#michael-curtiz

#michael-curtiz

In the history of cinema, there has never been a single script. It is a pervasive myth that film-making requires screenplays; in fact, most scenes are made up on the spot.

Film is like that. It developed from [the silent era] into Fellini and Bergman, Buñuel and David Lynch. [They] took these ideas and created a film that was really like a dream.

If a consortium of Italian grandmothers were to put down The Ten Commandments of making pasta, then 'Thou Shalt Not Break The Spaghetti Before Boiling It' is likely to be right up there alongside 'Thou Shalt Serve The Pasta Al Dente' and 'Thou Shalt Only Add Salt To Boiling Water, Never Oil'.

Cinematography isn't about beautiful images. It's about producing a whole series of images that serve a story. If I come out of a premiere and somebody says, 'Oh, I love the shot when such and such ...' I know I've made a mistake.

Eyes Wide Shut was stranger than that: a meditative art film whose much-hyped orgy scene is more creepy than sexy, run by a cabal of rich and powerful men who prey on young women.

It's dead, sadly. I say sadly because I actually thought there was something really special (and original!) there. Some truly extraordinary music we had figured out for it.

During a junket interview with OutNow, Gyllenhaal explained that the punctuation mark was included to represent the "whole lot of energy" that comes out when the historically muted Bride of Frankenstein is finally allowed to speak. That's all well and good, but to viewers the titular exclamation point is less of a metaphor and more of a golden arrow saying, "This movie is going to be crazy."

George Lucas should have died. It was 1962; the 17-year-old had just crashed his yellow Autobianchi convertible into a walnut tree, in Modesto, California. The car rolled, bounced and came to rest - it was "beyond mangled, flipped upside down and twisted like a crushed Coke can against the tree". When the teenager woke in hospital two weeks later, his heart having nearly stopped, he had a new philosophy: "Maybe there's a reason I survived this accident that nobody should have survived."

The esteemed film-maker was licking his wounds: his most recent picture, Far from the Madding Crowd, which imbued its 19th-century rural characters with an anachronistic King's Road style and panache, had flopped stateside. Childers approached the date with mixed feelings. He adored Schlesinger's previous movie, the jazzy Darling, starring Julie Christie as a model on the make, and had seen it three times.

Even in an era of CGI and AI, nothing is more vivid than the intimacy and imagination of radio or more direct than the connection radio has with listeners. I remember when the legendary Stan Freberg drained Lake Michigan and filled it with hot chocolate, a 700-foot mountain of whipped cream, and a 10-ton maraschino cherry. We didn't have to see it. We heard it on the radio. It was Freberg's demonstration of what radio can do better than television.

It's nice that you are asking about props, because they're not really acknowledged, says Jode Mann, a TV prop master in Los Angeles. When Mann worked on the children's comedy show Pee-wee's Playhouse in the 1980s, she got a call from its star, Paul Reubens, who said he was nominating her for an Emmy. It was only after Mann told her mother and promised to thank her if she won that Reubens called back to say he couldn't nominate her because there's no category for you.

In fact, I've made a conscious habit of seeking out successful individuals so I can learn from their experiences. But the man often nicknamed the "King of the Hollywood Blockbuster" continues to elude me. And yet, despite never meeting face to face, Spielberg taught me one of the most important lessons of my entire career. It's a lesson I've learned through engaging with his work.

Using the diary recollections of Coppola's wife, the late Eleanor Coppola, who was also disconsolately aboard and feeling thoroughly shut out of the alpha male chatting and joshing, Fischer shows our three dishevelled deities dizzied and stunned and even weirdly depressed by their staggering global acclaim.

The Welsh-born actor had spent much of the decade living in the United States, where he split his time between the stage and the screen, building an utterly respectable career. He had played a compassionate doctor in David Lynch's The Elephant Man, a murderous ventriloquist in the cult thriller Magic, and the real-life convicted child murderer Bruno Hauptmann in the TV movie The Lindbergh Kidnapping Case, for which he had won his first Emmy.

It's the first rule of romcoms that opposites attract, and you can't imagine two more different lovers than Poinsettia (Lynn Redgrave), a spark plug of a dame convinced that she is in a relationship with the 19th-century composer Giacomo Puccini, and Fish (James Earl Jones), a gentle giant who spends his spare time wrestling a demon that only he can see.

Starring Brad Pitt as the titular Cliff Booth along with Elizabeth Debicki, Scott Caan, Carla Gugino, and more, the trailer depicts Booth after the events of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. "So you helped rick subdue those hippie intruders, huh?," he's asked before replying "Something like that." The teaser then shows various scenes and scenarios from the film, but with minimal dialogue; though each time a character cusses or flips someone off, it's bleeped and censored.