Perspectives on John Huston


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John Huston's Filmmaking


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John Huston's Filmmaking offers an analysis of the life and work of one of the greatest American independent filmmakers. Always visually exciting, Huston's films sensitively portray humankind in all its incarnations, chronicling the attempts by protagonists to conceive and articulate their identities. Fundamental questions of selfhood, happiness and love are intimately connected to the idea of home, which for the filmmaker also signified a congenial place among other people in the world. In this study, Lesley Brill shows Huston's films to be far more than formulaic adventures of masculine failure, arguing instead that they demonstrate the close connection between humanity, the natural world, and divinity.




John Huston


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Recounts the life of the influential director, writer, and actor and offers insight into his professional achievements as well as his extensive hobbies, five marriages, and homes in Mexico and Ireland.




Moby Dick


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Ray Bradbury's screenplay for the 1956 film Moby Dick.




John Huston


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Over thirty years of interviews with the American director of such classic films as The Maltese Falcon, Key Largo, The African Queen, and The Night of the Iguana




John Huston


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Years after his death, American filmmaker John Huston (1906-1987) remains an enigmatic and compelling figure. This wide-ranging collection of new essays encompasses a variety of topics relating to Huston's lifestyle, political activities and cinematic legacy. Fresh analyses of such films as Key Largo, The Asphalt Jungle, The African Queen, The Misfits and Prizzi's Honor are included along with insightful studies of Huston's oft-overlooked literary adaptations In This Our Life, Moby Dick and A Walk With Love and Death. Also evaluated are Huston's controversial World War II documentary Let There Be Light, and two a clef portraits of the "real" Huston in the films The Way We Were and White Hunter, Black Heart. Bookending these essays are revealing interviews with John's actress daughter Angelica Huston and film producer Wieland Schultz-Keil.




Picture


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A classic look at Hollywood and the American film industry by The New Yorker's Lillian Ross, and named one of the "Top 100 Works of U.S. Journalism of the Twentieth Century." Lillian Ross worked at The New Yorker for more than half a century, and might be described not only as an outstanding practitioner of modern long-form journalism but also as one of its inventors. Picture, originally published in 1952, is her most celebrated piece of reportage, a closely observed and completely absorbing story of how studio politics and misguided commercialism turn a promising movie into an all-around disaster. The charismatic and hard-bitten director and actor John Huston is at the center of the book, determined to make Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage—one of the great and defining works of American literature, the first modern war novel, a book whose vivid imagistic style invites the description of cinematic—into a movie that is worthy of it. At first all goes well, as Huston shoots and puts together a two-hour film that is, he feels, the best he’s ever made. Then the studio bosses step in and the audience previews begin, conferences are held, and the movie is taken out of Huston’s hands, cut down by a third, and finally released—with results that please no one and certainly not the public: It was an expensive flop. In Picture, which Charlie Chaplin aptly described as “brilliant and sagacious,” Ross is a gadfly on the wall taking note of the operations of a system designed to crank out mediocrity.




John Huston as Adaptor


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John Huston as Adaptor makes the case that adaptation is the salient element in Huston's identity as a filmmaker and that his early and deep attraction to the experience of reading informed his approach to film adaptation. Thirty-four of Huston's thirty-seven films were adaptations of literary texts, and they stand as serious interpretations of literary works that could only be made by an astute reader of literature. Indeed, Huston asserted that a film director should be above all else a reader and that reading itself should be the intellectual and emotional basis for filmmaking. The seventeen essays in this volume not only address Huston as an adaptor, but also offer an approach to adaptation studies that has been largely overlooked. How an adaptor reads, the works to which he is drawn, and how his literary interpretations can be brought to the screen without relegating film to a subservient role are some of the issues addressed by the contributors. An introductory chapter identifies Huston as the quintessential Hollywood adaptor and argues that his skill at adaptation is the mark of his authorial signature. The chapters that follow focus on fifteen of Huston's most important films, including The Maltese Falcon (1941), The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948), The African Queen (1951), The Night of the Iguana (1964), Under the Volcano (1984), and The Dead (1987), and are divided into three areas: aesthetics and textuality; history and social context; and theory and psychoanalysis. By offering a more comprehensive account of the centrality of adaptation to Huston's films, John Huston as Adaptor offers a greater understanding of Huston as a filmmaker.




Watch Me


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"Picking up where A Story Lately Told leaves off, when Anjelica Huston is 22 years old, [this book] is a chronicle of her glamorous and eventful Hollywood years. She writes about falling in love with Jack Nicholson and her adventurous, turbulent, high-profile, spirited 17-year relationship with him and his intoxicating circle of friends. She writes about learning how to act, about her Academy Award-winning portrayal of Maerose Prizzi in Prizzi's Honor, [and] about her collaborations with many of the greatest directors in Hollywood, including Wes Anderson, Richard Condon, Bob Rafelson, Mike Nichols, and Stephen Frears"--




What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?


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At the age of twenty-five, Orson Welles (1915–1985) directed, co-wrote, and starred in Citizen Kane, widely regarded as the greatest film ever made. But Welles was such a revolutionary filmmaker that he found himself at odds with the Hollywood studio system. His work was so far ahead of its time that he never regained the wide popular following he had once enjoyed as a young actor-director on the radio. What Ever Happened to Orson Welles?: A Portrait of an Independent Career challenges the conventional wisdom that Welles’s career after Kane was a long decline and that he spent his final years doing little but eating and making commercials while squandering his earlier promise. In this intimate and often surprising personal portrait, Joseph McBride shows instead how Welles never stopped directing radical, adventurous films and was always breaking new artistic ground as a filmmaker. McBride is the first author to provide a comprehensive examination of the films of Welles's artistically rich yet little-known later period in the United States (1970–1985), when McBride knew and worked with him. McBride reports on Welles's daringly experimental film projects, including the legendary 1970–1976 unfinished film The Other Side of the Wind, Welles’s satire of Hollywood during the “Easy Rider era”; McBride gives a unique insider perspective on Welles from the viewpoint of a young film critic playing a spoof of himself in a cast headed by John Huston and Peter Bogdanovich. To put Welles’s widely misunderstood later years into context, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? reexamines the filmmaker’s entire life and career. McBride offers many fresh insights into the collapse of Welles’s Hollywood career in the 1940s, his subsequent political blacklisting, and his long period of European exile. An enlightening and entertaining look at Welles's brilliant and enigmatic career as a filmmaker, What Ever Happened to Orson Welles? serves as a major reinterpretation of Welles’s life and work. McBride clears away the myths that have long obscured Welles’s later years and have caused him to be falsely regarded as a tragic failure. McBride’s revealing portrait of this great artist will change the terms of how Orson Welles is understood as a man, an actor, a political figure, and a filmmaker.