It’s a safe bet that for...reasons...many of you have a lot of time on your hands right now. And while the prospect of blasting through your multi-platform watchlist sounds pretty appealing, the hours of constant screen time can numb your sense of reality and personhood, making you feel like living sweat pants with severe eye strain.
So maybe it’s time to give screens a rest and settle down with a nice book. But don’t fret! If you still want to scratch that cinephile itch while in the book nook, here are a few titles from all over the spectrum—fandom, history, how-to, Hollywood, indie, high-brow, low-brow and every brow in between—that do just that.
Silver Screen Fiend: Learning about Life from an Addiction to Film
by Patton Oswalt
This book is pure catnip for, as Oswalt dubs them, the “sprocket fiend”. This memoir tracks the roughly half a decade of Oswalt’s life where he ascended from unknown stand-up to household name on the sitcom King of Queens. During this time, he was also trying to see every revival movie in every L.A. repertory theatre he could, often sabotaging the rest of his life in the process.
If you’re a fan of Oswalt’s comedic voice, you’re probably already on board. But if you need further convincing, Patton lovingly describes a Letterboxd-busting list of films (the list of the deeper cuts alone is massive), while preaching the dangers of going too far down the rabbit hole of pop art consumption...that soulless, but addictive place where it becomes more about collection and complete-ism than actual enjoyment. It’s a rich, hilarious account of growing up, from young adulthood to adult-sans-qualifier-hood, through the lens of both fandom and creation.
The cherry on top is the book’s epilogue, “I’ll Program a Month in Heaven for You, Sherman Torgan”, a tribute to the deceased proprietor of L.A.’s famed New Beverly Cinema and Willy Wonka to Patton’s cinematic caprices. Here, Patton programs an imaginary film festival of the most famous movies never made—Adaptations of greenlight-elusive novels like Confederacy of Dunces and Blood Meridian, Sergio Leone’s epic about the Battle of Stalingrad, Francis Ford Coppola’s Doctor Strange (yup...almost a thing)—complete with expertly rendered tales from each fictional production.
Tip: If you can, get the audio version of the book. As with anything he writes, Oswalt’s literal voice adds that extra shake of pepper that makes the experience nearly perfect.
Making Movies / Rebel Without a Crew
by Sidney Lumet and Robert Rodriguez, respectively
Two iconic tomes of filmmaking. One, a masterclass by arguably one of the greatest Hollywood directors of all time. The other, a first-person account of how some dude out-resourcefuless-ed the odds and became an icon of filmmaking and the DIY spirit. Two great tastes that go well one after the other.
Making Movies spans almost four decades of Lumet’s illustrious career. And his insight on how to construct a film (communicating with actors, establishing a “lens plot”, etc.) is invaluable to directors of every experience level. It feels like you’re getting away with something reading this book, given that this is the mind behind gritty masterpieces like Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. But Lumet’s experience of making these tense, gritty films is nestled all warm and snuggly within the money of a Hollywood that valued these kinds of films. And by the time the “art film bubble” in Hollywood burst in the late 70s, Lumet was already established enough to continue on his current path.
With Rebel, Rodriguez’s diary during the making of El Mariachi, the director-writer shows the blood and guts of making a feature film with no money and no resources—or at least resources people don’t recognize as resources. He volunteered for in-patient medical testing to raise money (where he found some of his cast) and used every trick employed by community theatre productions and backyard movie-makers to make an action movie for around $7,000—impossibly cheap even today.
And while comparing the work of these two auteurs is fairly apples-to-oranges, pairing Rodriguez’s story of permanently scarring his knees for film stock money and Lumet talking about telling his studio driver to let him sleep on the way to set in the morning is really quite illuminating. Just shows that there are many roads that lead to making a film. And for each road, there are a hundred different lessons learned.
Make Your Own Damn Movie: Secrets of a Renegade Director
by Lloyd Kaufman
If you’re an independent filmmaker and you don’t love Troma movies, you probably at least respect Lloyd Kaufman, creator and impresario of indie horror movies and living brand, long before “persona-as-a-brand” was a thing.
A follow up to his memoir All I Learned About Filmmaking I Learned from the Toxic Avenger (co-authored by future Guardians of the Galaxy director and Kaufman mentee James Gunn), this book attempts to show you the process of making indie films on the cheap, tying its structure to the making of Citizen Toxie: The Toxic Avenger 4.
Some of the advice is a little dusty having been written a decade-plus ago, but the fundamentals are there, all told with Kaufman’s signature showmanship and humor. If you really want to dive deeper into the specifics of directing, producing, and selling, you can check out Kaufman's Your Own Damn Film School series of break-out books.
Oh, and just like you ran to YouTube to check out Joe Exotic’s music videos after watching Tiger King, you can see a lot of the scenarios described in this book go down on camera in Apocalypse Soon (currently available on Amazon Prime).
The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film
by Michael Ondaatje
If you went to film school, you were possibly required to read Murch’s In the Blink of an Eye. If you haven’t read this iconic first attempt to crystalize the craft of film editing, go do that. I’ll wait. It’s super short and super worth it.
But don’t let the stigma of assigned reading turn you off to Murch and his amazing brain. Because if his friends have anything to say about Murch, it’s that he’s got a theory about everything and they’re all worth hearing.
This book is a dialogue between Murch and Michael Ondaatje, also noted for authoring the novel The English Patient before being adapted into the 1996 film of the same name, which was edited by Murch. Ondaatje’s fascination with the editing process and Murch himself is evident as they discuss Murch’s work on some of the most iconic films in cinema history (Apocalypse Now, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Godfather Saga) as well nearly every other art form imaginable. They also dive deeper into art’s associated building blocks: dreams, philosophy and—probably Murch’s true canvas—process.
The New Poverty Row
by Fred Olen Rey
“Poverty Row” is slang for the low-rent studios on Gower Street in Hollywood that cranked out B movies, dating back to the silent era. And while the studios themselves closed down years ago, the concept of a “poverty row” film has lived on, whether through second features, direct-to-VHS oddities, and now the more rough-hewn selections on Amazon Prime. And, same as it’s always been, these films are the direct reflection of a certain brand of cinematic mad genius: the director/distributor.
Fred Olen Rey, one of these mad geniuses and deservedly featured in the book, devotes individual chapters to director/distributors and their unique ways of making a few bucks with their movies. They inserted new footage into international films and resold them, wrote uninterrupted monologues that went on for 15 minutes to pad films out to feature-length, or got other production companies to hire them to make movies out of the country and then on weekends, would sneak in an extra film using the same cast, crew, and locations.
While a lot of these films have...erm...subjective value in and of themselves (not because they’re schlocky—they’re just boring), the true art form of the director/distributor has nothing to do with story or performances or, in many cases, anything that’s up on the screen at all. It’s creating a hundred dollar sizzle for a 50-cent steak.
So that’s it! Hopefully, you had a nice respite from screen time, learned a little something, and hey, you read a book! You said you were gonna read at least one during the quarantine anyway, right? Remember, books don’t go bad, so come on back anytime. In the meantime, go binge McMillions! You earned it!
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Note From Tongal: "Books About Films and Filmmaking to Read During the Quarantine" is part of a series of Tongal Community-written blog posts that were originally sourced in the Tongal Blog Open Call Project. The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the official policy or position of Tongal. Read more Tongal Community-written posts here and then Pitch us a topic you'd like to write about for the Tongal Blog
