A practical master class in the basics of effective movie promotion.
A step-by-step guide to pursuing a filmmaking career by crafting movie trailers.
Independent producer and director Getty’s guide takes readers on a journey through his own experiences in the movie production arena, revealing how aspiring filmmakers can follow in his footsteps. Specifically, he lays out the steps to making effective movie trailers—promotional clips that, he argues, are the most important part of the filmmaking process, as they do much of the heavy lifting to make a film a success. To that end, he stresses how conveying a good story is more important than editing together a series of flashy images, and how sound is the most important element of the process. Each chapter is filled with information about different aspects of moviemaking that also have relevance in feature-filmmaking, from finding a tale to tell that has universal appeal, creating effective sound design, and using skillful editing, to post-production concerns, such as choosing the perfect title. Most intriguingly, this encouraging work claims that a movie trailer can even be made before anything else happens with the project. This way, everyone involved is on the same page, and the reaction to the trailer can determine how the team moves forward: “It is the trailer the script should be written for—not the movie.” The author also effectively notes that Hollywood is a battle for time, a precious commodity, and that one must approach this competition as such. Getty’s writing style is clean and extremely straightforward, making the reading experience feel comfortable and uncomplicated, even when approaching dense topics. Getty offers his own experiences throughout to back up his contentions about how trailers work, which results in a fresh, balanced, and credible take on ideas that may initially seem familiar. Although the work is clearly aimed at readers looking to pursue a filmmaking career, there’s plenty of compelling detail and references to popular movies to engage general readers.
A practical master class in the basics of effective movie promotion.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: N/A
Page Count: 172
Publisher: Acrolight Pictures LLC
Review Posted Online: June 8, 2022
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
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
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.
In which the veteran humorist enters middle age with fine snark but some trepidation as well.
Mortality is weighing on Sedaris (Theft by Finding: Diaries 1977-2002, 2017, etc.), much of it his own, professional narcissist that he is. Watching an elderly man have a bowel accident on a plane, he dreaded the day when he would be the target of teenagers’ jokes “as they raise their phones to take my picture from behind.” A skin tumor troubled him, but so did the doctor who told him he couldn’t keep it once it was removed. “But it’s my tumor,” he insisted. “I made it.” (Eventually, he found a semitrained doctor to remove and give him the lipoma, which he proceeded to feed to a turtle.) The deaths of others are much on the author’s mind as well: He contemplates the suicide of his sister Tiffany, his alcoholic mother’s death, and his cantankerous father’s erratic behavior. His contemplation of his mother’s drinking—and his family’s denial of it—makes for some of the most poignant writing in the book: The sound of her putting ice in a rocks glass increasingly sounded “like a trigger being cocked.” Despite the gloom, however, frivolity still abides in the Sedaris clan. His summer home on the Carolina coast, which he dubbed the Sea Section, overspills with irreverent bantering between him and his siblings as his long-suffering partner, Hugh, looks on. Sedaris hasn’t lost his capacity for bemused observations of the people he encounters. For example, cashiers who say “have a blessed day” make him feel “like you’ve been sprayed against your will with God cologne.” But bad news has sharpened the author’s humor, and this book is defined by a persistent, engaging bafflement over how seriously or unseriously to take life when it’s increasingly filled with Trump and funerals.
Sedaris at his darkest—and his best.Pub Date: May 29, 2018
ISBN: 978-0-316-39238-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Feb. 19, 2018
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2018
PROFILES
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