Product Description: "Backstory" is the screenwriter's term for what happens in a plot before the screen story begins. In this companion volume to McGilligan's widely praised Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age, fourteen studio scribes active in later decades rail and reminisce about their fifty-plus years of inventing and scripting movies...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: The Backstory series of unique "oral histories" chronicles the lives and careers of notable Hollywood screenwriters—in their own words. Backstory: Interviews with Screenwriters of Hollywood's Golden Age focused on the early sound era and the 1930s...read more (view table of contents, read Amazon.com's description)

Product Description: Screenwriter Robert Riskin (1897-1955) was a towering figure even among the giants of Hollywood's Golden Age. Known for his unique blend of humor and romance, wisecracking and idealism, Riskin teamed with director Frank Capra to produce some of his most memorable films...read more

Relates the life of top Hollywood director George Cukor, who guided to stardom such legendary actresses as Garbo, Bergman, Garland, and Hepburn, and who led a secret double life as a homosexual

Traces the life and career of Robert Altman, and discusses the production and critical reception of each of his films

Interviews with the actor's principal directors--Raoul Walsh, William Wellman, and Howard Hawks--and members of his family, together with rare photographs, complement this biography and film study of the inimitable Cagney

Product Description:     Among the countless gangster films produced by Hollywood, few are as haunting, complex, or ingeniously crafted as White Heat (1948). Students of film history and screen writing will appreciate this treatment—an engaging study of teh various artistic elements that turned what might have been just another gangster film into an innovative classic of the genre and a model of cooperative filmmaking at its best...read more

Product Description: The 1942 smash musical hit Yankee Doodle Dandy has long remained a favorite among audiences and film buffs. Ostensibly the story of "Mr. Broadway"—George M. Cohan— the movie evolved in its making into one of Warners' trademark "biopics" and a showcase for the singing and dancing talents of James Cagney...read more

Illustrates the vital creative influence upon the cinema of James Cagney in his gangster, vaudeville, Western, and other film roles