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Zusatztext “Impressive and entertaining. . . . A sweeping and valuable compendium of picture-making and picture lore.” —Peter Bogdanovich! The Wall Street Journal “This book! lovingly put together from hundreds of dialogues with some of the greatest directors! writers and technicians who ever worked in the medium is a precious resource for filmmakers at all stages. . . . And for people who simply love movies! it’s a joy to read.” —Martin Scorsese “Anyone remotely interested in movies will be enchanted by this astonishing collection.” — Chicago Tribune “Brilliant. . . . This one is a keeper. . . . Anybody wanting to write! produce or direct movies needs to own and read it.” — The New York Post Informationen zum Autor Edited and with an Introduction by George Stevens, Jr. Klappentext The first book to bring together these interviews of master moviemakers from the American Film Institute's renowned seminars, Conversations with the Great Moviemakers offers an unmatched history of American cinema in the words of its greatest practitioners. Here are the incomparable directors Frank Capra, Elia Kazan, King Vidor, David Lean, Fritz Lang ("I learned only from bad films”), William Wyler, and George Stevens; renowned producers and cinematographers; celebrated screenwriters Ray Bradbury and Ernest Lehman; as well as the immortal Ingmar Bergman and Federico Fellini ("Making a movie is a mathematical operation. It's absolutely impossible to improvise”). Taken together, these conversations offer uniquely intimate access to the thinking, the wisdom, and the genius of cinema's most talented pioneers. It sounds like bragging, but we didn’t borrow from the bank. We kept a certain amount of money aside and financed our own pictures. In a way we gambled a little heavier than some people do at Las Vegas, but we always got away with it. HAROLD LLOYD (Born in Burchard, Nebraska, 1893—Died 1971) There are few more fondly remembered screen images than the young man with horn-rimmed glasses desperately clinging to the hand of a clock high over Los Angeles. That young man was seventy-six years old the night he joined twenty aspiring filmmakers who had earlier seen a thirty-five-millimeter print of Kid Brother in the old library of the Doheny estate in Beverly Hills. For most of them this was their first look at Harold Lloyd, a comic genius whose screen triumphs four decades earlier had made him one of the world’s most famous faces, an international star who produced his films and took responsibility for every detail. He never took director credit, but he was the guiding light of his comedies. Lloyd owned his films and preserved them, but kept such a tight grip on them that he missed the opportunity for the kind of revivals enjoyed by his contemporary rivals, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. In fact, most filmgoers remember him only for the famous clock scene in Safety Last! because it is seen so often in film history compilations. But in the 1920s audiences crowded into theaters and howled at Lloyd’s antics in Grandma’s Boy, Girl Shy, The Freshman, The Kid Brother and Speedy—which were always accompanied by a live orchestra. I remember Lloyd insisting that a piano was all right for two-reelers, but you had to have a big orchestra for features. He was slight at five foot nine, optimistic and genial. When he arrived at AFI he seemed more like someone’s happy uncle than a man whose success had enabled him to build a forty-four-room house in Beverly Hills with a hundred-foot waterfall, a nine-hole golf course and a staff of sixteen full-time gardeners. Lloyd gave the world thrills and laughs. His era was the magical time of grand movie palaces, huge audiences and shared laughter, and his legacy includes some of th...
