Film Art

This edition of Story by Numbers is no longer available.

Her agent told her not to get on the plane. The male leads weren't even cast. The financing was shaky at best. The script had been rewritten countless times. And yet something about Wild Oats lured Shirley MacLaine to the film's location shoot in the far-off Canary Islands - and straight to the center of one of the most thrilling and paradigm-shifting adventures of her life.

In a new edition of this popular guidebook, filmmakers Alan Rosenthal and Ned Eckhardt show listeners how to utilize the latest innovations in equipment, technologies, and production techniques for success in the digital, web-based world of documentary film.

Charles Band's Full Moon Entertainment was the most remarkable B-movie studio of the 1990s, responsible for a barrage of sci-fi, fantasy, and horror classics during the last true "golden age" of the home video era. From Puppetmaster to Trancers and beyond, Full Moon transformed the VHS experience for fans worldwide, bringing the inner workings of the movie-making process into the living room, and in turn creating a ravenous fan base that remains to this day.

La vie de la reine Elisabeth II et de sa famille racontée dans une série à succès de Netflix réunit des millions de fans à chaque épisode de "The Crown". Netflix a investi 140 millions d'euros pour une seule saison de "The Crown", c'est la plus chère de l'histoire devant même "Game of Thrones". Depuis le succès de la série historique Rome diffusée sur HBO, les moyens des séries ont décuplé et le public ne s'y trompe pas.

Oscar-winning director Hayao Miyazaki is the genius behind such animated classics as Princess Mononoke, Kiki’s Delivery Service, and Nausicaä of the Valley of the Winds. His bountiful imagination and compassion have earned him accolades the world over. Until the early 1990s, Miyazaki’s work was largely unfamiliar to American audiences. But that would soon change, and now fans of all ages eagerly await new material from the master.

Star Wars dominates the film world. The combined box office revenue of the Star Wars movies equates to over $10 billion, making it the second highest-grossing film franchise of all time. But this franchise is no blaster from the past. Its fantastically successful films have now been followed by multiple television series set in that same galaxy far, far away. The franchise’s flagship television series, and likely the firmest fan favorite for some time to come, is The Mandalorian.

In this wholly original work of film criticism, David Thomson, celebrated author of The Biographical Dictionary of Film, probes the many ways in which sexuality has shaped the movies - and the ways in which the movies have shaped sexuality.

The Thin Man films are one of the most highly regarded and successful series of films from Hollywood's classic era. This book looks at the people who populated the films, including full chapter profiles of its stars, William Powell and Myrna Loy, whose chemistry together was a huge reason for the success of the films. As Nick and Nora Charles, they knocked the stereotypes of on-screen marriage out of the park and replaced the stiff and formal with fun and sexy.

Women have been instrumental in the success of American cinema since its very beginning. One of the first people to ever pick up a motion picture camera was a woman, as was the first screenwriter to win two Academy Awards, the inventor of the boom microphone, and the first person to be credited with the title film editor. Throughout the entire history of Hollywood women have been revolutionizing, innovating, and shaping how we make movies. Yet their stories are rarely shared. This is what film reporter Alicia Malone wants to change. Backwards and in Heels tells the history of women in film in a different way.

Rita Hayworth was the epitome of 1940s glamour. A legendary "Love Goddess", she was a huge box-office star, and her sultry beauty and sensational figure made her into one of Hollywood's greatest sex-symbols: a pin-up so incendiary that GIs pasted it on to the first atom bomb ever detonated.

From its first publication in 1992, Men, Women, and Chain Saws has offered a groundbreaking perspective on the creativity and influence of horror cinema since the mid-1970s. Investigating the popularity of the low-budget tradition, Carol Clover looks in particular at slasher, occult, and rape-revenge films. Although such movies have been traditionally understood as offering only sadistic pleasures to their mostly male audiences, Clover demonstrates that they align spectators not with the male tormentor, but with the females tormented.

Ever since horror leapt from popular fiction to the silver screen in the late 1890s, viewers have experienced fear and pleasure in exquisite combination. Wheeler Winston Dixon's A History of Horror is the only book to offer a comprehensive survey of this ever-popular film genre. Arranged by decades, with outliers and franchise films overlapping some years, this one-stop sourcebook unearths the historical origins of characters such as Dracula, Frankenstein, and the Wolfman and their various incarnations in film from the silent era to comedic sequels.

A series of happy coincidences and serendipitous events is the answer. A fluke, then? Yes, but not exactly, given that huge amounts of commitment and hard work have been required. Eclipsed is the unlikely but true story of an ordinary family, muddling through life without much of a plan and dealing with circumstances that confound normal expectations. Written by a dad who as a professional comedian took his own shot at show-biz stardom and called Eclipsed because his carefully honed plans didn't work out so well.

Even by the standards of the 1970s, even compared to Jar-Jar Binks, the legendary 1978 Star Wars Holiday Special is a peerlessly cringeworthy pop-culture artifact.

Jewel thievery, car chases, and romance on the French Riviera. Alfred Hitchcock's Oscar-winning film To Catch a Thief brought together Hollywood's two most glamorous stars, Grace Kelly and Cary Grant, in the most glamorous place on Earth, the French Riviera. It is a tale of jewel thievery, intrigue, false identity, covert investigation, and, most of all, romance.

In the fall of 2000, Gilmore Girls premiered on the WB, and viewers were introduced to the quirky world of Stars Hollow and the Gilmores who had made it their home, mother-daughter best friends Lorelai and Rory. Coffee at Luke's is the perfect look at what made the show such a clever, beloved part of the television landscape for so long.

A book that explores the great American novelist and playwright Edna Ferber, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Ficton, whose work was made into many Academy Award-winning movies; the writing of her controversial, international best-selling novel about Texas, and the making of George Stevens’ Academy Award winning epic film of the same name, Giant.

Josephine Alibrandi is 17 and in her final year of school. Dealing with her mum and the ways of her Nonna are daunting enough as she prepares for her exams. But Josie is about to discover real life gets in the way of her carefully-made plans.

David Bordwell argues that the principles of visual storytelling created in the studio era are alive and well, even in today's bloated blockbusters. American filmmakers have created a durable tradition - one that we should not be ashamed to call artistic, and one that survives in both mainstream entertainment and niche-marketed indie cinema. Bordwell traces the continuity of this tradition in a wide array of films made since 1960.