Screenwriting is the second of the 'Behind the Silver Screen' series of ten volumes, which will together cover for the first time the full art, craft, business and history of filmmaking from inception to reality. Screenwriting is where a movie begins. Written by screenwriters and critics, this innovative book is devoted to the art of the screenwriter and the business of screenwriting from Hollywood's silent beginnings to the global multimedia marketplace. Focusing on key screenplays that changed the game in Hollywood and beyond and on films from The Birth of a Nation to Chinatown and Lost...

Art directors and production designers are the cinema's 'architects of illusion'. Their overall purpose is to produce the overall pictorial vision for a film and their skills encompass set design, storyboarding, painting, decoration, construction, budgeting, colour and special effects. This book examines the crafts of art direction and production design. It traces their contribution from Thomas Edison's primitive studio, the Black Maria, to the growth of the Hollywood 'studio system', to the effect of sound and colour, and on to the computer-generated imagery of contemporary Hollywood. It...

Screen acting is generally considered in terms of the on-screen performance, which is actually the outcome of collaborative work and ever-changing conventions of the group activity that is filmmaking. New technologies and aesthetic developments, for example, continue to change how actors perform on screen..These elements are explored in this readable, in-depth investigation of the dynamic role of acting in the creation and evolution of Hollywood. Expert contributors take readers from the inception of film acting in 1895, when spectators thrilled at the sight of vaudeville performers and Wild...