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    Books on Classic Films

    The BFI Classics series has many short books on individual films, which I have just started to work through.

    https://www.palgrave.com/br/series/14789

    Edward Buscombe's one on The Searchers is awesome.

    https://www.amazon.com/Searchers-BFI...5499557&sr=1-1

    #2
    Oh, lovely. Good to know. I've been meaning to pick up Final Cut on the making of Heaven's Gate. What a fucking catastrophe. I had to reread the Wiki entry just to remind myself of some of the details. Like after 6 days of filming they were already 5 days behind schedule. And John Hurt had such a long time sittin' around between takes that he left, made Elephant Man, and came back.

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      #3
      I have got a book about how 2001: A Space Oddyssey was made. I think I read it 25 years ago. It was interesting to see how the story changed.

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        #4
        Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind is a very good read.

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          #5
          I enjoyed the Lebowski BFI Film Classics book. Re: The Searchers, it may not be in print any more, but Scorsese on Scorsese from the old Faber series had a really interesting section on The Searchers as inspiration for Taxi Driver.

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            #6
            Originally posted by Stumpy Pepys View Post
            Easy Riders, Raging Bulls by Peter Biskind is a very good read.
            Seconded. As is Down And Dirty Pictures by him.

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              #7
              Don't know how you'd define classic films but just finished "We don't need roads" by Caseen Gaines about the Back To The Future trilogy.
              Very detailed,he got access to nearly everyone but it's not a hagiography, he details the problems with Eric Stoltz and Crispin Glover and goes into detail about the accident on the second film that nearly killed a stuntwoman, recommended if you're a fan

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                #8
                Originally posted by WOM View Post
                Oh, lovely. Good to know. I've been meaning to pick up Final Cut on the making of Heaven's Gate. What a fucking catastrophe. I had to reread the Wiki entry just to remind myself of some of the details. Like after 6 days of filming they were already 5 days behind schedule. And John Hurt had such a long time sittin' around between takes that he left, made Elephant Man, and came back.
                I have just finished Final Cut and thought it was great on the personality of Cimino, his conflicts with the studio executives (who conceded far too much in pre-filming negotiation and then dithered fatally before trying to rein him in) and the hypocrisy of the critics (who sometimes did a 180 on The Deer Hunter after Heaven's Gate flopped). It takes rather too long to get to those themes, however, and the industry minutiae of the late 70s are as dull as fuck unless you are really keen on studio politics and film industry culture. Most of the first half of the book could be skipped without really losing much of value. The real meat starts with the executives caving in to Cimino's demand that Huppert should play the female lead, which then sets a precedent for Cimino manipulating them during the filming.

                The book is astute on why the film fails as a film (it fails to make us care about the characters or the history), and its flawed relationship to the actual history. It's honestly self-critical from a studio exec's viewpoint, and predicts how Hollywood would go down the shitter as massive corporations took over.

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                  #9
                  In Search of the Third Man by Charles Drazin is awesome on the background to the film - Greene, Reed, Korda, Selznick, Welles, Karas. Interesting theory regarding Kim Philby in the last chapter. Great photos.

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