Fans pick 100 books like Surely You Can't Be Serious

I don’t think I like Ghost World, but it belongs on this list. When I think of Clowes’ work I think of caricature, but the environments in Ghost World pull most of the storytelling weight. You can hear the hum of the fluorescents in the grocery store and the wind between buildings on an empty street.

We’ll be honest. We don’t really remember the romantic drama Up Close & Personal (1996), starring Robert Redford and Michelle Pfeiffer. But we won’t forget this book by Dunne, who wrote the film with his wife, Joan Didion. This is a forthright look at the writer’s lot in Hollywood. It’s a manual for massaging egos and dealing with conflicting notes, told with bracing honesty.

Sometimes, you take a job because you need health insurance. Sometimes, a movie that starts out based on the tragic true story of newscaster Jessica Savitch becomes a glossy sudser in which she lives. Sometimes, a troubled project becomes a hit despite itself. That’s always show business.

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).

I think the author is very clever by bringing in the trendy concept of soft power and thus opening a new window for our understanding of Taiwan cinema.

I found the book not the easiest to read if you are not particularly familiar with the language of cultural studies or with specific films and filmmakers in Taiwan. However, the author has presented a convincing and valuable argument by linking a cinematic output to the entire system, which enables the production, circulation, and distribution of this output.

In other words, Taiwan cinema is a result, but the system that enriches creativity is where Taiwan’s values and soft power lie.  

This was the first story theory book I read and it was hugely influential on me, because it is probably the definitive work in terms of a formulaic, structural approach to story.

This book gave me a depth of knowledge of the traditional approach to story theory, but also a clear understanding of how people in the film industry are going about their work today. It is all wrong, in my opinion, but it is also the truth of what is going on.

It is wrong because a story does not begin with structure. A story begins in the mind, and a structure arrives later once the story is present. This book set me on my journey to find an alternative to structure.

When I decided to study Taiwan cinema more systematically, I tried to read as much on the subject as possible. I enjoyed this book because it offered me a broad overview of many kinds of questions that can be asked about and through Taiwan cinema.

For example, I realized that it is possible to try and understand Taiwanese domestic & international politics, cross-strait relations, colonial history, and the impact of globalization in a more relatable manner by reading films and documentaries as texts. It is also possible to analyze different festivals, genres, filmmakers, and individual films from the perspectives of the film industry and film artistry.

I was totally energized by the enormous potential the subject of Taiwan cinema can offer because of this book.     

Leonard Maltin shot to prominence as a youth publishing the annual Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide, with each new edition becoming an instant New York Times bestseller. Maltin also served a long stint as an on-air correspondent for Entertainment Tonight, where he earned backstage access to generations of movie stars.

His recently published memoir details his early obsession with the movies and then his slow but steady rise as one of Hollywood’s leading historians. I love this book most for its insights into the old stars that Maltin met—stars who knew him from his books and TV work and opened up about their own histories, making this book a valuable resource for film scholars.

The year before Errol Flynn blew into Hollywood, the “pre-Code” era ended. What was the “pre-Code” era? It was the period in the early 1930s when Hollywood rode the cliff, making movies about sensational topics like adultery, pay-for-play, drug use, and more. Many of the pictures included a scene or two with leading ladies scantily clad and even braless. Leading men were often scoundrels.

This book entertainingly details both the point of view of studios struggling to remain relevant in the depths of the Great Depression by creating salacious products and the outcry from alarmed parents who took their kids to the movies only to cover their eyes and rush them back out again.

The author backs up his narrative with eye-popping photos illustrating just what was so shocking about the pre-Code era. This interesting period of Hollywood history ended abruptly and, unfortunately, with the puritanical “Production Code” that ushered… show more.

Though not a book, the film starring Will Ferrell and Emma Thompson borrowed heavily from "Niebla" by Miguel de Unamuno, a Spanish novel about a character who becomes aware he is being narrated by a writer and goes to visit the writer. This film lives rent-free in my heart because the style of self-awareness that Ferrell’s character experiences in this film is close to the way I conceived of the meta-awareness of the characters Forsyth and Kintyre in The Untold Tale. I love the idea of someone learning they are being puppeteered and breaking free of the expected, the prescribed, and the narrative laid out for them. Maybe that’s why I like the film The Truman Show so much, too.

Harris focuses on Oscar night 1968 as four of the five films nominated for Best Picture evinced Hollywood’s reluctant affirmation of the American counterculture. These “pictures at a revolution,” as he terms them—Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, and the Oscar winner In the Heat of the Night—signaled a necessary industry re-think, away from bloated old-Hollywood blockbusters (like Dr. Dolittle, the fifth nominee) and towards something more politically savvy and more hip. Harris does well to chronicle the backstage/behind-the-scenes histories of all five of these films.