History of the movies and cinema

My favorite general history is The Story Of Cinema by David Shipman.



The Parade's Gone By by Kevin Brownlow is a very readable introduction to Hollywood's silent era, with great photos.



Brownlow made my all time favorite documentary series, Hollywood, about silent movies:

Hollywood: A Celebration of American Silent Film (Watch on YouTube)



Brownlow made many other superb documentaries on film history, about Chaplin, Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and John Ford, among others

Universal Horror looks at the great horror movies this studio turned out in the 30s: Dracula, Frankenstein, etc...



Inside Warner Brothers by Rudy Behlmer details the day to day inner workings of a studio via company memos. Sounds dull but is anything but.



My favorite movie star memoir is The Moon's A Balloon by David Niven. This book is hilarious even if you have no interest in classic movies.



I have many others I could recommend but these should be enough to get you started. Let me know what you think of them.

A few other favorites I forgot to mention:

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The Studio is a 1969 non-fiction book by John Gregory Dunne about the workings at 20th Century Fox from May 1967 to May 1968. He was allowed significant access to the studio over several months.

According to Dunne's obituary, the resulting book "is regarded as one of the most detailed and accurate reports on the workings of a major film studio ever written."

It covers such aspects as:

- the test screening and marketing of Doctor Doolittle
- the making of Star!, The Planet of the Apes, The Sweet Ride
- the scripting of The Boston Strangler

People who appear in the book include Richard Zanuck, Darryl F. Zanuck, Gene Kelly, Paul Monash, Joe Pasternak, Pandro Berman.

Joyce Haber of the Los Angeles Times said "Dunne's observations are right on the button, his descriptions are spare but evocative, his observations combine substance with humor."

In 1969 Charles Champlin called it "the hottest book in movie circles these days"

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Adventures in the Screen Trade is a book about Hollywood written in 1983 by American novelist and screenwriter William Goldman.

The book is divided into three parts. "Part One: Hollywood Realities" is a collection of essays on various subjects ranging from movie stars and studio executives to his thoughts on how to begin and end a screenplay and how to write for a movie star.

"Part Two: Adventures" has stories from 11 projects that Goldman has been involved with, from Charly and Masquerade, to the Academy Award-winning Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President's Men, to some projects that remained unrealised, such as a musical remake of Grand Hotel.

In "Part Three: Da Vinci", Goldman shows the reader how he would go about adapting his own short story "Da Vinci" into a screenplay. The full text of "Da Vinci" and the subsequent screenplay that he wrote are included, followed by interviews with key movie industry figures, including director George Roy Hill, cinematographer Gordon Willis, and composer Dave Grusin.

There is also an expanded edition of the book, which includes the full screenplay of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, plus Goldman's analysis of the screenplay's strengths and weaknesses, as "Part Three", and moves the "Da Vinci" section to "Part Four".

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The epic human drama behind the making of the five movies nominated for Best Picture in 1967-Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Doctor Doolittle, and Bonnie and Clyde-and through them, the larger story of the cultural revolution that transformed Hollywood, and America, forever

It's the mid-1960s, and westerns, war movies and blockbuster musicals-Mary Poppins, The Sound of Music-dominate the box office. The Hollywood studio system, with its cartels of talent and its production code, is hanging strong, or so it would seem.

By the Oscar ceremonies of the spring of 1968, when In the Heat of the Night wins the 1967 Academy Award for Best Picture, a cultural revolution has hit Hollywood with the force of a tsunami. The unprecedented violence and nihilism of fellow nominee Bonnie and Clyde has shocked old-guard reviewers but helped catapult Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway into counterculture stardom and made the movie one of the year's biggest box-office successes. Just as unprecedented has been the run of nominee The Graduate, which launched first-time director Mike Nichols into a long and brilliant career in filmmaking, to say nothing of what it did for Dustin Hoffman, Simon and Garfunkel, and a generation of young people who knew that whatever their future was, it wasn't in plastics. Sidney Poitier has reprised the noble-black-man role, brilliantly, not once but twice, in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and In the Heat of the Night, movies that showed in different ways both how far America had come on the subject of race in 1967 and how far it still had to go.

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They Went Thataway is a non-fiction book written by James Horwitz and published in 1976. It analyzes the Western film genre from a nostalgic, yet jaded point of view.

The book takes the form of a quest journey, with Horwitz using the idea of researching and locating the old western actors of the past for a writing project. However, Horwitz uses the journey as a way to reconnect with his much more innocent past, and wonders what happened to himself and the world around him.

The book carries a heavy anti-Establishment sense to its narration, with numerous references to Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, as well as the just-concluded Vietnam War.

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Houseman is best remembered as an actor, but his most lasting work was actually as a producer, first with Orson Welles in the 1930s theatre and then in Hollywood in the '40s and '50s.

Houseman wrote three volumes of memoirs, all very much worth reading. The first, Run-Through, deals w/his time w/Welles, but for purposes of this thread the most notable is the second, Front And Center, which details his career as producer of such classic films as The Blue Dahlia, They Live By Night, Executive Suite, and Lust For Life.

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Easy Riders, Raging Bulls ... good book about the 70's.

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Makes a logical followup to Pictures At An Exhibition. The decade when everything seemed so promising, right before Star Wars changed Hollywood forever.

ERRB was made into a documentary, as was TKSITP. Both are worth watching.