Printed Matter

By Myrl A. Schreibman
Lone Eagle Publishing $21.95

Not only does this tome get into the nuts and bolts of how to make movies — vocabularly, sequentiality, money allotment, union hires, music rights, etc. — it draws deeply on the author's personal experiences and those of directors Gilbert Cates, Herb Stein, Penelope Spheeris, production designer David Haber, stunt coordinator Rawn Hutchinson and dozens more.

As Cates writes in the introduction, Schreibman explains every nook in production, so that the book focuses on the creativity inherent in each crew member's responsibility. "That indeed is the 'business' of a great producer," Cates concludes. The quality of knowing it all and explaining it all succinctly makes the book transcendent, so that it isn't just for producers.

Directors, unit production managers, assistant directors, production assistants, writers, cinematographers, best boys, dolly grips, sound mixers and production accountants as well as the general public can learn more about the big picture on any big or small picture. Schreibman's crannies include the Taft-Hartley Act, actors and nudity, meals on location, completion bonds, breaking down screenplays, wardrobe, publicity, main and end titles, and human areas like "Relationships and Ego" in Chapter 2: Understanding Producing.

Clear and exact explanations and sound reasoning are laced throughout the book so that there's no confusion among any novice that when the gaffer's "juicers" are involved in the "martini shot," they're not misbehaving — they're electricians on hand for any day's final shot. Helpful charts and breakout boxes are located throughout the book to illustrate concepts, define terms and highlight quotes. The author, a professor and administrator in the UCLA School of Theater, Film and Television, as well as a DGA member director, points out resources available to any production, and uses his own anecdotes from such productions as The Clonus Horror and The Girl, the Gold Watch and Everything to drive home his points.

This handbook's style is disarming even as it attests to the great difficulties inherent in mounting and steering a production. It's personable, readable—like many other "how to do job" books — and insightful. It reads like mentoring is in progress, not curricula. It can work as guide for new filmmakers and as a reinforcing balm for veterans who need a confidence adjustment around the trailer when the second AD throws open the door and says, "Guess what?"

By Bruce Block
Focal Press $29.95

Whether creating for the big screen, television, video or computer, every director is stuck with the same cast. But who's complaining?

"These cast members are capable of playing any part, any mood and any emotion," Bruce Block offers in The Visual Story. "[T]hey work equally well in live-action, animation and computer-generated media ... have no lawyers or agents, work for free, receive no residuals and never come to the set late."

Like the Seven Sages or the seven seas, there are seven members in this ideal cast: space, line, shape, tone, color, movement and rhythm. These "most sought after (and least understood) players around," perform in a troupe called Visual Components. "Most of Hollywood," Block believes, "doesn't even know what the visual components are, yet they've appeared in every film ever made."

So Block proceeds to introduce us to individual components, one by one, starring them in their own chapters, carefully explaining how each one functions and, in its versatility, can be endlessly modified.

If this sounds simplistic, it isn't. Neither is it simple. Block takes plenty of time and great pains to define the complexities within each component. There are examples in which specific scenes from familiar movies (with lists of "Films to Watch" at the ends of chapters) are cited to breathe life into the theories presented. As we are reminded of the ways different directors, decades apart, achieved their dramatic, storytelling effects, as in, say, the section on movement, we appreciate them all the more through Block's analysis of what made up their "affinity of continuum."

Block is an adjunct professor at the USC School of Cinema & Television, teaches classes in visual structure at the American Film Institute, as well as for a long list of commercial studios. The Visual Story, with its graphs galore, is a textbook and might work best in a film-school setting, or in whatever atmosphere would provide opportunities for experimentation with discussions and spurring-on exchanges. But an aspiring director, or even an old hand, picking the book up in solitude, could profit from its pages. Since filmmaking is, when you boil it all down, visual storytelling, the more one understands the tools of the trade — those "visual components" — the richer one's palette can be.

Which brings us to the chapter on color. Of all the visual components, Block believes, color is the most misunderstood ("Probably due to the misguided color education we received as children..."). Since color communicates as surely as music to cue an audience's emotional reaction to what is on the screen — Sidney Lumet's Murder on the Orient Express (1974), as an example, has every murder occurring in a blue light — Block rolls up his sleeves and teaches, beginning with a discourse on light itself.

Lest all of this suggest a cut and dried methodology to drain the life's blood out of a film, at book's end, Block cautions against spending too much time thinking about the visual components. After all, he says, no one wants to wind up "with a production that looks great and has no heart and soul."

Read, study, muse, experiment. But spend more time watching the movies that make you come alive.

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