UNITED STATES AUTHOR · BIOGRAPHY · MOTION PICTURE PRODUCERS AND DIRECTORS
King Vidor
Also known as: KING VIDOR
King Wallis Vidor ( VEE-dor; February 8, 1894 – November 1, 1982) was an American film director, film producer, and screenwriter. His 67-year career spanned the silent and sound eras, with works distinguished by a sympathetic depiction of contemporary social issues. Considered an auteur director, Vidor approached multiple genres and allowed the subject matter to determine the style, often pressing the limits of film-making conventions. His most acclaimed and successful film in the silent era was The Big Parade (1925). Vidor's sound films of the 1940s and early 1950s, such as Northwest Passage (1940), Comrade X (1940), An American Romance (1944), and The Fountainhead (1949), have been characterized as some of his best.
Speech involves the rationalising of our feelings and impulses, something film directors of the silent era discovered they could catch at first hand.
— from On film-making
Most acclaimed
On film-making
An analysis of the director's art and craft, from one of the most revered of all film school directors. Mackendrick directed classic Ealing comedies plus a Hollywood masterpiece, Sweet Smell of Success. But after retiring from film-making in 1969, he spent nearly 25 years teaching his craft at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles. Mackendrick produced hundreds of pages of handouts and sketches, designed to guide his students to a finer understanding of how to write a story, and then use those devices peculiar to cinema in order to tell that story as effectively as possible. Gathered and edited in this collection, his teachings reveal that he had the talent not only to make great films, but also to articulate the process with a clarity and insight that will still inspire any aspiring filmmaker. --From publisher description.
Billy the Kid
History has treated Billy the Kid like a homicidal psychopath, a brazen madman responsible for as many as 21 murders. Steeped in legend, shrouded in folklore and outright lies, Billy the Kid has been portrayed for over 125 years as one of the most savage killers in American folklore. Yet for others, particularly the Hispanic people of the Southwest, the Kid was an avenging angel and a sagebrush Robin Hood. For them and many others, the Kid embodied youth, nobility, humanity, romance, and tragedy. He was the symbolic transition between the old and the new, with a blazing sixgun in hand. Now along comes Michael Wallis's sympathetic yet completely authoritative biography, which challenges and debunks many of the myths that have hounded this young man since his death at the age of 21 in New Mexico Territory. By scrupulously retelling Billy the Kid's brief but compelling story in an effort to set the record straight,Wallis -- renowned for his social histories of the West -- has created a new portrait of this outlaw. Countless books have been published about the Lincoln County War, including Billy the Kid's role in that conflict and the aftermath, but few authors have analyzed the Kid's crimes in the larger context of the political and social corruption that had become a way of life in New Mexico Territory. Wallis describes how the outlaw legend was deliberately manufactured and manipulated -- in fact, really the kid only became known by that name in the last year of his life. Furthermore, we learn how the few killings in which the Kid was actually implicated were used to divert attention from much larger societal corruption and crimes committed by a brotherhood of cunning politicians and power brokers. Wallis's Billy the Kid is more than a riveting story; the book is an extraordinary evocation of the reality of the Old West. With fascinating details of 19th century life, Wallis presents the brief, unhappy ballad of a rootless young man, most likely born to an immigrant Irish woman in New York just before the Civil War. Wallis then uses the story of Billy the Kid to explain the history of the violent settlement of the West and the development of frontier life between 1865 and 1881. We learn of the rise of the gun culture, the dangerous criminal world of New Mexico's Lincoln County, and everyday life at remote frontier outposts. We also meet many of the legendary heroes and antiheroes who, like the Kid, have been mythologized over time. - Jacket flap.