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
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.
A coffee-table book celebrates Michelle Obama’s sense of fashion.
Illustrated with hundreds of full-color photographs, Obama’s chatty latest book begins with some school portraits from the author’s childhood in Chicago and fond memories of back-to-school shopping at Sears, then jumps into the intricacies of clothing oneself as the spouse of a presidential candidate and as the first lady. “People looked forward to the outfits, and once I got their attention, they listened to what I had to say. This is the soft power of fashion,” she says. Obama is grateful and frank about all the help she got along the way, and the volume includes a long section written by her primary wardrobe stylist, Koop—28 years old when she first took the job—and shorter sections by makeup artists and several hair stylists, who worked with wigs and hair extensions as Obama transitioned back to her natural hair, and grew out her bangs, at the end of her husband’s second term. Many of the designers of the author’s gowns, notably Jason Wu, who designed several of her more striking outfits, also contribute appreciative memories. Besides candid and more formal photographs, the volume features many sketches of her gowns by their designers, closeups on details of those gowns, and magazine covers from Better Homes & Gardens to Vogue. The author writes that as a Black woman, “I was under a particularly white-hot glare, constantly appraised for whether my outfits were ‘acceptable’ and ‘appropriate,’ the color of my skin somehow inviting even more judgment than the color of my dresses.” Overall, though, this is generally a canny, upbeat volume, with little in the way of surprising revelations.
Not so deep, but a delightful tip of the hat to the pleasures—and power—of glamour.Pub Date: Nov. 4, 2025
ISBN: 9780593800706
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 7, 2025
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2026
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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