Andrew Horton

Julian Hoxter

Mark Eaton

J. Madison Davis

Screenwriting

Andrew Horton--Professor of Film and Literature at Loyola University and a successful screenwriter--presents a definitive work on the character-centered screenplay. Focusing on the screenplays of The Silence of The Lambs, Thelma and Louise, Northern Exposure and other works, he takes readers step-by-step through the entire writing process.

Writing the Character-centered Screenplay

The nature of comedy has interested many thinkers, from Plato to Freud, but film comedy has not received much theoretical attention in recent years. The essays in Comedy/Cinema/Theory use a range of critical and theoretical approaches to explore this curious and fascinating subject. The result is a stimulating, informative book for anyone interested in film, humor, and the art of bringing the two together. Comedy remains a central human preoccupation, despite the vagaries in form that it has assumed over the centuries in different media. In his introduction, Horton surveys the history of the study of comedy, from Aristophanes to the present, and he also offers a perspective on other related comic forms: printed fiction, comic books, TV sitcoms, jokes and gags. Some essays in the collection focus on general issues concerning comedy and cinema. In lively (and often humorous) prose, such scholars as Lucy Fischer, Noel Carroll, Peter Lehman, and Brian Henderson employ feminist, post-Freudian, neo-Marxist, and Bakhtinian methodologies. The remaining essays bring theoretical considerations to bear on specific works and comic filmmakers. Peter Brunette, William Paul, Scott Bukatman, Dana Polan, Charles Eidsvik, Ruth Perlmutter, Stephen Mamber, and Andrew Horton provide different perspectives for analyzing The Three Stooges, Chaplin, Jerry Lewis, Woody Allen, Dusan Makavejev, and Alfred Hitchcock's sole comedy, Mr. and Mrs. Smith, as well as the peculiar genre of cynical humor from Eastern Europe. As editor Horton notes, an over-arching theory of film comedy does not emanate from these essays. Yet the diversity and originality of the contributions reflect vital and growing interest in the subject, and both students of film and general moviegoers will relish the results.

Comedy/Cinema/Theory

Cinema is a truly global phenomenon and screenwriters who limit their ambitions to Hollywood can unnecessarily limit their careers. This text provides the practical know-how for breaking into the global marketplace.

Selling Your Scripts from Hollywood to Hong Kong

Screenwriting for a Global Market

Stuart Y. McDougal

This title was originally published in 1998. Play It Again, Sam is a timely investigation of a topic that until now has received almost no critical attention in film and cultural studies: the cinematic remake. As cinema enters its second century, more remakes are appearing than ever before, and these writers consider the full range: Hollywood films that have been recycled by Hollywood, such as The Jazz Singer, Cape Fear, and Robin Hood; foreign films including Breathless; and Three Men and a Baby, which Hollywood has reworked for American audiences; and foreign films based on American works, among them Yugoslav director Emir Kusturica's Time of the Gypsies, which is a "makeover" of Coppola's Godfather films. As these essays demonstrate, films are remade by other films (Alfred Hitchcock went so far as to remake his own The Man Who Knew Too Much) and by other media as well. The editors and contributors draw upon narrative, film, and cultural theories, and consider gender, genre, and psychological issues, presenting the "remake" as a special artistic form of repetition with a difference and as a commercial product aimed at profits in the marketplace. The remake flourishes at the crossroads of the old and the new, the known and the unknown. Play It Again, Sam takes the reader on an eye-opening tour of this hitherto unexplored territory. This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1998.

Retakes on Remakes

Play It Again, Sam

This updated text attempts to provide a definitive work on the character-based screenplay. It surveys the New Hollywood, where Fargo, Shakespeare in Love and The Truman Show are able to succeed alongside the perennial special effects extravaganzas.

Writing the Character-Centered Screenplay, Updated and Expanded Edition

From a hotel in Marrakech in The Man Who Knew Too Much, to small-town Alabama in To Kill a Mockingbird, to Mission Control in Space Cowboys, creating a fictional, yet wholly believable world in which to film a movie has been the passion and life's work of Henry Bumstead, one of Hollywood's most celebrated production designers. In a career that has spanned nearly seventy years, Bumstead has worked on more than one hundred movies and television films. His many honors include Academy Awards for Art Direction for To Kill a Mockingbird and The Sting, as well as nominations for Vertigo and The Unforgiven. This popularly written and extensively illustrated book tells the intertwining stories of Henry Bumstead's career and the evolution of Hollywood art direction. Andrew Horton combines his analysis of Bumstead's design work with wide-ranging interviews in which Bumstead talks about working with top directors, including Alfred Hitchcock, George Roy Hill, Robert Mulligan, and Clint Eastwood, as well as such stars as Paul Newman, Robert Redford, Doris Day, Jimmy Stewart, Sidney Poitier, Bill Cosby, Jerry Lewis, and James Cagney. Numerous production drawings, storyboards, and film stills illustrate how Bumstead's designs translated to film. This portrait of Bumstead's career underscores an art director's crucial role in shaping the look of a film and also tracks the changes in production design from the studio era through location shooting to today's use of high-tech special effects.

Henry Bumstead and the World of Hollywood Art Direction

BONES IN THE SEA follows what life is like on a Greek island in 1987 as an American family of three decide to take "time off" from routine life in the United States and simply settle into island life as the Greeks have known it for thousands of years! More than a travel book, this is a "what if we took the family and lived in a completely different place and way for a short time" narrative that covers a lot of Greek local and national culture as well.

Bones in the Sea

As late as 1976, George Roy Hill was the first and only director to have two films on the all-time top ten box office hits: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (both starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman). A filmmaker with a diverse background in music, drama and television, Hill proved to be a popular storyteller in a variety of genres. His films are tied to important American themes and reflect an ironic, bittersweet vision of life. The book begins with a discussion of the way Hill's films often make their most important statements on the subtextual level. The stories entertain, but the subtext is often disturbing, contradictory, unresolved. Hill felt that all of his major characters create an environment, a fantasy, an illusion, and then go on to make it happen. It continues by tracing the thematic characteristics that are consistent with Hill's depiction of protagonists who create their own environments and then attempt to inhabit them. Then, individual chapters study in detail the art, craft and style of each of his films, including Thoroughly Modern Millie, Slaughterhouse Five, A Little Romance, The World According to Garp, Little Drummer Girl and Hill's last film Funny Farm.

The Films of George Roy Hill

Screenwriters often joke that “no one ever paid a dollar at a movie theater to watch a screenplay.” Yet the screenplay is where a movie begins, determining whether a production gets the “green light” from its financial backers and wins approval from its audience. This innovative volume gives readers a comprehensive portrait of the art and business of screenwriting, while showing how the role of the screenwriter has evolved over the years. Reaching back to the early days of Hollywood, when moonlighting novelists, playwrights, and journalists were first hired to write scenarios and photoplays, Screenwriting illuminates the profound ways that screenwriters have contributed to the films we love. This book explores the social, political, and economic implications of the changing craft of American screenwriting from the silent screen through the classical Hollywood years, the rise of independent cinema, and on to the contemporary global multi-media marketplace. From The Birth of a Nation (1915), Gone With the Wind (1939), and Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) to Chinatown (1974), American Beauty (1999), and Lost in Translation (2003), each project began as writers with pen and ink, typewriters, or computers captured the hopes and dreams, the nightmares and concerns of the periods in which they were writing. As the contributors take us behind the silver screen to chronicle the history of screenwriting, they spotlight a range of key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond. With original essays from both distinguished film scholars and accomplished screenwriters, Screenwriting is sure to fascinate anyone with an interest in Hollywood, from movie buffs to industry professionals.

On the writing of comedy for cinema and television

Writing the Comedy-Centered Screenplay

Laughing Out Loud

Greek film director Theo Angelopoulos is one of the most influential and widely respected filmmakers in the world today, yet his films are still largely unknown to the American public. In the first book in English to focus on Angelopoulos's unique cinematic vision, Andrew Horton provides an illuminating contextual study that attempts to demonstrate the quintessentially Greek nature of the director's work. Horton situates the director in the context of over 3,000 years of Greek culture and history. Somewhat like Andrei Tarkovsky in Russia or Antonioni in Italy, Angelopoulos has used cinema to explore the history and individual identities of his culture. With such far-reaching influences as Greek myth, ancient tragedy and epic, Byzantine iconography and ceremony, Greek and Balkan history, modern Greek pop culture including bouzouki music, shadow puppet theater, and the Greek music hall tradition, Angelopoulos emerges as an original "thinker" with the camera, and a distinctive director who is bound to make a lasting contribution to the art form. In a series of films including The Travelling Players, Voyage to Cythera, Landscape in the Mist, The Suspended Step of the Stork, and most recently in Ulysses' Gaze starring Harvey Keitel (winner of the 1995 Cannes Film Festival Grand Prix), Angelopoulos has developed a remarkable cinematic style, characterized by carefully composed scenes and an enormous number of extended long shots. In an age of ever decreasing attention spans, Angelopoulos offers a cinema of contemplation.

A Cinema of Contemplation

The Films of Theo Angelopoulos

Michael Brashinsky

Now faced with the "zero hour" created by a new freedom of expression and the dramatic breakup of the Soviet Union, Soviet cinema has recently become one of the most interesting in the world, aesthetically as well as politically. How have Soviet filmmakers responded to the challenges of glasnost? To answer this question, the American film scholar Andrew Horton and the Soviet critic Michael Brashinsky offer the first book-length study of the rapid changes in Soviet cinema that have been taking place since 1985. What emerges from their collaborative dialogue is not only a valuable work of film criticism but also a fascinating study of contemporary Soviet culture in general. Horton and Brashinsky examine a wide variety of films from BOMZH (initials standing for homeless drifter) through Taxi Blues and the glasnost blockbuster Little Vera to the Latvian documentary Is It Easy to Be Young? and the "new wave" productions of the "Wild Kazakh boys." The authors argue that the medium that once served the Party became a major catalyst for the deconstruction of socialism, especially through documentary filmmaking. Special attention is paid to how filmmakers from 1985 through 1990 represent the newly "discovered" past of the pre-glasnost era and how they depict troubled youth and conflicts over the role of women in society. The book also emphasizes the evolving uses of comedy and satire and the incorporation of "genre film" techniques into a new popular cinema. An intriguing discussion of films of Georgia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Kazakhstan ends the work.

Glasnost and Soviet Cinema in Transition

The Zero Hour

This study of the rapid changes in Soviet cinema that have been taking place since 1985 examines the response of filmmakers faced with the "zero hour" created by a new freedom of expression and the dramatic break-up of the Soviet Union.

William Rothman

Mihail Iosifovič Brašinskij

Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost gathers together 23 essays written by some of Russia's most astute commentators of film and culture. Written during the 1980s and published in English for the first time, this collection includes reviews of films such as Little Vera and Taxi Blues, which were critically hailed in the West. Their comments not only illuminate important aspects of Russian filmmaking during this decade: as importantly, they capture a sense of a society in flux during the waning years of Communism, as well as the larger context within which Glasnost cinema and culture developed. This collection provides insight into the successes and shortcomings of Glasnost, as captured in film, for a Western audience.

Russian Critics on the Cinema of Glasnost

As late as 1976, George Roy Hill was the first and only director to have two all-time, top-ten, box-office hits: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (both starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman). A filmmaker with backgrounds in music, drama and television, he was a popular storyteller. His films reflect an ironic, bittersweet vision of life. The stories entertain, but the subtext is often disturbing. Hill felt that all of his major characters "create an environment, a fantasy, an illusion, and then go on to make it happen." Individual chapters study in detail the art, craft and style of each of his films, including Period of Adjustment, Toys in the Attic, The World of Henry Orient, Hawaii, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Slaughterhouse Five, A Little Romance, The World According to Garp, The Little Drummer Girl and Hill's last, Funny Farm.

The Films of George Roy Hill, rev. ed.

Among the pioneers of television, Ernie Kovacs was one of the most original and imaginative comedians. His zany, irreverent, and surprising humor not only entertained audiences throughout the 1950s and early 1960s, but also inspired a host of later comedies and comedians, including Monty Python, David Letterman, much of Saturday Night Live, Rowan and Martin's Laugh-In, Captain Kangaroo, and even Sesame Street. Kovacs created laughter through wildly creative comic jokes, playful characterizations, hilarious insights, and wacky experiments. "Nothing in moderation," his motto and epitaph, sums up well Kovacs's wholehearted approach to comedy and life. In this book, Andrew Horton offers the first sustained look at Ernie Kovacs's wide-ranging and lasting contributions to the development of TV comedy. He discusses in detail Kovacs's work in New York, which included The Ernie Kovacs Show (CBS prime time 1952–1953), The Ernie Kovacs Show (NBC daytime variety 1956–1957), Tonight (NBC late-night comedy/variety 1956-1957), and a number of quiz shows. Horton also looks at Kovacs's work in Los Angeles and in feature film comedy. He vividly describes how Kovacs and his comic co-conspirators created offbeat characters and zany situations that subverted expectations and upended the status quo. Most of all, Horton demonstrates that Kovacs grasped the possibility for creating a fresh genre of comedy through the new medium of television and exploited it to the fullest.

Nothing in Moderation

Ernie Kovacs & Early TV Comedy

Joanna E. Rapf

A wide-ranging survey of the subject that celebrates the variety and complexity of film comedy from the ‘silent’ days to the present, this authoritative guide offers an international perspective on the popular genre that explores all facets of its formative social, cultural and political context A wide-ranging collection of 24 essays exploring film comedy from the silent era to the present International in scope, the collection embraces not just American cinema, including Native American and African American, but also comic films from Europe, the Middle East, and Korea Essays explore sub-genres, performers, and cultural perspectives such as gender, politics, and history in addition to individual works Engages with different strands of comedy including slapstick, romantic, satirical and ironic Features original entries from a diverse group of multidisciplinary international contributors

A Companion to Film Comedy

As late as 1976, George Roy Hill was the first and only director to have two all-time, top-ten, box-office hits: Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and The Sting (both starring Robert Redford and Paul Newman). A filmmaker with backgrounds in music, drama and television, he was a popular storyteller. His films reflect an ironic, bittersweet vision of life. The stories entertain, but the subtext is often disturbing. Hill felt that all of his major characters “create an environment, a fantasy, an illusion, and then go on to make it happen.” Individual chapters study in detail the art, craft and style of each of his films, including Period of Adjustment, Toys in the Attic, The World of Henry Orient, Hawaii, The Great Waldo Pepper, Slap Shot, Thoroughly Modern Millie, Slaughterhouse Five, A Little Romance, The World According to Garp, The Little Drummer Girl and Hill’s last, Funny Farm.

"We need good screenwriters who understand character." Everywhere Andrew Horton traveled in researching this book—from Hollywood to Hungary—he heard the same refrain. Yet most of the standard how-to books on screenwriting follow the film industry's earlier lead in focusing almost exclusively on plot and formulaic structures. With this book, Horton, a film scholar and successful screenwriter, provides the definitive work on the character-based screenplay. Exceptionally wide-ranging—covering American, international, mainstream, and "off-Hollywood" films, as well as television—the book offers creative strategies and essential practical information. Horton begins by placing screenwriting in the context of the storytelling tradition, arguing through literary and cultural analysis that all great stories revolve around a strong central character. He then suggests specific techniques and concepts to help any writer—whether new or experienced—build more vivid characters and screenplays. Centering his discussion around four film examples—including Thelma & Louise and The Silence of the Lambs—and the television series, Northern Exposure, he takes the reader step-by-step through the screenwriting process, starting with the development of multi-dimensional characters and continuing through to rewrite. Finally, he includes a wealth of information about contests, fellowships, and film festivals. Espousing a new, character-based approach to screenwriting, this engaging, insightful work will prove an essential guide to all of those involved in the writing and development of film scripts.

Andrew Horton

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