A breezy guide that takes readers inside the sometimes hair-raising world of do-it-yourself filmmaking, capturing its many...
An instructional manual on film directing, inspired by the making of a “microbudget” movie.
It might seem impossible to make a feature-length movie about a man trapped inside a car by a mudslide on a budget of only $40,000. However, Dickerson did just that, and he turned the experience of directing the film Detour into a book that’s both an enlightening primer for filmmakers and a behind-the-scenes memoir. The author treads somewhat in the footsteps of William Goldman’s landmark book Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) as he lays out the laborious process of putting together a screenplay, using scenes from such films as Mulholland Drive (2001), Witness (1985), Taxi Driver (1976), and Schindler’s List (1993) as examples. Having previously made several short films, he envisioned Detour as a “minimalist action film,” initially intending to make it for only $10,000 in a garage, “using a junker that I would buy on Craigslist and a whole lot of dirt.” He runs into some “financing follies,” however, that tie him up for some two years and educate him about the dangers of being “seduced” by Hollywood. Like biting into a coconut, he warns his readers, “you’ll find it’s impenetrable, and your attempt futile, no matter how badly you want inside of it.” Once filming begins, Dickerson dishes out intriguing insider info for would-be directors—it’s a good idea, for example, to pick up a box of doughnuts on the way to the set no matter what your budget is. He also effectively details the creative and technical challenges he faced, such as how he completely buried actor Neil Hopkins in mud and how he found a reasonable facsimile of a dead bird. “It’s vital to never lose sight of that DIY mentality that compelled you to write and make the movie in the first place,” he advises. Detour eventually got its premiere at the famous Mann’s Chinese Theatre in Hollywood. It was a vindication of Dickerson’s belief, shown throughout this book, that, by using digital video and other tools, “We can all make, and release, a movie.”
A breezy guide that takes readers inside the sometimes hair-raising world of do-it-yourself filmmaking, capturing its many frustrations and challenges.Pub Date: N/A
ISBN: 978-0-9851886-3-4
Page Count: -
Publisher: Kettle of Letters Press
Review Posted Online: March 6, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2015
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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