Jasmine St. Clair always dreamed of starring in movies. She just wasn't expecting her most famous role to be in the intimate home video that her sleazy boyfriend secretly made in hopes of furthering his own film career. With her "good girl" image in tatters along with her faith in men Jasmine leaves Hollywood and heads to St. Lucia. Against this lush Caribbean backdrop, Jasmine meets Darien Lamont, a sexy, mysterious American with secrets of his own. But after being so deeply wounded, can Jasmine trust her heart enough to embrace a red–hot new romance?
Jasmine St. Clair always dreamed of starring in movies. She just wasn't expecting her most famous role to be in the intimate home video that her sleazy boyfriend secretly made in hopes of furthering his own film career.With her "good girl" image in tatters—along with herfaith in men—Jasmine leaves Hollywood and heads toSt. Lucia. Against this lush Caribbean backdrop, Jasminemeets Darien Lamont, a sexy, mysterious Americanwith secrets of his own. But after being so deeplywounded, can Jasmine trust her heart enough to embrace a red-hot new romance?
Like Michael Powell's Peeping Tom, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies and videotape presents us with a protagonist who can only connect with others through the lens of a camera. Graham is an enigmatic young man who returns to Baton Rouge from a long road trip, mildly irritating his old lawyer friend John and wholly intriguing John's housebound wife Ann. John is conducting a sneaky and entirely sexual affair with Ann's sister Cynthia. For her part, Ann has lost interest in sex, yet Graham's obscurely charming eccentricity stirs something inside her - until she learns that he is functionally impotent and can manage arousal only with the help of a video camera and an agreeably loose-lipped female. Nevertheless, it's the dragging into the open of Graham's dirty little secret that causes all of these characters to confront their own veiled deceits and hypocrisies. sex, lies and videotape won the Palme d'Or at the 1989 Cannes Film Festival, affirming the arrival of a distinctive new talent and signalling the start of a movement among young independent American film-makers opposed to the values and formats of the Hollywood system. Soderbergh's script is an unerringly elegant, witty and literate study of contemporary perversity.
The industry's only director-cinematographer-screenwriter-producer-actor-editor, Steven Soderbergh is contemporary Hollywood's most innovative and prolific filmmaker. A Palme d'or and Academy Award-winner, Soderbergh has directed nearly thirty films, including political provocations, digital experiments, esoteric documentaries, global blockbusters, and a series of atypical genre films. This volume considers its slippery subject from several perspectives, analyzing Soderbergh as an expressive auteur of art cinema and genre fare, as a politically-motivated guerrilla filmmaker, and as a Hollywood insider. Combining a detective's approach to investigating the truth with a criminal's alternative value system, Soderbergh's films tackle social justice in a corporate world, embodying dozens of cinematic trends and forms advanced in the past twenty-five years. His career demonstrates the richness of contemporary American cinema, and this study gives his complex oeuvre the in-depth analysis it deserves.
Steven Soderbergh and Richard Lester are a generation apart, but theyshare a sense of humour and a passion for cinema. Soderbergh's freshman film, sex, lies and videotape, inaugurated a movementin US independent cinema. Lester's freewheeling work in the '60s and '70s (Help!, A Hard Day's Night, The Knack, How I Won the War, Petulia) helped create a 'new wave' of British film-making. Here, the two cineastes discuss their mutual passion for the medium in a frank,funny and free-ranging series of interviews. Also included is Soderbergh's diary of an extraordinary twelve months in which he ventured into 'guerilla film-making' with offbeatprojects Schizopolis and Gray's Anatomy, before returning to the Hollywood fray with the George Clooney hit Out of Sight.
She packed her dreams of stardom away at 17 when she walked down the matrimonial aisle, never imagining that 30 years later she would have the chance to make them come true...and at what cost. Nearly Famous, Tales From The Hollywood Trenches is the captivating and incredibly honest story of a woman's journey from a 50's era good girl who married the man of her mother's dreams only to end up divorced, destitute and responsible for 2 little girls. The experience started a fire that fueled her determination to never be reliant on anyone else again. The result was an amazing career, sitting opposite the biggest stars in Hollywood, telling their story...but at what cost. In this very revealing memoir Reba Merrill takes the reader on an insider's look at the true cost of fame.
James Mottram traces the roots of this generation of American film-makers to Steven Soderbergh's 'Sex, Lies and Videotape' and looks at how many kickstarted their careers and made their mark at Robert Redford's Sundance Institute in Utah or at his film festival.
Indie, Inc. surveys Miramax's evolution from independent producer-distributor to studio subsidiary, chronicling how one company transformed not just the independent film world but the film and media industries more broadly. Miramax's activities had an impact on everything from film festival practices to marketing strategies, talent development to awards campaigning. Case studies of key films, including The Piano, Kids, Scream, The English Patient, and Life is Beautiful, reveal how Miramax went beyond influencing Hollywood business practices and motion picture aesthetics to shaping popular and critical discourses about cinema during the 1990s ... [and] looks at the range of Miramax-released genre films, foreign-language films, and English-language imports released over the course of the decade.
In this “dishy…superbly reported” (Entertainment Weekly) New York Times bestseller, Peter Biskind chronicles the rise of independent filmmakers who reinvented Hollywood—most notably Sundance founder Robert Redford and Harvey Weinstein, who with his brother, Bob, made Miramax Films an indie powerhouse. As he did in his acclaimed Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, Peter Biskind “takes on the movie industry of the 1990s and again gets the story” (The New York Times). Biskind charts in fascinating detail the meteoric rise of the controversial Harvey Weinstein, often described as the last mogul, who created an Oscar factory that became the envy of the studios, while leaving a trail of carnage in his wake. He follows Sundance as it grew from a regional film festival to the premier showcase of independent film, succeeding almost despite the mercurial Redford, whose visionary plans were nearly thwarted by his own quixotic personality. Likewise, the directors who emerged from the independent movement, such as Quentin Tarantino, Steven Soderbergh, and David O. Russell, are now among the best-known directors in Hollywood. Not to mention the actors who emerged with them, like Matt Damon, Ben Affleck, Ethan Hawke, and Uma Thurman. Candid, controversial, and “sensationally entertaining” (Los Angeles Times) Down and Dirty Pictures is a must-read for anyone interested in the film world.
“Provocative, insightful, and instructive analysis of the cinematic and philosophical significance of Steven Soderbergh’s work.” —Jason Holt, editor of The Daily Show and Philosophy: Moments of Zen in the Art of Fake News Widely regarded as a turning point in American independent cinema, Steven Soderbergh's sex, lies, and videotape launched the career of its twenty-six-year-old director, whose debut film was nominated for an Academy Award and went on to win the Cannes Film Festival’s top award, the Palme d’Or. The Philosophy of Steven Soderbergh breaks new ground by investigating salient philosophical themes through the unique story lines and innovative approaches to filmmaking that distinguish this celebrated artist. Editors R. Barton Palmer and Steven M. Sanders have brought together leading scholars in philosophy and film studies for the first systematic analysis of Soderbergh’s entire body of work, offering the first in-depth exploration of the philosophical ideas that form the basis of the work of one of the most commercially successful and consistently inventive filmmakers of our time.
