This is far more than a making of the movie book. The author delves deeply into the backgrounds of those responsible for making the 1969 film Midnight Cowboy and into the sociocultural climate of the times that led to such a groundbreaking film.
Frankel's previous books, The Searchers and High Noon, explored important films in equal depth, but the Midnight Cowboy saga seems to have greater relevance to our time, especially as it relates to LGBTQ people and their lives.
I remember seeing Midnight Cowboy in college in 1971 and wasn't sure how to interpret it; I've seen it many times since and feel it's a masterpiece of American cinema, and yet Frankel's book has given me even more to think about.
Glenn Frankel's Shooting Midnight Cowboy tells the story of a modern classic that, by all accounts, should never have become one in the first place. Much more than a history of Schlesinger's film, Shooting Midnight Cowboy is an arresting glimpse into the world from which it emerged. By turns madcap and serious, and enriched by interviews with Hoffman, Voight, and others, this is not only the definitive account of the film that unleashed a new wave of innovation in American cinema but also the story of a country (and an industry) beginning to break free from decades of cultural and…
The author was the executive director of the Academy for 20 years; as a writer for Variety who regularly covered the Oscar races in music, I knew him slightly as someone who could answer my questions about the inner workings of Oscar rules. He was always a smart, honest, and decent guy in that difficult and often politically sensitive position.
This book was astonishing to me for its thorough debunking of Oscar myths, including the famous one of “who named Oscar” and its never-before-told stories of the machinations and behind-the-scene maneuvering that went on during Oscar’s first several decades. Often funny, sometimes jaw-dropping.
The first behind-the-scenes history of the organization behind the Academy Awards.
For all the near-fanatic attention brought each year to the Academy Awards, the organization that dispenses those awards-the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences-has yet to be understood. To date, no one has ever produced a thorough account of the Academy's birth and its awkward adolescence, and the few reports on those periods from outside have always had a glancing, cursory quality. Yet the story of the Academy's creation and development is a critical piece of Hollywood's history.
Now that story is finally being told. Bruce Davis, executive…
One of the greatest of all American writers died under mysterious circumstances in 1849. Dawidziak, whose earlier books on TV icons Columbo and Kolchak have been on my shelf for years, tackles this fascinating subject in a unique way. He looked at every conceivable book and article on the subject, interviewed dozens of people with serious knowledge of Poe, and pieced his entire life together in this thorough chronicle.
He weighs and dissects all the evidence and the theories surrounding his death and presents them to us in a logical, meaningful way that serves not only as literary history but as a reminder of Poe's genius with mystery and horror (two words that would also describe the last days of his life)—a page-turner.
A Mystery of Mysteries is a brilliant biography of Edgar Allan Poe that examines the renowned author’s life through the prism of his mysterious death and its many possible causes.
It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened to him during the three missing days before he was found, delirious and “in great distress” on…
Music for Prime Time is the first serious, journalistic history of music for American television. It is the product of 35 years of research and more than 450 interviews with composers, orchestrators, producers, editors and musicians active in the field. This wide-ranging narrative not only tells the backstory of every great TV theme but also examines the many neglected and frequently underrated orchestral and jazz compositions for television dating back to the late 1940s.
Covering every series genre (crime, comedy, drama, westerns, action-adventure, fantasy and sci-fi), it also looks at music for animated series, news and documentary programming, TV-movies and miniseries, and how music for television has evolved in the era of cable and streaming options.
