A behind-the-scenes look at the film world by the 23-year-old director of El Mariachi, a highly successful low-budget independent film, covers the making of that film and the business deals that made its success possible. 15,000 first printing. Tour.

Walt Disney is an American hero--the creator of Mickey Mouse, and a man who changed the face of American culture. After years of research, with the full cooperation of the Disney family and access to private papers and letters, Bob Thomas produced the definitive biography of the man behind the legend--the unschooled cartoonist from Kansas City who went bankrupt on his first movie venture but became the genius who produced unmatched works of animation. Complete with a rare collection of photographs, Bob Thomas' biography is a fascinating and inspirational work that captures the spirit of Walt Disney.

In a career that spanned six decades and more than sixty films, Alfred Hitchcock was the dominant figure in the first century of cinema. His films -- from The 39 Steps to The Birds, from Rear Window to Vertigo, from Notorious to Psycho -- set new standards for cinematic invention and storytelling élan. He was both visionary artist and consummate entertainer ... and became the most widely recognized director who ever lived.In the decades since his death, the public image of Hitchcock has crystallized into a series of iconic images: the macabre Englishman, the sexual obsessive, the Master of Suspense. But this remarkable new biography -- the first in a quarter-century -- draws on prodigious new research to restore Hitchcock the man, in all his three-dimensional glory. Here is the comprehensive film craftsman, forever pushing forward the boundaries of his art. Here is the passionate collaborator, who cheekily referred to actors as "cattle" but invigorated the careers of Cary Grant, James Stewart, Ingrid Bergman, and Grace Kelly. Here is the insatiable provocateur, testing the limits of his audience with his cocktails of sex and violence. And here, too, is the private man: dedicated romantic, constant trickster, impotent voyeur, devoted husband, a man who sacrificed his life, again and again, for his work.Like the best Hitchcock films, Patrick McGilligan's life of Hitchcock is a drama full of fresh revelation, graced by a central love story, dark humor, and cliff-hanging suspense: a definitive portrait of the most creative, and least understood, figure in film history.

For twenty-five years, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film has been not merely “the finest reference book ever written about movies” (Graham Fuller, Interview), not merely the “desert island book” of art critic David Sylvester, not merely “a great, crazy masterpiece” (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian), but also “fiendishly seductive” (Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone).Now it returns, with its old entries updated and 300 new ones—from Luc Besson to Reese Witherspoon—making more than 1300 in all, some of them just a pungent paragraph, some of them several thousand words long. In addition to the new “musts,” Thomson has added key figures from film history—lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more. Here is a great, rare book, one that encompasses the chaos of art, entertainment, money, vulgarity, and nonsense that we call the movies. Personal, opinionated, funny, daring, provocative, and passionate, it is the one book that every filmmaker and film buff must own. Time Out named it one of the ten best books of the 1990s. Gavin Lambert recognized it as “a work of imagination in its own right.” Now better than ever—a masterwork by the man playwright David Hare called “the most stimulating and thoughtful film critic now writing.”

Since his first feature movie, She's Gotta Have It (1986), gave him critical and commercial success, Spike Lee has challenged audiences with one controversial film after another, sparking debates about race, sex, American politics and film production, and garnering award nominations along the way. Spike Lee: Interviews collects the best interviews and profiles of America's most prominent African American filmmaker. The collection features interviews with such luminaries as Charlie Rose, Elvis Mitchell, Michael Sragow, and actor Delroy Lindo. Lee has made a broad range of movies, including documentaries (4 Little Girls), musicals (School Daze), crime dramas (Clockers), biopics (Malcolm X). An early advocate of digital video, he used the technology to film both of his 2000 releases, The Original Kings of Comedy and Bamboozled. Reactions to Do the Right Thing (1989) and Jungle Fever (1990) propelled Lee into a constant presence in the public eye as media currency. He directed commercials for Nike, Levi's, and the U.S. Navy, directed music videos, published seven books, and conducted many interviews explaining and clarifying his views. As Lee puts it, "I've been blessed with the opportunity to express the views of black people who otherwise don't have access to power and media. I have to take advantage of that while I'm still bankable." Articulate and deeply passionate, Lee reveals a degree of subtlety and wit that is often lost in sound bites and headlines about him. The range of his interests is as diverse as the subjects of, and approaches to, his films. Cynthia Fuchs, an associate professor of English at George Mason University, writes film and media reviews for the Philadelphia City Paper and Addicted to Noise.