debor009

About 3,500 films are made each year, not all of them great obviously. Is it my imagination or were more great movies really made back in the 1930s and 1940s, during Hollywood's Golden Age?  Certainly they had a system down for identifying plots that appealed to the public and maybe that made all the difference. I just finished Thomas Schatz’ book The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era ,  which was a fascinating read.  Schatz says that in any given year in the early 1930s, MGM staff readers alone filed reports on more than 1,000 novels and original scripts, 500 short stories, 1,500 plays, and 1,300 works in foreign languages...all in the pursuit of stories the studio could turn into hit movies.  One assumes a similar output was seen at all of the other major studios as well. At MGM they followed “The Ten Commandments for Studio Readers” laid down by head of production Irving Thalberg , and most of it sounds like good advice for struggling f...

Viewing good films is not only a way to study acting technique but also to see ways to handle a big genre on a small budget. Lonely Are the Brave , for example - a film of which Kirk Douglas was immensely proud - is an example of how to make a Western with one horse, one jeep, one star (Douglas), a handful of fine actors who were relative unknowns at the time ( Carroll O'Connor , Walter Matthau , Gena Rowlands , George Kennedy ), one jail set, one house, and lots of open (and free) desert. Directed by Volker Schlondorff Another example is now in theatres: Diplomacy , a riveting French-German film about the faceoff between Raoul Nordling , the Swedish consul general in Paris during World War II (played by Andre Dussollier ) and Dietrich von Choltitz , the German general charged with destroying Paris before the German infantry retreated across the Rhine (played by Niels Arestrup , a favorite of mine). The acting is superb, it is wonderfully directed by German filmmaker Volker Schlon...