These four early works by the internationally lauded filmmaking team deal with the subject for which they are best known: corruption and crime in situations that combine the real and the surreal with the hilarious. Of the scripts included here, Barton Fink--an intense look at the psychological ruin of a New York playwright trying to make it in 1940s Hollywood--is a masterful culmination of these themes.
Director Joel Coen's and producer Ethan Coen's Blood Simple (1984, River Road Prods/Circle Releasing/Palace) is a contemporary noir thriller set in Texas. A taut, convoluted plot and imaginative direction made the independent release a word-of-mouth hit and established the Coen brothers' reputation for originality. Actors John Getz, Frances McDormand, and Dan Hedaya appear in the story in which a woman commits adultery, and her enraged husband hires a killer for revenge. Blackmail, violence, and mistaken assumptions lead to an edgy, exhilarating climax.
(Book). Quintessential Coen brothers fare but different. Inside Llewyn Davis has a certain kinship with Les Miserables . In it almost all the principal actors Oscar Isaac, Carey Mulligan, Justin Timberlake sing. While not quite a musical, Inside Llewyn Davis is built around full-length performances of folk songs that were heard in the grubby cafes of the Village in a year when Bob Dylan, who kind of, sort of shows up in the movie, had just appeared on the scene. Bob Dylan, Paul Clayton, the Rev. Reverend Gary Davis, Joni Mitchell, Tom Paxton and myriad other singers of the era are invoked in the film. Its story bounces through actual places like Gerde's, the Gaslight Cafe and the Gate of Horn in Chicago without explicitly portraying real artists or folk music powers like the impresario Albert Grossman. Working with the producer Scott Rudin, their collaborator on both True Grit and No Country for Old Men , the Coen Brothers shot the film in New York City and elsewhere last year and finished the movie at their own pace. They could have rushed it into the Oscar season but chose to bide their time. T Bone Burnett, who provided the old time music of O Brother, Where Art Thou? , also produced the music for Inside Llewyn Davis . Mr. Burnett has helped to re-create the brief flowering of a folk scene that in the early '60s made Washington Square and its environs an unlikely crossroads for musical influences from Appalachia, the Deep South, the Far West, New England almost anywhere but New York's neighborhoods, from which some of its heartiest practitioners, and Llewyn Davis, arrived.
Set in the midst of the bleak midwinter snow drifts of the American Midwest, Fargo is a story of murder and mayhem. Jerry Lundegaard plots the kidnapping of his wife to rescue his precarious financial situation, but events career out of control when one of the perpetrators he has hired to do the job goes haywire. In a senseless universe, it falls to Marge Gunderson (chief of the Brainerd Police Department and the moral centre of the film) to set things to rights. Like the Coen brothers' auspicious debut feature Blood Simple, Fargo concerns itself with dirty deeds done for money, but the grimness of the tales is alleviated by the laconic humour with which the characters greet their fates. The intricacy of the plotting is executed with brillance, yet the writing also reveals humanity at its core. Fargo was honoured with the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay of 1996.
The screenplays of award-winning playwright John Patrick Shanley have earned him a reputation as a gifted writer with a great range and imagination. His movies Moonstruck, Five Corners, and Joe Versus the Volcano have starred such Hollywood luminaries as Cher--who took home an Oscar for her performance in Moonstruck--Nicolas Cage, Jodie Foster, John Turturro, Meg Ryan, and Tom Hanks. This collection showcases Shanley's talent for creating dialogue that is true to his characters and his ability to tell their stories in eccentric and intensely humorous situations.
In Gates of Eden, Ethan Coen exhibits on the printed page the striking, twisted, yet devastatingly on-target vision of modern American life familiar from his movies. The world within the world we live in comes alive in fourteen brazenly original tragicomic short stories—from the Midwest mob war that fizzles due to the principals' ineptness to the trials of a deaf private eye with a blind client to a fugitive's heartbreaking explanation for having beheaded his wife, alarming in that it almost makes sense.
The Day of the Cattleman was first published in 1929. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions. The legend of the Wild West, as celebrated in thousands upon thousands of western stories and movies, radio and television programs, has a firm grip on the imaginations of both young and old, not only in America but in many other lands. But, popular though such versions are, they do not tell how the west was really won. Professor Osgood's account sets the record straight for those who want authentic history rather than melodramatic fiction. "The range cattleman," Professor Osgood writes, "has more solid achievements to his credit than the creation of a legend. He was the first to utilize the semi-arid plains. Using the most available natural resources, the native grasses, as a basis, he built up a great and lucrative enterprise, attracted eastern and foreign capital to aid him in the development of a new economic area, stimulated railroad building in order that the product of the ranges might get to an eastern market, and laid the economic foundation of more than one western commonwealth." Professor Osgood traces the rise and fall of the range cattle industry, particularly in Montana and Wyoming, from 1845 to the turn of the century. He gives a detailed account of the activities of the stock growers' associations and of the cattlemen's relations with the railroads and with the Federal government. The book has won critical acclaim both in this country and abroad. The Saturday Review has described it as an "honest, scientific, and thorough examination" of a "semi-epic phase of Western life, now almost completely dead." In England, the Times Literary Supplement called it "the only substantial record of this particular chapter in the history of the West."
The brilliant screenplay of the Academy Award–nominated film The Trial of the Chicago 7 by Academy and Emmy Award–winning screenwriter and director Aaron Sorkin. Sorkin’s film dramatizes the 1969 trial of seven prominent anti-Vietnam War activists in Chicago. Originally there were eight defendants, but one, Bobby Seale, was severed from the trial by Judge Julius Hoffman—after Hoffman had ordered Seale bound and gagged in court. The defendants were a mix of counterculture revolutionaries such as Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin, and political activists such as Tom Hayden, Rennie Davis, and David Dellinger, the last a longtime pacifist who was a generation older than the others. Their lawyers argued that the right to free speech was on trial, whether that speech concerned lifestyles or politics. The Trial of the Chicago 7 stars Sacha Baron Cohen, Eddie Redmayne, Frank Langella, and Mark Rylance, among others, directed by Aaron Sorkin. This book is Sorkin’s screenplay, the first of his movie screenplays ever published.
Since his death in 1986, Andrei Tarkovsky has become increasingly recognized as one of the great masters of world cinema. In his films, Solaris, Mirror, Stalker and The Sacrifice, Tarkovsky defined a new way of looking at the world. His non-realistic, highly-charged images are a continuing source of inspiration - not only for a new generation of film-makers, but also for poets, musicians and painters. This volume collects his great works for the first time in one volume, as well as three of his unproduced screenplays. This material provides a unique glimpse into the way Tarkovsky's vision evolved from the printed text to its final form on celluloid. The book also contains an extended essay by film critic and historian Ian Christie, who places Tarkovsky's work in the context of Soviet film-making practice.
