100 books like Cinematic Storytelling

This popular text on screenwriting relates films to narrative ideas found in ancient myths around the world.

Vogler does an excellent job in demonstrating how films often use elements of plot and character that have proven to be universal characteristics of stories for centuries. He applies these concepts not only to fantasy films but standard Hollywood dramas such as Titanic. 

This book initiated my interest in narrative film theory back in my graduate school days. It became a crucial source for my dissertation.

Bordwell writes about popular films but with a highly analytical eye. All his books are worth reading for those who want intelligent, in-depth discussion, not just stories about Hollywood culture. 

I found Claudia Gorbman’s book insightful in her examination of how film music helps to reinforce the story and enhance the mood of what’s happening on the screen.

Music has a powerful impact on the film viewer, shaping our emotional response to the characters and their triumphs and challenges. Using many examples, this book sharpened my understanding of how music works in a film. 

This is another seminal text which introduced me to the critical theory of film viewers as “readers.”

Watching a movie is not a passive activity. The mind is very active, constantly shifting through the multiple channels of information, organizing the details into a coherent picture of the fictional world presented in the film.

Monaco examines several ways in which this creative-receptive process works in the viewer’s mind.

This lavishly illustrated large-format volume takes the reader from George Lucas’s childhood and early youth to his years at film school and his subsequent Hollywood career as a director, writer, and producer, with a particular emphasis on the production histories of his key films.

With unprecedented access to countless interviewees and archival materials, Hearn brings George Lucas and the making of his films to life.

Apart from telling compelling stories, he also reproduces a wide range of documents for the reader’s perusal so that the book may serve as an archive in its own right (and I have certainly used it precisely in this way in my own research).

Another book focusing on the medium of film, but again the lessons to be learned about good storytelling are universal. Alexander ‘Sandy’ Mackendrick directed such classic Ealing comedies as The Man in the White Suit and The Ladykillers, also the Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. After retiring from filmmaking in 1969, he spent nearly 25 years as a professor at CalArts in Los Angeles where he helped students to write better stories and communicate them effectively through the craft of filmmaking.

This book is compiled from Mackendrick's legacy of masterly handouts and lectures. One section I found incredibly insightful is his comparison of two versions of a key scene from the script of Sweet Smell of Success (initially written by Ernest Lehman and subsequently rewritten by Clifford Odets), seeing how increased tension between the characters is achieved.

Besides being superb novelists and essayists, Dunne and his famous wife, Joan Didion, were screenwriters who banked sizable incomes and endless frustrations doctoring scripts for nearly two dozen movies. Still, no matter what their glittering reputations, most writers are viewed as hors-d’oeuvres at the bottom of the Hollywood food chain, and Dunne spares no one, including himself, in this wickedly witty account of developing a screenplay about the life of TV news anchor Jessica Savitch. What started out as a gritty, cautionary story of a talented young woman who succumbed to drugs and alcohol was transformed into a feel-good fairy tale of love and redemption after Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer got attached to the project. Dunne captures every wrong turn with a writer’s sharp eye and ear for Hollywood hypocrisy.

A photo book that breaks down composition into a very simple workman-like manner not relying on formula. Too many times composition is taught as a formula or “rules of thirds,” which simply scratches the surface as to what composition can and should be doing for the artist. The author offers a different perspective than that of a painter but just as valid.

Apart from presenting George Lucas in his own words, this book offers a concise introduction to his career, including a chronology and a filmography.

The interviews collected herein go from a May 1971 article in the San Francisco Chronicle about the young filmmaker whose first feature, the rather abstract Science Fiction drama THX 1138, had just come out (and flopped!), all the way to a conversation with the Los Angeles Times in January 1999 about the forthcoming release of the first Star Wars prequel Star Wars: Episode I – The Phantom Menace.

Despite dramatic changes in Lucas’s status as a filmmaker (and businessman) across this period, the interviews reveal striking continuities, notably his striving for maximum control over his films and business affairs.

These are collections of writings by Miyazaki in translation: interviews, essays, production notes, doodles, and even poems. These are sometimes directly related to the films, and sometimes on general themes such as artistic integrity, the environment, and contemporary Japan. You get a picture of Miyazaki: deeply thoughtful, ethically engaged, and playfully child-like. Plus, lots of cool illustrations. The second volume goes up through Howls’ Moving Castle.