The best books about the making of a movie

Even if Mark Harris wasn’t my former editor I would maintain that he is the smartest and most insightful journalist writing about movies today. And the evidence was there right out of the gate with his first book, Pictures at a Revolution, which chronicles the making of the five films nominated for the 1967 Best Picture Oscar. That story alone would be compelling, but what makes Harris’ tale truly great is how he uses these five films (Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, In the Heat of the Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and Dr. Doolittle) as a prism to see the bigger picture of what was happening in the culture, pinpointing the exact moment when Old Hollywood was gasping for its last breath and a vibrant, thrilling New Hollywood was being born.

When Tom Wolfe published The Bonfire of the Vanities, he managed to capture the zeitgeist of the go-go Big Money ‘80s in a way that no one else had. Of course, it didn’t take Hollywoof very long to turn his bestseller into a film…and screw it up royally. Salamon’s tremendous access to Brian De Palma’s big-budget fiasco provides an insane fly-on-the-wall immediacy, showing us how even talented people with good intentions can completely whiff. There’s schadenfreude on every page.  

Wasson has written some really great books about the movies and some I didn’t really care for. But he really nails this one about the making of Roman Polanski’s neo-noir classic, Chinatown. Weaving together the rollicking narratives of the film’s four main creative players (Polanski, producer Robert Evans, writer Robert Towne, and star Jack Nicholson), Wasson shows us how easy it would have been for any one part of this brilliantly complex jigsaw puzzle to fall in the wrong place and doom the whole endeavor. It certainly helps that the four men he focuses on are all outsize characters swinging their way through Tinseltown’s Me Decade, but Wasson also does the work, digging up great new nuggets about a movie that most film buffs think they already know everything about. That he also manages to write like a dream is just the icing on the cake.

I’ve been a fan of Josh Karp’s for years. So much so, that at this point I just blindly trust his taste. If he thinks something is worth writing about, I tend to end up agreeing. In Orson Welles’ Last Movie, he puts on his private-eye hat and starts digging into the legendary Citizen Kane director’s unfinished final film, The Other Side of the Wind (it was completed after Karp’s book was published and aired on Netflix). Yes, the story is about an auteur’s quest to realize his vision against crushing odds, but it’s also about something much larger—a promising young genius who tragically flamed out too soon and battled with every last breath and cent to do what he was born to do. Parts of it almost read like a Shakespearian tragedy.

Gottlieb was the credited writer of Steven Spielberg’s 1975 Great White blockbuster. And in this slim volume published shortly after the film’s massive success, he tells the (mostly) unvarnished story about how this little movie about a vacation town terrorized by a man-eating shark spiraled completely out of control (in terms of its budget and shooting schedule) and how it was saved by a series of happy accidents, creative flukes, and of course, youthful hubris and genius. Jaws has always been my favorite film since I first saw it at age 6 (my parents were sadists, apparently). And if you love the movie—and really, who doesn’t?—then The Jaws Log is a must read.