A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.
Interviews with more than two dozen female filmmakers from a wide range of genres.
In 2017, a report by the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission found that “every major Hollywood studio systematically discriminated against hiring female directors,” even though “the graduating classes of America’s top film schools are 50/50 male/female.” Moreover, Smokler was surprised to discover that “articulate, well-heeled, filmgoing friends” were uninformed about women’s contributions to cinema, such as not knowing that Greta Gerwig was an accomplished director well before Barbie. In this entertaining corrective, Smokler, a writer and documentary filmmaker, interviewed 25 writers, producers, and directors—all of them Americans who “have at least one film or television series a reasonably avid movie watcher would have heard of or seen”—and asked them “to focus on the stories of their triumphs that we can all learn from and share.” Among the participants are Barbara Kopple, “the Mother Courage of American documentary filmmaking”; Julie Dash, “the first black woman to direct a feature film in general release in America”; and Chris Hegedus, whose enormous contributions to documentaries would “raise the level of innovation in nonfiction cinema that had already seemed to be at its apex.” As is often the case with books like this one, some interviews are more insightful than others. For the most part, the exceptional talent interviewed here provide valuable perspectives on the art of filmmaking. There are many amusing anecdotes, as when Jessica Yu, director of the short subject Breathing Lessons, a documentary about a polio-stricken man who lived his life in an iron lung, says the biggest change in her life after she won her Oscar was that “I gained a bit of professional identity from doing that and your family stops asking ‘what is it exactly that you do?’”
A welcome spotlight on the considerable achievements of female filmmakers.Pub Date: May 22, 2025
ISBN: 9780197619766
Page Count: 296
Publisher: Oxford Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2025
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.
Avuncular observations on matters historical from the late popularizer of the past.
McCullough made a fine career of storytelling his way through past events and the great men (and occasional woman) of long-ago American history. In that regard, to say nothing of his eschewing modern technology in favor of the typewriter (“I love the way the bell rings every time I swing the carriage lever”), he might be thought of as belonging to a past age himself. In this set of occasional pieces, including various speeches and genial essays on what to read and how to write, he strikes a strong tone as an old-fashioned moralist: “Indifference to history isn’t just ignorant, it’s rude,” he thunders. “It’s a form of ingratitude.” There are some charming reminiscences in here. One concerns cajoling his way into a meeting with Arthur Schlesinger in order to pitch a speech to presidential candidate John F. Kennedy: Where Richard Nixon “has no character and no convictions,” he opined, Kennedy “is appealing to our best instincts.” McCullough allows that it wasn’t the strongest of ideas, but Schlesinger told him to write up a speech anyway, and when it got to Kennedy, “he gave a speech in which there was one paragraph that had once sentence written by me.” Some of McCullough’s appreciations here are of writers who are not much read these days, such as Herman Wouk and Paul Horgan; a long piece concerns a president who’s been largely lost in the shuffle too, Harry Truman, whose decision to drop the atomic bomb on Japan McCullough defends. At his best here, McCullough uses history as a way to orient thinking about the present, and with luck to good ends: “I am a short-range pessimist and a long-range optimist. I sincerely believe that we may be on the way to a very different and far better time.”
A pleasure for fans of old-school historical narratives.Pub Date: Sept. 16, 2025
ISBN: 9781668098998
Page Count: 208
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: June 26, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2025
SEEN & HEARD
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
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