The New Biographical Dictionary of Film - Softcover

Thomson, David

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0375709401 ISBN 13: 9780375709401

Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2004

Synopsis

Featuring three hundred new additions, an updated edition of the classic film reference provides more than 1,300 entries on leading international actors and actresses, directors, and producers, along with frequently provocative critical essays, profiles, and film analyses. Reprint.

About this title

About the Author

David Thomson was born in London. He has taught film studies at Dartmouth College, has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival, and has been the editor of the Journal of Gastronomy. He is a regular contributor to the New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, The New Republic, Salon, and The Independent (London). He was the screenwriter on the award-winning documentary The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind. His other books include Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick, Rosebud, and three works of fiction: Suspects, Silver Light, and Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes. David Thomson lives in San Francisco with his wife and their two sons.


From the Hardcover edition.

From the Inside Flap

For twenty-five years, David Thomson s Biographical Dictionary of Film has been not merely the finest reference book ever written about movies (Graham Fuller, Interview), not merely the desert island book of art critic David Sylvester, not merely a great, crazy masterpiece (Geoff Dyer, The Guardian), but also fiendishly seductive (Greil Marcus, Rolling Stone).

Now it returns, with its old entries updated and 300 new ones from Luc Besson to Reese Witherspoon making more than 1300 in all, some of them just a pungent paragraph, some of them several thousand words long. In addition to the new musts, Thomson has added key figures from film history lively anatomies of Graham Greene, Eddie Cantor, Pauline Kael, Abbott and Costello, Noël Coward, Hoagy Carmichael, Dorothy Gish, Rin Tin Tin, and more.

Here is a great, rare book, one that encompasses the chaos of art, entertainment, money, vulgarity, and nonsense that we call the movies. Personal, opinionated, funny, daring, provocative, and passionate, it is the one book that every filmmaker and film buff must own. Time Out named it one of the ten best books of the 1990s. Gavin Lambert recognized it as a work of imagination in its own right. Now better than ever a masterwork by the man playwright David Hare called the most stimulating and thoughtful film critic now writing.


From the Hardcover edition.

Edition details

• Publisher: Alfred a Knopf Inc
• Publication date: 2004
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0375709401
• ISBN 13: 9780375709401
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 989