. Not to mention gaining a new respect for one of the greatest American directors of all time. —MB
Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player
Author: Robert Rodriguez
Original publication date: August 1, 1995
Thanks to Rebel Without a Crew, Robert Rodriguez should be regarded as a patron saint of struggling independent filmmakers armed with more dreams than dollars. The heart of the book is Rodriguez's production diary, written throughout the production of El Mariachi, his award-winning, DIY 1992 action flick that paved the way for future triumphs like Desperado, From Dusk Till Dawn, Sin City, and Grindhouse: Planet Terror.
He's a laid-back storyteller too, penning his tips for surviving the Hollywood studio system and "The Ten Minute Film Course" (in which Rodriguez explains how you can become a real director without wasting precious money on film school) with a conversational tone that's welcoming and easily digestible. —MB
Spike, Mike, Slackers & Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of American Independent Cinema
Author: John Pierson
Original publication date: January 6, 1997
To believe in projects as daring and unconventional as Kevin Smith's Clerks, Michael Moore's Roger & Me, Richard Linklater's Slacker, and Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, you've gotta be a little crazy. And that's exactly what behind-the-scenes maverick John Pierson is, a production representative who helped push all of those groundbreaking debut films through, and, inadvertently, assisted in redefining independent cinema in America.
All of Pierson's most fascinating memories and wisdom from those experiences are compiled in Spike, Mike, Slackers, & Dykes, a compelling book that, admittedly, is more self-congratulatory than clear-headed. Still, the man brokered some risky, unexpectedly lucrative deals, so even reading his one-sided recollections of those business moves makes for fascinating stuff. —MB
All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger
Author: Lloyd Kaufman and James Gunn
Original publication date: 1998
Disclaimer: Already appreciating the low-budget, morally deficient charms of movies like Tromeo and Juliet, The Toxic Avenger, and Chopper Chicks in Zombietown will greatly help you enjoy All I Need to Know About Filmmaking I Learned from The Toxic Avenger. Written by Troma Entertainment co-founder Lloyd Kaufman (along with protege and modern-day director James Gunn), it's a celebratory reflection on how a little, proud sleaze factory started with nothing in 1974 and gradually amassed a reputation for daring, inexpensive genre productions.
What's so great about Kaufman's memoir, though, is that people who've never even heard of Cannibal! The Musical! will also get a kick out of it. That's because Kaufman's no suit-and-tie stooge with a vanilla personality. He's a crass, hilarious, and always uncorked rabble-rouser whose ability to thrive outside of the studio system is matched by his knack for colorful language. —MB
Movie Wars: How Hollywood and the Media Limit What Films We Can See
Author: Jonathan Rosenbaum
Original publication date: 2000
World renown movie critic Jonathan Rosenbaum has a rather large chip on his shoulder, and, thankfully, he's capable of explaining himself. Having learned about cinema's high-water marks while living in Paris and writing for the hugely influential magazine Cahiers du cinéma, the Alabama-born cinephile has a strong, unwavering affinity for art-house pictures and foreign films; meaning, exactly the kinds of flicks that major studios love to soullessly remake and major chains like AMC and Regal hardly ever screen.
In Movie Wars, Rosenbaum makes a compelling argument against Hollywood's power over theater-going audiences. To him, movies have become a money game, not one of honest creativity, and he's not afraid to call out peers who've given positive reviews to crappy movies only because the studios sent them on press trips free of charge. —MB
Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies
Author: Manny Farber
Original publication date: 1971
Things to know before diving into Negative Space: Farber, one of the most idiosyncratic film critics, was a painter. He fixated on form and structure rather than plot, character, or mood. And last but definitely not least, dear reader, he writes like a guy fixated on form. It's gonna get weird, especially if you're used to capsule reviews and maybe columns of text in an Intro to Film textbook.
Let his formalist's approach to language wash over you and prepare to think about how you watch movies differently. Prepare to think about form as content—what does this cut mean, or what does it mean if there hasn't been a cut—far more than were. —RS
A Cinema of Loneliness
Author: Robert Kolker
Original publication date: 1980
You've read about the drugs and other counter-culture happenings of the great American males of movies with books like Easy Riders, Raging Bulls—now let Robert Kolker, professor at the University of Maryland, walk you through a dense but rewarding critical analysis of the films of the lonely men: Penn, Kubrick, Scorsese, Spielberg, Stone, Altman, and, in the recent edition, Fincher.
With a steady eye on the sordid and violent political machinations of the '60s, '70s, and '80s, Kolker fixes these filmmakers at the heart of the American film canon. He also takes a nice, long detour through Rambo country, to talk about the ugliness of American action pictures and the conservative fixation on the lone strongman who will save us.
The dressing down of Steven Spielberg's perpetual nostalgia machine is worth the cover price alone. —RS
For Keeps: 30 Years at the Movies
Author: Pauline Kael
Original publication date: 1994
During her time as the New Yorker's chief film critic, from 1968 to 1991, Pauline Kael published a number of review anthologies. For Keeps draws from all of them for a career-spanning compendium of work. Fearless and frequently angry, Kael penned biting reviews that pushed against the tide of popular opinion. Critics loved West Side Story. Kael hated it. When Last Tango in Paris was being throttled, she fought for its genius. And so on.
Agree wither her scatter-shot taste or not, Kael was an incredible personality, and did much to get pop culture talking about movies intelligently. Even when she was wrong she got her point across. —RS
The American Cinema: Directors and Directions 1929-1968
Author: Andrew Sarris
Original publication date: 1968
Auteur theory grew out of France's undying love for American westerns, gangster pictures, and other genre stuff. The stylistic ticks that survived in the face of cookie-cutter motion pictures, that was the mark of the auteur.
Andrew Sarris, a critic from Brooklyn, popularized auteur theory in the U.S. of A. with this book. Organized by director, The American Cinema is the sound of a gavel striking wood. It announces that, from now on, the director will be the author. This useful half-truth has shaped the popular discourse on cinema more than any other theory, and to understand the impetus, you must go back to Sarris. —RS
Reel to Real: Race, Sex, and Class at the Movies
Author: bell hooks
Publication Date: 1996
bell hooks won't be kind when she finds flaws in your film. A gifted writer with the oppressive webs of racism, capitalism, and sexism forever in her crosshairs, hooks should be on everyone's reading list, especially because of the headlock white men have on film criticism and production.
When critics were cheering Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It, hooks stood up to decry the film's sexism. Similarly, she's spoken out against Beasts of the Southern Wild, a film that audiences have swallowed without a second thought. Read hooks and have your eyes opened. —RS
What is Cinema? Vol 1. & 2
Author: André Bazin
Original publication date: 1968
Appreciating cinema means watching it, but, reader, at some point in your career as a viewer, you have to read the two volumes of Bazin's What Is Cinema?, collections of his influential essays that shaped the way we talk about movies. It's a text of biblical importance for the film community, but readers should be pleasantly surprised to find Bazin's writing clean, smooth, and light.
So much contemporary film theory requires the reader to bring a linguistics degree, a background in psychoanalysis, Karl Marx, and a slew of other hallmarks of academia to the table. Bazin's writing only asks that you love and know cinema. From there, he'll do the rest. —RS
Film Form
Author: Sergei Eisenstein
Publication Date: 1969
You can't talk about cinema without talking about the Soviets, and you can't talk about the Soviets without talking about montage, and you can't talk about montage without Eisenstein, director of Battleship Potemkin, among other seminal works. For Eisenstein, there could be no filmmaking without theory, and in Film Form, he articulates his operating principles.
In popular discourse, montage is the word for a training sequence, but that's a bastardization. In Eisenstein, montage was a theory of editing based heavily in Marx's ideas of the dialectic. Meaning achieved through the juxtaposition of shots, is an easy way to define it for these purposes. Now, go let Eisenstein expand on that. —RS
Film as Art
Author: Rudolf Arnheim
Publication Date: 1932
To this day, the title of Rudolf Arnheim's seminal Film as Art is a rallying cry. When there's a new kid on the block, there will be blood, and cinema has had to fight accusations of entertainment and brainlessness by the Gods of High Art since the medium's first flickers of light.
A German Jew, Arnheim defended the integrity of film during the rise of Hitler. When the dictator took power, sales of Film as Art ceased and Arnheim fled the country.
His work, which famously incorporated psychology and theories of visual perception, laid the groundwork for all of film theory. By talking about a form, he made it clear that film's no different from any other art. When you interrogate the image, Arnheim is at your side. —RS
The World Viewed
Author: Stanley Cavell
Original publication date: January 1, 1979
What's a professor of philosophy from Harvard doing writing about cinema? Just expanding the boundaries of film theory, giving it, for better or worse depending on your views of the Ivory Tower, a big fat stamp of approval from academia. Of course, filmmakers and cinephiles didn't need that—for those camps, film has and will always be, art. But for Cavell to publish this book was an important moment.
Beyond the historical importance, The World Viewed calls for intense reflection on emotion and experience from the filmgoer. Cavell's language is simple but his ideas are not. He sees cinema as a means to enter the whole of human experience. It's too much for a blurb. You just have to step in. —RS
Men, Women, and Chainsaws: Gender in the Modern Horror Film
Author: Carol J. Clover
Original publication date: 1992
Consider the risk that film studies professor Carol J. Clover took when she started work on her seminal Men, Women, and Chainsaws. At the time, slasher movies, exploitation flicks, and hard-R-rated horror movies were almost universally charged with being misogynistic exhibitions of females getting stalked, objectified, and ultimately slaughtered in tasteless ways.
Cover sought to look past the surface-level carnage to probe the deeper layers of films like Halloween and I Spit on Your Grave. As she sees them, horror's darkest pictures offer challenging, if subtle, interrogations of female empowerment and male identification with femininity.
That might sound like difficult to imagine for those who despise the horror genre, but, if you fall into that category, give Men, Women, and Chainsaws a chance and see if Clover isn't able to convince you otherwise. At the very least, you'll hold in your hand the book that first introduced the term "final girl" to describe every slasher flick's virginal, well-meaning heroine who lives longer than her more promiscuous friends. —MB
Cinema 1 & 2
Author: Gilles Deleuze
Publication Date: 1983 & 1985
Along with Cavell, Deleuze is one of the most well known philosophers to write about cinema well. Prepare yourself, reader, because it's going to get dense. Aspiring cinephiles should start with Bazin and Eisenstein, and then work up to Deleuze.
The Paris-born philosopher wrote about cinema as a way to write about time and history, and how history is made. Or, how we come to understand something as history.
It's heady, but will make you look at the formal decisions of cinema—cuts, long takes, camera position—in a different, sharper way. —RS
Visual and Other Pleasures
Author: Laura Mulvey
Publication Date: 1989
You can't be a contemporary film lover without talking about the male gaze, and to do that you need Laura Mulvey. In her famous essay "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," first published in 1975, she wrote about the camera as always asking viewers to identify with the male character, with maleness. Women become objects, and are always filtered through the male gaze. It's so prevalent, viewers don't even realize it's happening.
Once you read Mulvey, there's no going back. —RS