Review by Choice Review
Unlike many directors, Lumet admires screenwriters, an esteem revealed throughout a brilliant film career that includes Twelve Angry Men (1957), Long Day's Journey into Night (1962), The Pawnbroker (1965), Serpico (1974), Murder on the Orient Express (1974), Dog Day Afternoon (1975), and Network (1976). "My respect for them would grow so great," he writes in his chapter on the screenplay, "that I'd want them in on every aspect of production." In lamenting an exception to that usual situation, however, he offers clear evidence that his way with words is almost as nimble as his talent with a camera: An unnamed writer "was ready to surrender anything he wrote so the star of the picture might hire him the next time he needed a rewrite. If the star asked a simple question, such as 'I'm not sure the time of day is clear here,' the writer would go downstairs, we'd hear the clackety-clack of his portable, and he'd be back with the scene rewritten to take place in a watch factory." Drawing on his own films and the films of numerous others, Lumet traces the entire process of moviemaking in a witty, instructive, thoroughly enjoyable book. All collections. M. W. Estrin; Rhode Island College
Copyright American Library Association, used with permission.
Review by Booklist Review
Lumet writes about the entire process of moviemaking--from camera lenses to encounters with actors and artists--both to praise it as art and to argue for the purity of the form.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Award-winning director Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon; The Verdict) serves as an unpretentious, anecdotal and sometimes irascible gide to the knotty process of getting a story on the screen. Brushing aside the auteur theory, he insists that filmmaking is a collaborative art involving technicians, actors and writers. Drawing upon almost 40 years' experience, the author lucidly explains the technical and aesthetic considerations in set design, cinematography and editing. As Lumet's movies are ample testimony to his love of language and actors, he unsurprisingly singles out such hyperbolic talents as screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and actors Al Pacino and Katharine Hepburn, from whom he coaxed one of her bravest performancesas the crumbling matriarch in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. But Lumet is not star-struck: ``If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third star is the camera.'' Remarkably informative and engrossing, even if film is not your bag. It's all here: lights, camera, action. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
The director of films like Long Day's Journey into Night and Dog Day Afternoon explains how it's done. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Making movies may be ""hard work,"" as the veteran director continually reminds us throughout this slight volume, but Lumet's simple-minded writing doesn't make much of a case for that or for anything else. Casual to a fault and full of movie-reviewer clich‚s, Lumet's breezy how-to will be of little interest to serious film students, who will find his observations obvious and silly (""Acting is active, it's doing. Acting is a verb""). Lumet purports to take readers through the process of making a movie, from concept to theatrical release--and then proceeds to share such trade secrets as his predilection for bagels and coffee before heading out to a set and his obsessive dislike for teamsters. Lumet's vigorously anti-auteurist aesthetic suits his spotty career, though his handful of good movies (Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, Prince of the City, and Q&A) seem to have quite a lot in common visually and thematically as gutsy urban melodramas. Lumet's roots in the theater are obvious in many of his script choices, from Long Day's Journey into Night to Child's Play, Equus, and Deathtrap. ""I love actors,"" he declares, but don't expect any gossip, just sloppy kisses to Paul Newman, Al Pacino, and""Betty"" Bacall. Lumet venerates his colleague from the so-called Golden Age of TV, Paddy Chayevsky, who scripted Lumet's message-heavy Network Style, Lumet avers, is ""the way you tell a particular story""; and the secret to critical and commercial success? ""No one really knows."" The ending of this book, full of empty praise for his fellow artists, reads like a dry run for an Academy Lifetime Achievement Award, the standard way of honoring a multi-Oscar loser. There's a pugnacious Lumet lurking between the lines of this otherwise smarmy book, and that Lumet just might write a good one someday. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
