The Reel Truth details the pitfalls, snares, and roadblocks that aspiring filmmakers encounter. Reed Martin interviewed more than one hundred luminaries from the independent film world to discuss the near misses that almost derailed their first and second films and identify the close shaves that could have cut their careers short. Other books may tell you the best way to make your independent film or online short, but no other book describes so candidly how to spot and avoid such issues and obstacles as equipment problems, shooting-day snafus, postproduction myths, theatrical distribution deal breakers, and dozens of other commonly made missteps, including the top fifty mistakes every filmmaker makes.
Did you know that most of the biggest indie filmmakers, screenwriters, and producers working today each made the same avoidable mistakes early on in their careers? The Reel Truth details the pitfalls, snares, and roadblocks that aspiring filmmakers encounter. Reed Martin interviewed more than one hundred luminaries from the independent film world to discuss the near misses that almost derailed their first and second films and identify the close shaves that could have cut their careers short. Other books may tell you the best way to make your independent film or online short, but no other book describes so candidly how to spot and avoid such issues and obstacles as equipment problems, shooting-day snafus, postproduction myths, theatrical distribution deal breakers, and dozens of other commonly made missteps, including the top fifty mistakes every filmmaker makes. From personal experience and his years as a freelance reporter covering independent film for USA Today and Filmmaker magazine, Martin uncovers the truth about the risks and potential rewards that go with chasing celluloid glory. Whether you're writing a screenplay, looking for financing, about to start shooting, or thinking about investing time and money (or someone else's money) in an independent film, The Reel Truth is a must-read.
Real trials and courtroom movies are made for each other. Lawyers are storytellers, courtrooms are theaters, and the trial process provides drama, surprise, suspense or comedy. This book will serve as a video guide to help you identify the courtroom movies you'd like to see. It ranks each of the films on a one- to four- gavel system, with four gavels for the classics. And it answers the questions you'll be asking as you see the films. Where does truth end and trickery begin? Can lawyers really pull rabbits out of hats with unexpected courtroom stunts? Did the trial process reveal the truth-or conceal it? How well do reel trials reflect real events? These are just some of the topics you'll encounter as the authors analyze over 200 courtroom movies, including such classics as To Kill a Mockingbird, My Cousin Vinny, 12 Angry Men, and The Trial of the Chicago 7. An index at the back of the book lists all of the films reviewed in the book. The book celebrates the courtroom genre that has intrigued viewers around the world. The authors will entertain and educate you on a fascinating journey through nine decades of reel law, lawyers and justice.
Americans have had a long-standing love affair with the wilderness. As cities grew and frontiers disappeared, film emerged to feed an insatiable curiosity about wildlife. The camera promised to bring us into contact with the animal world, undetected and unarmed. Yet the camera's penetration of this world has inevitably brought human artifice and technology into the picture as well. In the first major analysis of American nature films in the twentieth century, Gregg Mitman shows how our cultural values, scientific needs, and new technologies produced the images that have shaped our contemporary view of wildlife. Like the museum and the zoo, the nature film sought to recreate the experience of unspoiled nature while appealing to a popular audience, through a blend of scientific research and commercial promotion, education and entertainment, authenticity and artifice. Travelogue-expedition films, like Teddy Roosevelt's African safari, catered to upper- and middle-class patrons who were intrigued by the exotic and entertained by the thrill of big-game hunting and collecting. The proliferation of nature movies and television shows in the 1950s, such as Disney's True-Life Adventures and Marlin Perkins's Wild Kingdom, made nature familiar and accessible to America's baby-boom generation, fostering the environmental activism of the latter part of the twentieth century. Reel Nature reveals the shifting conventions of nature films and their enormous impact on our perceptions of, and politics about, the environment. Whether crafted to elicit thrills or to educate audiences about the real-life drama of threatened wildlife, nature films then and now reveal much about the yearnings of Americans to be both close to nature and yet distinctly apart.
All too often, highly fictionalized cinematic depictions of the past are accepted as the unassailable truth by those unfamiliar with the "real" account. This book profiles sixty movies that portray actual moments in history, and compares the mythologized account of each event to what really happened. Movies chronicled include The Ten Commandments, Spartacus, A Man for All Seasons, Gladiator, Gandhi, Apollo 13, The Thin Red Line, Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The Last Emperor, All the Presidents Men, Mutiny on the Bounty, Gone with the Wind, Bonnie & Clyde, Patton, and Elizabeth. Sanello also contrasts several historical figures with their filmed treatments, including Julius Caesar, Henry V, Christopher Columbus, Joan of Arc, Sir Thomas More, Jesus Christ, Catherine the Great, Sigmund Freud, and Harry Houdini. Lavishly illustrated with sixty film stills, Reel v. Real shows how a happening's genuine details are frequently reshaped and distorted by Hollywood's bottomless appetite for over-the-top flamboyance and melodrama.
Think big, spend little! Everything you need to make your movie is in this complete resource kit. The Power Filmmaking Kit is a comprehensive, multimedia book and DVD package that empowers you to produce your own Hollywood-quality movie. Emmy-award winning director Jason Tomaric produced an independent film using only local resources for under $2,000 that not only got picked up for distribution, but is also used as a case study in top film schools. This book shows you how to do the same, regardless of your budget or location. You'll learn how to achieve professional quality on a microbudget, using the resources you have at hand. The book includes: * Coverage of the entire filmmaking process. It's all here, from writing, directing, and cinematography, to acting, editing, and distribution. * Step-by-step instructions, tips, diagrams, charts, and illustrations for how you can make a Hollywood-caliber movie on a next-to-nothing budget with little upfront money and access only to local resources. The DVD includes: * Time and Again, the profitable, award-winning, internationally distributed independent film made for under $2,000 * One hour of video tutorials unveiling how the movie was made...interviews and behind-the-scenes case studies on directing, production, and editing * Complete rough footage from a scene for editing practice * Forms, contracts, and more resources *The Producer's Notebook includes scripts, storyboards, schedules, call sheets, contracts, letters from the producer, camera logs and press kits from "Time and Again." See how the production was scheduled and organized, read the script, follow the storyboards and watch the production unfold from beginning to end. * Blank contracts and forms that you can print out to use on your own film
What was Takako Konishi really doing in North Dakota, and why did she end up dead? Did she get lost and freeze to death, as the police concluded, while searching for the fictional treasure buried in a snowbank at the end of the Coen Brothers’ film Fargo? Or was it something else that brought her there: unrequited love, ritual suicide, a meteor shower, a far-flung search for purpose? The seed of an obsession took root in struggling film student Jana Larson when she chanced upon a news bulletin about the case. Over the years and across continents, the material Jana gathered in her search for the real Takako outgrew multiple attempts at screenplays and became this remarkable, genre-bending essay that leans into the space between fact and fiction, life and death, author and subject, reality and delusion.
