Before there was François Truffaut, with his gargantuan series of interviews with Alfred Hitchcock that became a book, there was Peter Bogdanovich, who, in his early twenties—fifty years ago—was, in effect, New York’s première activist on behalf of the classic American cinema and its luminaries (most of whom were still alive and working)… 

Richard Brody on Peter Bogdanovich and Alfred Hitchcock: http://nyr.kr/10dViND

Photograph: NBC.

(Source: newyorker.com)

…we seldom get to witness the actual creative sessions that go into producing films. So I was gobsmacked to discover, recently, that over several days in 1978, George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and the screenwriter Lawrence Kasdan worked through an idea Lucas had for a film called “Raiders of the Lost Ark,” and they recorded the sessions. And there’s a transcript. And it’s online. 

…Over the intervening decades of enormous wealth and success, both Lucas and Spielberg have carefully tended their public images, so there is a voyeuristic thrill to seeing them converse in so unguarded a manner…

Patrick Radden Keefe reads the transcript of the Indiana Jones creators spitballing about the movie: http://nyr.kr/YdyrUb

(Source: newyorker.com)

In this clip, Richard Brody discusses his DVD-of-the-Week, Sam Peckinpah’s 1972 film, “The Getaway.” Click-through for more: http://nyr.kr/YqCQ5J

(Source: newyorker.com)

Sasha Weiss considers why people find Anne Hathaway, Hollywood’s “happy girl,” to be so annoying: “Little girls learn very quickly to modulate their excitement if they want to be acceptable… Anne has somehow managed to retain that bright look, and many people would like to wipe it off her face.”

Continue reading: http://nyr.kr/XFpWAi

Photograph by Jason Merritt/Getty.

(Source: newyorker.com)

There’s no point to letting indignation, or even just personal preference, override the rational effort to forecast the Academy’s likely misjudgments. The Oscars are the way that Hollywood’s insiders want to be perceived by the world. The following predictions are less their view of the industry’s best achievements than of the choice of work that they’d elect to represent them; the awards are the industry’s advertisement for itself.

Richard Brody casts his Oscar ballot: http://nyr.kr/11XQz7S

(Source: newyorker.com)

Hollywood and China could have a profitable new future together, but American directors might be surprised by the way Chinese fans can react to some good-natured pushback against the censors…

Evan Osnos on the growing relationship between Hollywood and China: http://nyr.kr/WWZHFR

(Source: newyorker.com)

(Source: newyorker.com)

Richard Brody’s DVD of the Week: Nicholas Ray’s “Johnny Guitar”.  

Hear Brody discuss the film in the clip above, and click-through for more on this “miraculous movie”: http://nyr.kr/N1jlf4

(Source: newyorker.com)

Nolan, though more critically praised than many directors and more commercially successful than most …has been dismissed by many cineastes as slick and quasi-intellectual.

I think this is because they misunderstand what his films are doing. Nolan’s entertainments, the best ones, anyway, are games. I don’t mean that they resemble puzzles or tricks (though they do that, too), I mean that they are most satisfying when understood as games, not as novelistic narratives. They are contests with rules and phases, gambits and defenses, many losers and the occasional victor, usually a Pyrrhus type.

James Verini on Christopher Nolan’s games: http://nyr.kr/LZ7KyO

Richard Brody on Anne Frank’s Cinema: http://nyr.kr/MiIc9r

The very internationalism of Frank’s Hollywood heroes (Garbo was Swedish, Henie Norwegian, Milland English) suggests her sense of the relative paradise of tolerance that Hollywood represented and perhaps even helped to foster.