Like steel on flint, good friction is creatively generative. It can come from a clash of collaborators: Scorsese and De Niro debating a character choice, or Jack Fisk and Emmanuel Lubezki lighting a set. It can come from process: Paul Thomas Anderson and his team waiting two days to screen dailies, or Phil Tippett studying four-legged animals to give The Empire Strikes Back’s walkers greater weight. It can even come from budget: forcing directors to deploy imaginative solutions to circumvent limited locations, performers or special effects.

Bad friction is creatively sapping. It’s the loose fabric at the back of a trainer, rubbing, rubbing, rubbing at your heels. Even the most patient filmmaker has been driven to the edge of driving hot needles through their eyeballs by contracts and rights and permits and insurance and budgeting and scheduling. Or the continuity tracking of costume design across different shooting days and locations. Or taking half a day to rig a crane for a four-second shot.

The great promise of technology is that it can eliminate the bad friction. The great threat of technology is that it can eliminate the good friction.

When adapting to new technology of any kind, the central issue therefore becomes identifying the parts of the process that should not be smoothed away and protecting them at all costs.

For seasoned pros, this is fairly easy. They know enough about their working methods to identify which parts are precious. For the rest of us, it is fairly hard. Without sufficient practical experience, we can easily mistake good friction for bad. Add to this our reasonable human impulse to take shortcuts, and you have a recipe for a kind of creative flattening. What’s that phrase about the baby and the bathwater?

I am at fault. In my bones, I believe in a sort of soft-auteurism. I believe directors often infuse a film with a part of themselves, and that it is rewarding (not to mention fun) to trace this across their filmographies. Perhaps you feel the same. So we talk in hushed tones of Kubrick as this otherworldly visionary, or Hitchcock as a meticulous control freak. And there is, of course, truth in these assessments. But they neglect the collaborative nature of filmmaking, implicitly replacing it with the idea that a movie is perfectly formed in the director’s head, and everything else is just a delivery mechanism to get it out. The whole process of filmmaking gets reduced to expensive, time-consuming meat puppetry. Bad friction.

And remember what happens to bad friction? It gets eliminated. Why have a production department, when it’s all in the director’s head? In fact, why bother having any other humans at all?

The responsibility, I think, of any of us who write about, talk about, care about movies, is to do the work to identify and celebrate the good friction. To make the positive case for when and why it is best to do it the hard way. This means studying craft. It means trying to make stuff ourselves. And yes, it means changing how we talk about directors.

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Irving Thalberg is the patron saint of middle managers. Sandwiched between studio chief Louis B. Mayer and the legions of writers, directors, actors and artisans in MGM’s employ, he spent much of the late 1920s and early 1930s shaping the Dream Factory’s golden era.

This was the age of the Hollywood central producer. Under this system, studios concentrated creative and financial responsibility for their output in one man (it was always a man). And it was Thalberg, “the boy wonder,” who pioneered this approach, overseeing the production of more than 400 films during his twelve years at MGM while cultivating stables of writers (F Scott Fitzgerald, Frances Marion, Anita Loos) and stars (Clark Gable, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford) that were the envy of the industry.

Everything went through Thalberg. His days were a whirlwind of script meetings, editing sessions, production meetings and rough-cut screenings. He plunged into every stage of the production cycle, working with writers, directors, editors, composers and department heads to midwife the studio’s pictures from conception to release.

To identify raw story material for his factory, Thalberg commissioned a battalion of readers to plough through thousands upon thousands of potential properties. In “any given year during the early 1930s,” writes historian Thomas Schatz, “MGM’s readers filed reports on over 1,000 novels and original scripts, over 400 short stories, and on 1,500 plays and 1,300 works on foreign language.”

Thalberg, who was only 26 when he joined MGM in 1925, was openly described as a genius by his peers. He had a near-supernatural knack for identifying a good story, and for shaping it in a way that was both creatively ambitious and commercially attractive.

For the readers under his tutelage, he developed a guide designed to help them spot the latent potential in the stories they reviewed. He called this guide his Ten Commandments.

For years now I’ve been stubbornly trying to become a better movie-watcher. By this, I mean developing the context, language and historical understanding I need to properly appreciate what’s in front of me. Such is the task of the ambitious cinephile.

So when I stumbled upon Thalberg’s Commandments, in Schatz’s excellent The Genius of the System, the effect was like a lighthouse in a storm. Nearly 100 years later, they remain (with a healthy dose of linguistic jiu-jitsu) excellent advice for how to better appreciate what’s on the screen.

For paid pilgrims, I’ve shared the Commandments below, along with some notes on how I interpret them. Which ones do you agree with?

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(1) Your most important duty is to find great ideas. You’ll find them buried under tons of mediocre suggestions

In ’s 9 Rules of Criticism, he describes the life of a critic as follows:

You seek out greatness as your daily routine.

What a wonderful phrase. Is this not the higher calling, not just of a critic, but of any of us who vociferously consume culture?

Consumption can become an end in itself, a Sisyphean exercise of racking up the numbers. But each time we think of a piece of art as just another notch on the bedpost we’re contributing to a flattening effect; a homogenisation of our cultural experience.

I’m being aspirational. I love Letterboxd as much as anyone. But it’s helpful, I find, to remember the “why.” We are seeking greatness.

This means reorienting our consumption from passive to active; mindless to mindful. It means treating each film on its own terms. It also means becoming both familiar with, and sensitive to, the mediocre. If you find that everything meets your standards, then they’re probably too low…

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As a smug metropolitan British liberal, I am genetically predisposed to the smug metropolitan British liberal comedian, Stewart Lee.

In his 2018 show Content Provider, Lee takes a swipe at Brexit.

Now, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I was trying to write a show that I could keep on the road for 18 months and as I didn’t know how Brexit was going to pan out, I didn’t write any jokes about it in case I couldn’t use them in the show and monetise the work I’ve done, right?

So, I haven’t written any jokes about Brexit, cos I didn’t see the point of committing to a course of action for which there’s no logical or financial justification.

It’s a clever joke. We in the Brexit-hating audience duly laugh, of course, followed by a self-satisfied cheer and ripple of applause. Lee crouches, grimaces, and turns against us.

That’s right, clap the things you agree with! Clap, clap, clap! Agree, agree, agree!

“Did you see Stewart Lee in Southend?”

“Yeah.”

“Was it funny?”

“No, but I agreed the fuck out of it.”1

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In the late 2000s, there was a minor event known as the “Great Financial Crisis.” Surprisingly, this led people to feel a little hard done by modern capitalism. By the late 2010s/early 2020s, this anger curdled into a wave of movies that fantasised about browbeaten workers unleashing bloody vengeance on wealthy villains.

These movies are satirical. They employ ludicrous, clearly fictional scenarios like a luxury restaurant that slaughters its guests or a billionaire paedophile island. They are cathartic, too, systematically dehumanising and humiliating their villains for our amusement.

I’m a bit late to the “Eat the Rich sucks” bandwagon.2 A common critique is political: these films are made by corporations providing a harmless outlet for our frustration while retaining the structures that suppress us. They offer fantasies of individualistic vengeance that undercut the cooperative action truly required to achieve change. Et cetera.

My issue is different. Eat the Rich cinema is bad art. It is designed to make people who already think a certain way feel better about themselves for doing so.

writes that “all art has some moral purpose—it surprises or familiarises in order to call us to the things of this world.” Eat the Rich cinema abandons this moral purpose. It neither challenges our worldview nor helps us clarify it. We may have a good time, but our understanding of reality remains the same.

Lee’s Brexit bit is a well-constructed joke, just like Ready or Not is a well-constructed thriller. But the challenge to the audience, and thus the artistry, emerges from his follow-up, which replaces our self-satisfaction about Brexit with unease at how easily we were manipulated by the joke. Ready or Not provides no such concerns. Everything we bring into the movie is left safely intact.

“Hmmm,” you may be saying, “not every movie has to be some sophisticated deconstruction of our worldview. It could simply be entertaining while gesturing at some larger themes.” To that I say: where is your ambition? Where are your standards? The great works of pop entertainment had a moral purpose. The Rebel Alliance was inspired by the Việt Cộng!

It’s no coincidence that the one Eat the Rich movie that can claim to be art is the one that sits most uncomfortably in the subgenre. The fact that Parasite can alternatively be read as a story of middle-class envy, a reactionary fable or a sweeping critique of capitalism speaks to its ability to both surprise and familiarise; to “call us to the things of this world.”

Not every movie should be a poke-in-the-eye provocation. I don’t think the answer is Eat the Poor (although the little stinker in me would at least like to see a filmmaker give it a try). Nor do I want a happy-clappy “we’re all friends and should get along” Panglossianism. But if Eat the Rich is to endure as a subgenre worth our time, it needs to aspire to more than getting us to agree the fuck out of it.

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Hello, pilgrims.

Today’s post is especially for you, my beloved patrons. Consider it a cinematic ménage à trois: three hot and sweaty bodies of writing, bound together by a shared purpose.

Here’s what’s on the agenda:

• We return to The Cinephile’s Bookshelf, finding contemporary lessons in a critic’s evisceration of 1960s underground film.

• I break one of my own rules by ranting about something awful.

• The king of physical media helps us understand what the f*ck acting actually is.

The nice part of having paid subscribers is earning money. The hard part of having paid subscribers is doing things to earn money. Do let me know if you like this new format. My plan is to publish these regularly, alongside my usual essays, which will continue to be free for everyone.

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The Cinephile’s Bookshelf

The death of high standards

A product of the 20th century, the poet and film critic Parker Tyler (1904-1974) possessed that deeply regrettable critical artefact known as “nuance.”

He was embedded in the underground film scene of the 1960s - the world of Andy Warhol and Stan Brakhage - which in turn had evolved from the pre- and post-war avant-garde. So, it must have been with dismay that his buddies on the scene read this 253-page evisceration of the technical and artistic ambitions of many of the movement’s leading prospects.

This is a boggy, dense book - almost confrontationally hard to parse. If approached as a 101 guide to underground film, it’s unreadable. As a ferocious argument for why filmmakers and critics should maintain high standards, it remains fiercely relevant.

It was his passion for the avant-garde that made Tyler so willing to criticise it (remember what I said about nuance?) He believed that underground filmmaking was capable of producing great art. Many experimental filmmakers already had. But by the 1960s, the movement had abandoned its technical, intellectual, and aesthetic standards.

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This weekend, I spotted a billboard advertising Slow Horses author Mick Herron’s latest book, Clown Town:

IN A WORLD RUN BY IDIOTS, THESE SPIES FIT RIGHT IN

Replace “spies” with “protagonists,” and you have a pretty good thesis statement for contemporary American cinema. Over the past few years, our movies have subjected a succession of protagonists to lobotomy for our amusement.

Project Hail Mary was sold as a “science, bitch!” ode to problem-solving akin to The Martian or Apollo-13. Instead, the film takes every opportunity to undercut its protagonist’s genius with displays of lovable buffoonery befitting a non-problematic Jar Jar Binks.

The paranoid thriller was once the realm of handsome, intrepid men trying to outsmart the Blob. Now, it fronts a basement-dwelling mode of hero who has spent more time furiously browsing Reddit than fighting the good fight (One Battle After Another, Bugonia, Eddington).

Action was once the bastion of cold-eyed competence. No longer. The Amateur replaces the ice-cool killers of Bourne and Bond with a bookish weakling. The Killer’s titular assassin fucks up every kill. The titular Monkey Man’s modus operandi appears to be “John Wick but shitter.”

No genre is safe. Robert Pattinson plays a sentient lettuce in Mickey-17. King Kong’s latest American outing saw him slip and stumble around like Charlie Chaplin. Longlegs reimagines Hannibal Lecter as a falsetto-toned weirdo who loves T. Rex. Even Napoleon is just a horny sub now.

I wrote the other day about how a wave of filmmakers are using their films to tackle the current moment:

In 20 years, when they look back at Eddington, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, House of Dynamite, Weapons, Cloud, It Was Just An Accident, No Other Choice, and 2024’s Civil War, they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.

The rise of the idiot protagonist is one manifestation of this trend. If we feel unable to navigate the quicksand of modern life, and if we’ve lost faith in society’s powerbrokers’ ability to help us do so, then why on earth would we make films about protagonists who actually know what they’re doing?

The best way to make a story feel realistic in our chaotic, confusing reality is to include a buffoon at the centre of it. A competent protagonist would be trapped in the uncanny valley. Why pretend to be Frank Grimes when we live in a world of Homer Simpsons?

This is why, when we do see good old-fashioned muscular competency - F1, Rebel Ridge, Top Gun Maverick - it explicitly feels like a throwback to a bygone era; a nostalgic retread of the kind of bold popcorn-sellers that Hollywood used to do so well. I doubt Christopher Nolan’s Odysseus will receive the Napoleon treatment.

There is, perversely, a degree of wish fulfilment in our obsession with idiot protagonists. There’s something validating, cathartic even, about seeing lovable buffoons fuck up, muddle through, and succeed anyway. They may be fools, but at least they win. The message smuggled inside purportedly optimistic films like Project Hail Mary is that this is the best we can hope for.

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Like last time, the list threatened to get out of hand - if you’re not included and would like to feature in the next edition, just drop me a DM.

I’ll wet your whistle with a recommendation of my own: Raymond Fielding’s The Techniques of Special Effects Cinematography, which explores the arcane methods of 20th-century special effects artists. I wrote about the book for The Cinephile’s Bookshelf, a series I’ve launched for paid subscribers: The Saddest Textbook I’ve Ever Read.

For future instalments of The Cinephile’s Bookshelf (and more), you can subscribe to my shiny new paid tier…

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Alright then. Buckle up, it’s book time.

Max Cea (Nothing Bogus)

MIKE NICHOLS: A LIFE; by Mark Harris (2021)

I’m not done with it but I’ve been enjoying Mark Harris’s Mike Nichols biography. I was particularly interested to read about his experience on Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is one of my favorite films. For such a masterfully blocked and staged film, it’s amazing the degree to which he was figuring out how to work with a camera in real time. There were a few movies he watched a bunch in prep and one of them was 400 Blows - to remind himself that a first film can be exceptional. A good reminder, and very inspiring.

Writer and filmmaker is the proprietor of the excellent Substack , the home of a consistently surprising goodie bag of essays, Q&As, production listings and more. What sets Max apart is his curiosity - he balances everything from well-researched deep dives into lesser-known film scenes to thoughtful industry commentary to behind-the-scenes interviews.

Courtney Daniels (Courtney Daniels)

SAVE THE CAT! GOES TO THE MOVIES: THE SCREENWRITER’S GUIDE TO EVERY STORY EVER TOLD; by Blake Snyder (2007)

The book I’d recommend is Save the Cat Goes to the Movies. Because after you read several ‘beat sheets’ of well-known movies, you start to notice patterns. You start to get a feel for the rhythm of how good stories go, how they’re built. And it’s good to be reminded that story/structure usually doesn’t just happen organically with the first draft. You have to purposefully make it good, and that requires work.

is a filmmaker, author and podcast host. If you’re considering making your first low-budget movie and don’t know what to expect, her article How my movie shoot is going is an excellent starting point. She was too modest to recommend her own book, so I’ll do it for her: she’s the author of Yes You Can: How to Make a Movie for Almost No Money, which excerpted a couple of times over at his Substack (1, 2). Get yourself a copy!

Decarceration (From The Yard To The Arthouse)

FLICKER; by Theodore Roszak (1991)

The novel Flicker (Theodore Roszak) is, among other things, a story about a lifetime of film. It is also, in essence, a book about film history, and to many readers, it is a bone-chilling thriller. But I was most struck by a protagonist, a young man who, like many of us, ends up chasing a girl into a new interest. He follows her into the movie theater and never leaves, swept up in the stories and narratives flickering in front of his awed face. His mild interest turns into a curiosity, and then an obsession.

As Flicker shifts through the decades, it becomes about a cinephile’s favorite topic – lost films. It’s something that occupies a disproportionate amount of my brain. The meme is that men are preoccupied with the Roman Empire. My preoccupation is similar, but instead of Caesar, it’s the missing reels of The Magnificent Ambersons, it’s Jerry Lewis’ The Day The Clown Cried, it’s the half of a movie shot for a remake of a Revenge Of The Nerds remake in the mid-00’s before it was abandoned by Fox. In Flicker, it’s a silent film adaptation of Hearts Of Darkness that’s said to be cloaked in the occult. While people have only been uncovering separate cels and small moments of footage, the director, Max Castle, has been missing.

But until a nightmarish finale, this becomes a book about a small film community. Men and women grow up, their grow old. Boys become men, while older men age out, and as the years go by, women seize a larger share of the cinephilia. And as Max Castle segues into legend, others arise to take his place. But are they acolytes, or do they know more about Castle than everyone else for certain reasons? Flicker becomes a mystery that gets tangled in memory, as films become totems in our mind, shifting through time to become either what we think is the truth, or what we remember is a lie.

You won’t find a braver, more singular film critic than , the writer of From The Yard To The Arthouse. He combines candid, forthright criticism with bracing insights into criminal justice, insights he learned the hard way after spending several years in prison. The great joy of his Substack is reading him rediscover his passion for film, and by extension, for life, in real time. He recently hit 500 posts, a remarkable achievement by any standard. A true gift to the Filmstack community.

Cole Haddon (5AM StoryTalk)

THE FILMS IN MY LIFE; by Francois Truffaut (1975)

A foundational part of my cinema-loving life was reading film criticism/analysis from both brilliant critics – even ones I often disagreed with – and actual filmmakers. The latter is more difficult to find because most screenwriters and/or directors, at least the good ones, typically don’t run around criticizing other people’s work even for posterity. This is why François Truffaut’s The Films in My Life is such an illuminating joy to read, in part because he understood it wasn’t especially helpful to anyone to blow up other people’s work for personal kicks. He writes from a place of passion and it’s contagious.

Let’s be clear here. If you’re going to read Truffaut, you should start with his book Hitchcock/Truffaut (and then watch the film about it). It’s a master class on everything to do with filmmaking – and visual storytelling. But after you’re done with that, you should move on to The Films in My Life to better understand how to deconstruct films and, through Truffaut’s life experience (including work as a film critic), begin to develop the vocabulary necessary to interpret yourself through film. When you’re done, you can then watch the films and director filmographies he discusses to begin developing your own opinions on them. In this regard, you will discover some of the greatest, often overlooked directors of the 20th century and place yourself light years ahead of others who have relatively shallow cinematic toolboxes from which to build their own films and other stories.

is a screenwriter, novelist and the brain behind 5AM StoryTalk, one of my favourite Substacks. As well as being a great writer, he is one of the most generous folks on this platform, offering his subscribers a ridiculous number of hand-curated resources like screenplays, interviews and even paintings, all designed to help us become better artists and students of cinema. His copy of The Films in My Life is also the cover image for this post…

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Jen Harrington (INSPIRED)

HITCHCOCK/TRUFFAUT; by François Truffaut (1966)

I’ve never been one much for film academia - maybe because I went to film school twice (two of the purported best, in fact) and all I got was student loan debt that will follow me to my grave. Not that I think film criticism and analysis don’t have merit, because they do, it’s just been… tainted for me. So when it comes to traditional texts, my best experiences were my first ones, before I became jaded by all the people telling me what to think and then charging me for it.

I have bought Hitchcock/Truffaut by François Truffaut for many people as it’s my go-to gift for anyone I know who loves film. It’s an entire film education in one book and inexpensive enough that you probably don’t even have to put it on your credit card. I grew up loving Hitchcock - well before I understood the brilliance of his direction - and just liked the morbid fun he had with dark material. Then, as a teenager, Truffaut broke my mind open with his disregard for how I thought movies were supposed to be. So, as I learned more about film history and the Cahiers du Cinéma, I was shocked to discover that Truffaut had idolized Hitchcock. You just don’t think that super smart French arty guy is going to be obsessed with genre-loving Hollywood guy.

Thank God he was because there was no one better to interview such a master of the craft. He gets technical, he gets philosophical, he breaks down Hitchcock’s whole filmography. You learn so much, appreciate so much, by the end of the book. And you probably won’t even have to explore your financing options to get your hands on it.

is a professional screenwriter and filmmaker who writes about how to build a career in the industry. I first discovered her via her excellent account of how she sold her first script - recommended reading for anyone dealing with creative stagnation of any kind. She is also running a screenwriting competition over at her Substack, . What’s stopping you from entering…?

Kelli McNeil-Yellen (KLA Media Group)

HOLLYWOOD COCKTAILS; by Tobias Steed and Ben Reed (1999)

One of my favorite film-related books is Hollywood Cocktails, by Tobias Steed and Ben Reed, because let’s face it, most Hollywood legends (films and stars) have a drink associated with them that lasts far longer than they do.

The dirty gin martini, shaken, not stirred, ala James Bond.

The French 75, ala Casablanca.

Pinot noir, ala Sideways.

The list goes on.

The book also captures a vibe, a vibe I think all folks who chase a career in Hollywood aspire to reignite. The attention to detail that Steed gives in his prose feels like reaching back into the past, when effort and friction felt like they meant something, and the labor they commanded meant the product was worth consumption. The analogies between today’s instant gratification cycle and what was previously expected from creatives could not be more distinct.

The book also features a beautiful layout: lush, gorgeous photos from some of the most classic movies in Hollywood as well as thematic recipes. Added bonus: if you’re suffering from writer’s block, all one need do is thumb through the pages and let your favorite classic film (and drink) take you away.

da da da dee da da da.... (to the tune of “As Time Goes By”)

I give this book a 10/10 for inspiration and a 2/10 for productivity.

As someone who jumped from law into the creative world, I always admire people who have made similar transitions. After twenty years working in marketing and PR, Kelli made the leap to filmmaking with an award-winning Slamdance film, DARUMA. Over at , she brings her hard-earned insights in marketing and PR to the indie film world. No amount of reading can substitute for that type of experience.

Courtney Romano (Let’s Go Again)

A SWIM IN A POND IN THE RAIN; by George Saunders (2021)

This is not a book about film. This is not even a book about storytelling. This is a book about discovering your own taste. And in my estimation, one of the most vital skills to develop as a filmmaker is your own personal sense of taste, divorced from the groupthink of algorithms and viral strategies, and instead fully embodied through your own weird little interior world. It’s these weird little worlds we each have that come alive in movies - through the story arcs of course, but also the symbols, and the intuitive choices, and the voice-y parts. And more than that, in an industry that is so difficult, knowing your taste and making decisions from your own sense of taste makes the challenges much more fun. Finding people who vibe with your sense of taste is fun. Discovering how your personal taste has changed over time, and understanding what that might mean about your own personal alchemy is fun. I believe audiences can feel that kind of fun-having in every frame. That, to me, is the X factor. So it begins with knowing what you like. ’ book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is an invaluable resource for practicing finding your taste, and having fun while doing it. When my kids reach their early 20s, I’ll force them to read it every five years henceforth. It’s essential.

is a driving force behind the burgeoning non-dependent filmmaking movement. She’s a selfless supporter of indie filmmakers, filling her Substack, , with a cornucopia of resources for anyone looking to build a sustainable body of work outside of traditional channels. Her recent post, 64 ways to try non-dependent filmmaking & free yourself from Hollywood, is an excellent starter pack for the NonDe curious.

Mikhail Skoptsov (Textual Variations)

THE SECRET HISTORY OF STAR WARS; by Michael Kaminski (2008)

In the course of studying film and TV over two decades, I’ve come across many amazing books by professional scholars and academics, which shaped my research interests and methodology. One the most insightful and influential, however, has been The Secret History of Star Wars, fan Michael Kaminski’s independent eye-opening account of the evolution of Star Wars as a longform multi-part story.

Its goal was to debunk the most popular myths and widely accepted official claims about the film franchise’s creation, such as the notion that Lucas had known from the outset that Darth Vader was Luke Skywalker’s father and that he had written the original Star Wars trilogy as a single, elaborate script that he then divided into three parts.

By drawing on archival newspapers, behind-the-scenes magazine articles, audio and print interviews, early script drafts, production notes, and documentaries among other sources, Kaminski not only proves that Star Wars was in reality an unplanned, unstable, ever-changing narrative shaped by everything from practical filmmaking considerations to unforeseen real-life events, but also illustrates that the creative process itself is inherently fluid and prone to organic evolution.

Reading it thus made me recognize how serialized film and television narratives are actually constructed and how common it is for their creators to invoke the myth of a preexisting master plan to create a sense of unity. This, in turn, inspired me to study how and why stories evolve over time, which is central to my writing today, and to one day write a book that similarly demystifies the construction and evolution of a cinematic franchise, whose history has been extensively mythologized.

For all these reasons, I strongly recommend reading The Secret History of Star Wars. Whether you’re a budding filmmaker, fan, critic, or academic, I’m sure you’ll learn something from it.

is a media scholar and critic (given that he holds a PhD in modern culture and media, I really should be calling him “Dr Skoptsov”). His Substack, , has a unique angle: it examines how and why movies transform over time, leading to multiple different versions being in circulation. His pieces are always thoughtful and heavily researched: this essay from 2024 is an excellent, practical overview of both how the VFX pipeline works and how it was affected by COVID.

Ellis J. Sutton (Notes From the Studio)

CREATIVITY, INC.: OVERCOMING THE UNSEEN FORCES THAT STAND IN THE WAY OF TRUE INSPIRATION; by Ed Catmull and Amy Wallace (2014)

I first heard about Creativity, Inc. when I was working at Netflix, grabbing drinks with another assistant and venting about how it felt like Hollywood didn’t have a real system for consistently making movies better. I remember asking if there was anywhere that actually got this right, and she immediately said Pixar. She told me they had written a book about their process and specifically recommended the expanded edition because it builds on and updates the original. That alone stuck with me, and when I finally read it, it completely reframed how I think about creativity and building great work.

The biggest thing I took away from Creativity, Inc. is that you have to leave room for failure. Not just accept it, but actively build for it. Failure is a part of the creative process, and more than that, it’s critical to achieving excellent outcomes. You cannot assume that without failure you’re going to get to something great. Failure is what allows you to experiment, and experimentation is what allows you to discover, and discovery doesn’t happen without unexpected outcomes. At the same time, the book really reinforces how important it is to have the right people. You can give a good idea to a mediocre team and they’ll probably mess it up, but if you give a mediocre idea to a great team, they’ll make it better, throw it out, or come up with something better entirely. That shifts the focus away from just chasing ideas and toward investing in people, because people are the ones who ultimately drive outcomes. And I think that’s where something like Hollywood gets complicated. It is a people business, but it’s not always about whether you’re choosing the right people for the right moment, and not just at the top, but across the entire system. Because anyone can have a good idea. That’s another thing the book reinforces. Ideas can come from anywhere, at any level. And while it can feel like noise when you’re getting feedback from everywhere, the reality is you don’t control where the best idea is going to come from. The job isn’t to shut it out, it’s to get better at filtering it.

That’s where something like the Braintrust becomes important, and not just in name, but in how you build it. It’s not about surrounding yourself with people you’re comfortable with, it’s about surrounding yourself with people who are honest, candid, and actually make the work better. People whose notes genuinely improve the story, not just reinforce what you already think. Because you will naturally default to your friends and the people you trust, but you have to ask if those people are truly helping you get better. And if excellence requires failure, then you also need to be able to fail enough times to reach it, which means you need to be able to iterate quickly. Excellence doesn’t always come from taking more time, it comes from the number of iterations, from trying, learning, adjusting, and repeating over and over again. So if you can fail fast, you should, because it compresses the process of getting better. And if you can’t fail fast, you should still be failing, because stopping is the only thing that guarantees you won’t get there. And I think all of that leads to the simplest idea in the book, which is that the goal is not ease, the goal is excellence. It’s easy to optimize for the safest path, the most straightforward path, but that rarely leads to anything special. The path to excellence is harder, more uncertain, and more demanding, but it’s also the path that leads to something meaningful.

While many of us talk about what’s wrong with the industry, has rolled up his sleeves and started fixing it. As well as writing , where he shares wisdom earned from seven years working in the entertainment business, he’s the co-creator of , an extremely cool grassroots microcinema movement. This post is a great introduction to the project. If only I lived in Los Angeles…

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The video game era is here. All hail the video game era.

Don’t just take my word for it. Here’s newly minted Filmstacker :

Speaking of video games, that was my overwhelming takeaway from CinemaCon—they’re not only the new superhero for studios, they’re the new Everything […] This is not only the vanguard of studio filmmaking, it’s easily the most untapped resource given the 40-plus-year history of gaming.

Sounds grim, right? Just as superheroes hit the limits of their powers, studios find another source of IP to shove through the sausage factory. There is the unmistakable stench of butts-in-seats cynicism to the whole affair. One Intellectual Property After Another.

It’s less bad than you think. Actually, that’s a hedge. I’ll rephrase. It’s good.

Studios have always followed the money. Westerns, musicals, slashers, historical epics, young adult dystopias: Hollywood history is littered with the bones of genres once enthusiastically embraced by the industry’s powerbrokers.

Today, the pivot revolves around IP and brand identity rather than story and genre. Hence the cynicism. But that’s the world we’re stuck with. Rather than comparing this latest development to a mythical ideal of artistically motivated studio filmmaking, isn’t it better to compare it to, I don’t know, the world we’ve actually been living in for the last 10+ years?

If I had to choose between a world where superheroes are the “vanguard of studio filmmaking” and a world where video game movies fulfil the same function, I’d choose the latter.

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Welcome to the inaugural edition of The Cinephile’s Bookshelf. In this new series, I hunt down rare, out-of-print and obscure film books and excavate their secrets. Today, we add our very first book to the shelf: Raymond Fielding’s The Technique of Special Effects Cinematography.

The Hunt

Visual effects wizard Phil Tippett describes first discovering The …

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Stop moaning. Don’t be a cynic. Don’t indulge the cynics. Study acting. Study form. Study editing. Explore animation. Distinguish schlock from slop. Read interviews. Read modern critics. Read classic critics. Fight nostalgia. Respect the canon. Fuck the canon. Pinpoint tone. Take notes. Read Bordwell. Be wrong. Change your mind. Change it back. Be a nerd. Be an aesthete. Be a snob. Be a populist. Keep writing.

Make the time. Stop watching television. Stop playing Xbox. Ignore awards. Listen to soundtracks. Have a watchlist. Find community. Collaborate. Proselytize. Persuade. Make trade-offs. Don’t comment on commentary. Support your local cinema. Upgrade your home set-up. Rewatch. Cherish your favourites. Be genre blind. Be a genre obsessive. Go to the cinema alone. Go to the cinema late at night. Find a bigger screen. Find a louder sound system. Write. Write. Write.

For some strange, cosmic reason, this still-young Frankenstein’s monster of an art form has chosen us to be its acolytes.

We can’t choose our passions, but we can choose what we do with them. Don’t waste the gift of obsession.

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American cinema has long flip-flopped between revealing the world as it is and the world as it wants it to be.

Certain eras retreat into wish-fulfilment. The Reaganite 1980s unleashed a wave of ‘roided-up bodybuilders on enemies home and abroad. America was back, baby: bigger, meaner, and manlier than ever. Following the War on Terror, studios fed us morally straightforward fantasies of spandex-wearing heroes solving our problems with a wink, a quip and a well-timed punch.

Other eras are more cold-eyed. Historically, when cinema has been most culturally virile, it has produced tight, thematically cohesive, fiercely contemporary clusters that diagnose the anxieties of the current moment.

In the aftermath of Watergate, the New Hollywood spat out tales of angry, suspicious men being crushed by vast conspiratorial systems, whether the government, the mob, or the family (The Parallax View, All the President’s Men, The Conversation, Chinatown, Three Days of the Condor). The late 1990s introduced a series of passive, emasculated office drones flailing against the crushing weight of corporate mediocrity (Fight Club, Being John Malkovich, American Beauty, The Matrix, Office Space).

This push-and-pull between confrontation and retreat is a feature of cinema, not a bug. Movies are made of flesh and blood. Behind every film are dozens, hundreds, thousands of imperfect humans, each bringing their own hopes, fears, and preoccupations. They’re made by institutions, too: companies, nonprofits, and governments with mandates to fill, stakeholders to satisfy, and markets to please. Every movie reveals something about the world it was made in.

I am resolutely not one of the “cinema is dying” crowd. There have been hundreds of incredible, important movies in my adult life. I could solely watch 2010-2025 cinema for the next 30 years and still be finding cool new stuff in my sixties.

But for all the individual high points of the last 15 years, the medium as a whole has been losing contact with reality. At its best, cinema functions as a cultural antibody: a mirror to, rather than an escape from, society at large. In recent years, the dominant preoccupation has instead been wish-fulfilment, expressed through superhero fantasies, hermetically sealed character studies, and the retreat of auteurs to period pieces (no, smartphones aren’t an excuse).

There are a couple of obvious exceptions, but neither of them quite scratches my historical itch.

First, “Eat the Rich” (Parasite, The Menu, Triangle of Sadness, Glass Onion, Ready or Not). This is a cluster of thematically aligned films, yes. But it reads as escapism. "Rich People Are Bad, So Let’s Laugh At/Punish/Expose Them” isn’t a provocative thesis. Eat the Rich is to the financial crisis as superheroes are to the War on Terror: a retreat to moral simplicity and wish fulfilment in the face of forces we don’t understand.

Second, Elevated Horror. On the “world as it is vs world as you want it to be” scale, Elevated Horror sits firmly in the former’s camp (unless the world you want involves being possessed by a trickster demon). But though the trauma-coded language of Elevated Horror was new, its thematic preoccupations - psychological implosion, the sins of the father, grief - weren’t. With some exceptions (e.g. Get Out), these movies were more attempts to reflect eternal human truths than cohesive statements on the cultural moment.

Which brings us to 2025. When historians look back at 1970s cinema, they see a society processing the collective trauma of Watergate and Vietnam. When they look at 1999, they see one grappling with corporate alienation and the spiritual exhaustion of office life. In 20 years, when they look back at Eddington, Bugonia, One Battle After Another, House of Dynamite, Weapons, Cloud, It Was Just An Accident, No Other Choice, and 2024’s Civil War, they’ll see a culture grappling with the post-social media, post-COVID, post-AI collapse of shared reality.

Are you an American? Are you an alien? Are you my father? Were you my torturer? Do I have a job? Why do you hate me? Is there a nuke? Are you my enemy? Is COVID real?

These are the questions haunting the 2025 canon. Consensus truth has dissolved. Trust in institutions has collapsed. Conspiratorial thinking reigns.

These are films soaked in disorientation and anxiety; in a sense of existential confusion about a world changing in ways their characters don’t understand. Importantly, they are all set in or around the present day. They even feature smartphones and social media!

For the first time in years, cinema is behaving like a cultural antibody again. Yes, it’s uncomfortable, but so was Fight Club and The Conversation. Perversely, I read these movies’ cynicism as optimism. What is art for if not to help us process times of immense change? That movies still can be an outlet for our hopes and fears is a sign that the medium still has a role in our future.

As to where that immense change leads? I’ll leave that one to the historians.

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I. The Battle of the Smellies

December 2, 1959. Something is brewing in the bowels of the DeMille theatre.

Cufflinks, diamonds and champagne. On screen: Behind the Great Wall, the first feature-length documentary by a Western director in China. An afterthought.

Tiger hunts and orange slices. A fisherman’s jet-black bird retrieves an unsuspecting salmon; the crowd mumbles their approval.

Then: it’s released. Seeps from the air conditioning in a fine mist, catching the projector like dust in a streetlight. Citrus… bitter… not bad. Then more. Dozens of them. Each heralded by white subtitles splayed across the screen. Each welcomed with a groan. Jasmine, soy sauce, tiger, grass, pine. They combine into one big stink; a cinematic Dutch oven.

Pinched noses; scrunched brows. Pencils already scratching. “Strong enough to give a bloodhound a headache,” declares Time.

AromaRama was its name. The first “smellie” ever commercially released.

Not the last. A few weeks later, Scent of Mystery premieres, starring Casablanca veteran Peter Lorre.

AromaRama was a gimmick. Scent of Mystery uses a different technology. Smell-O-Vision is supposed to be the real deal.

Its mogul backer, Mike Todd Jr, pulls out all the stops. LP soundtrack; limited edition perfume; paperback edition; publicity stills. Elizabeth Taylor is flown out to demo the tech to eager studio executives. A defence contractor is tapped to manufacture hundreds more machines.

The film begins. One by one, thirty smells are released with a distracting hiss. A hint of brandy floats through the theatre as a character sips his coffee. Someone slips in a busy market; the scent of banana skin identifies the culprit.

Time offers a faint whiff of praise. “At least [the smells] don’t stink so loud” as the toxic fumes of AromaRama. It’s a Pyrrhic victory. The smelly winter is over. Neither technology would be commercially used again.¹

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II. Viva La Revolución

Something else lingered in the late 1950s Hollywood air. The smellies were just the latest desperate salvo in what was fast becoming an all-out war.

The defenders: the behemothic movie studios who had dominated American entertainment since the 1920s.

The aggressor: television.

The small screen had threatened to come for movies ever since the 1920s. War and depression had held it at bay. No longer. Television spent the 1950s mercilessly encroaching on cinema’s turf.2 The result: thousands of theatres in the red, with thousands more barely in the black.

Not since the introduction of sound had cinema faced such a threat. If any Tom, Dick or Harry could flip the box on from their couch, why would anyone pay their hard-earned money to go to the cinema?

Samuel Goldwyn (as in the “G” in “MGM”) saw the writing on the wall.3 “The thoroughgoing change which sound brought to picture making will be fully matched by the revolutionary effects […] of television upon motion pictures,” he declared in 1949. “I predict that within just a few years a great many Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors who are still coasting on reputations built up in the past are going to wonder what hit them.”4

By the late 1950s, the movie industry had spent nearly a decade scrambling for the silver bullet that would stop television in its tracks. The smellies were just the latest misfire. A few years previously, major studios had launched ambitious 3D projects, culminating in Alfred Hitchcock’s Dial M for Murder in 1954. The movie was a triumph; the technology…less so. By 1955, the 3D experiment had been abandoned.

Goldwyn was right. Television was revolutionary. American theatre attendance never returned to its pre-war peak. The studio system collapsed, ending the careers of hundreds of establishment figures who’d grown comfortable in the ancien régime. Movies changed, perhaps irreversibly.

But reports of cinema’s death were greatly exaggerated. The smellies were a wet fart of a response. But they weren’t the only response. Movies found new ways to combat, ally with, and learn from their cocky young rival.

Far from killing the movies, television caused a shockwave of technical, formal, stylistic, production and marketing innovations that endure to this day. These were complicated, diffuse and unpredictable. Some were positive; others weren’t. But none were terminal. Cinema endured. There was life in the old dog yet.

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It’s December, which means all Substack writers must share a year-end listicle or else they will be ritualistically disembowelled by a pack of rabid wolves.

I’ve filtered this list through the slightly arbitrary criteria of the books that ‘most changed how I think about movies,’ before breaking that rule for a bonus fiction recommendation (because why no…

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I think inevitability is the key. In a well-made drama, I want to feel: “Of course—that’s where it was heading all along.” And yet the inevitability mustn’t eliminate surprise. There’s not much point in spending two hours on something that became clear in the first five minutes. Inevitability doesn’t mean predictability. The script must still keep you o…

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It’s 1975. François Truffaut is back. The Story of Adèle H, his bracing portrait of doomed obsession, is a triumph, earning glowing reviews and an Academy Award nomination for star Isabelle Adjani. Oh, and it turns a small but tidy profit for its US distributor, New World Pictures. Job done.

It’s 1975. Cirio H. Santiago’s Cover Girl Models arrives with a…

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See if you can guess the scene.

The wails of a distress signal slice the silence. They land, a slow descent into the abyss. Astronauts venture through the haze. The atmosphere drips with dread.

An enormous vessel looms. Abandoned. Alien. They creep through the cold corridors of the derelict ship. Strange devices jut out like broken bones. Shadows reign.

Then they see it. A giant skeleton splayed across the centre of the room. Mighty. Helpless. Whatever the creature was, it was monstrous.

Not monstrous enough to survive what killed it.

Their breathing quickens. Reality begins to sink in.

They’re insignificant.

They’re isolated.

They’re doomed.

You’re probably already patting yourself on the back. After all, it’s one of the most iconic moments in movie history.

Except… it isn’t.

Yes, Alien’s ‘Space Jockey’ set piece unfolds almost beat for beat as described above. But, even in 1979, genre aficionados had heard that tune before. Over a decade previously, 5,000 miles east of Hollywood, Italian director Mario Bava had turned his blood-stained hands to science fiction.

By 1964, Bava had quietly built a reputation as a resourceful low-budget horror craftsman, conjuring pervasive gothic dread in his credited directorial debut, Black Sunday (1960). At first glance, a lavish, outer-space adventure seemed an awkward fit for his moody, earth-bound stylings (not to mention well beyond his budgetary limits). But, after reading the short story Una notte di 21 ore, Bava saw potential. He bought the film rights, commissioned a script, and got to work. Months later, Planet of the Vampires (1965) was released.

The dominant mode of 1950s and early 1960s sci-fi cinema was bright and friendly, filmed on studio sets with static backdrops and cheery colours. Planet of the Vampires was different. To this pulpy story, replete with spaceships, alien worlds, and borderline nonsensical dialogue like “Synchronise the meteor shield. Engage neuro-vascular pressure,” Bava brought the moody, atmospheric flourishes that were becoming his trademark. Pulsating greens and reds bathe the planet in an unhealthy neon glow. Swirling layers of fog subsume our protagonists in darkness and shadow. Strange objects punctuate the landscape. Machines bleed; the ground breathes. Threats creep beyond the frame.

Though the film wasn’t a commercial success, commentators noted its striking aesthetic. It was, writes Tim Lucas, “widely praised as containing one of the most convincingly alien environments ever filmed.”

And, waiting in that alien environment, stark and mysterious, was that monstrous skeleton.

Was Alien’s ‘space jockey’ set piece a direct rip-off of Planet of the Vampires? It’s disputed. Alien’s director, Ridley Scott, denies having ever seen the earlier film. Screenwriter Dan O’Bannon, on the other hand, admits he “stole” the skeleton, while special effects artist Carlo Rambaldi worked on both films.

Either way, the movies’ shared sci-fi horror aesthetic - doom-laden and coldly hostile - endures. Like the distress signal that kicks off both films, its echoes wail through everything from Event Horizon (1997) to Life (2017), to the dozens of knockoffs that followed in Alien’s wake. Scott’s film was a force multiplier, propelling the gothic sci-fi stylings pioneered by Bava into the mainstream. “When you look at the two movies, it’s not just similarities. It’s lifted structure, scenes, characters, dilemmas, themes that are very apparent,” said Drive director Nicholas Winding Refn in 2016. “And with Alien, which is another masterpiece, it defined genre movies as having a very high artistic standard. But the irony is that it all comes back to this Italian movie that I don’t think has gotten the recognition it deserved.”

For all their similarities, one difference towers over Alien and Planet of the Vampires. Money. The former was produced for the princely sum of $11m. The latter was cobbled together for a paltry $200k.

Miniatures, matte paintings, polenta boiled on camping stoves: Planet of the Vampires was a catalogue of low-budget innovation. The towering ship before which the crew look so small? Forced perspective and strategically placed mirrors. The strange apocrypha that litters the landscape? Vacuum cleaner hoses and plastic fans. The ceiling of the alien vessel’s control room? Desk lamps and plastic cones, shrouded in incense smoke.

In fact, nearly everything that makes Bava’s film atmospheric - uncanny-valley props, choking fog, neon-saturated gels - was born of brute necessity, not artistic indulgence. With jack-all money to spend, he was forced to compromise. “Do you know what that mysterious planet in [Planet of the Vampires] was made of?” he later claimed. “A couple of plastic rocks—and I mean ‘two’: one and one!—that were left over from some mythological picture made at Cinecittà.”

Planet of the Vampires wasn’t the first film Bava stitched together on a shoestring. It wasn’t the last, either. Bava’s cinema is a cinema of compromise. Making do. Finding a way. Like the masked killer in his slasher precursor, Blood and Black Lace (1964), his legacy is split in two. Practically unknown outside cinephile circles, he is talismanic within them, cited by Scorsese, Coppola, Tarantino, Burton, and more.

The Italian maestro’s artistry is usually praised as something achieved despite constraints. “Just imagine,” the conventional wisdom goes, “what he could have achieved with more money! ” That’s Hollywood logic for you. In this era of ballooning budgets, the difference between good and great is a few zeroes on a spreadsheet.

But that logic is dissolving before our eyes. “How can this cost $400m?” we groan at the latest washed-out, green-screened superhero instalment. “Where did the money go?” we ask as another blockbuster stumbles through shoddy lighting and clumsy set pieces. How many Bavas have been chewed up and spat out by the studio system, the diamond-encrusted knife they were handed planted squarely in their backs?

What if we’ve had it backwards all along? What if Bava’s genius emerged because of, rather than despite, his paltry budgets?

The swirling fog that gives Planet of the Vampires its oppressive mystery was, by Bava’s own admission, a cheap way to disguise a sparse set. The innovations that define his mise-en-scène - aggressive colour-gel lighting, matte paintings, unusual camera angles - were shortcuts to atmosphere, bypassing the expensive effects and extravagant sets of his peers.

Without these constraints, would he have produced the same results? Bava clearly thought not. Shortly after Planet of the Vampires, Paramount gave him a comparatively lavish $3m to make the action film Danger: Diabolik, his first and only dalliance with a Hollywood studio.

Bava made the whole film for $400k.

This was an edited extract of a new project I’m working on. MORE TO COME…

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Roger specialized in elevating exploitation. And starting with what other people in that world—the Arkoffs and others—would have been happy to leave as pure exploitation, Roger upgrades it, and is always willing to reach for something that’s smarter, and a script that’s a little better, and a writer that’s a little more interesting, and a director that’…

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Golan and Globus were on their way to the Cannes Film Festival in a couple of weeks, and hoped they could start selling their next Charles Bronson movie there. Kohner pitched them a script—for what would eventually become another Bronson classic, The Evil that Men Do (1984)—with a price tag to option it at $200,000. Cannon balked. Who needed to pay $200…

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While putting this together, I realised how many great writers are hanging out here. The list was threatening to get out of hand, so if you’re a Filmstacker not included this time, don’t worry, you’ll be lined up for the next one.

Alright then. Buckle up, it’s book time.

Dane Benko (Indulging a Second Look)

FILM EDITING - HISTORY, THEORY AND PRACTICE: LOOKING AT THE INVISIBLE; by Don Fairservice (2001)

“Film Editing - History, Theory and Practice by Don Fairservice is the best book I ever read that explains how narrative film editing functions, not because it describes the types of cuts and how they are supposed to function (shot/reverse shot, in-and-out of frame, match cut, etc), but because it organizes how those editing choices were figured out and innovated upon progressively over the history of cinema.

It takes you through the development linearly, from starting with the first discoveries of edits (the famous horse and cart turning into a hearse jump cut, for instance) and then through the challenges filmmakers confronted and, even in some cases, attempts to do it in other directions (such as, instead of cross-cutting to show parallel action, simply loading a second projector with a second reel and showing the two simultaneously, as well as other split-screen experiments).

There's no better way to more deeply understand how something works than to rebuild it yourself from principles. Accordingly, half of this book is dedicated entirely to the silent era, where most of these decisions, innovations, and discoveries were made. For the most part, after filmmakers figured out continuous sound, cinema has more or less standardized around these editing techniques and editing hasn't changed too much since.

In my mind there is no better single book to grok how narrative cinema functions than this one alone.”

is a filmmaker and artist behind . His essays ooze technical know-how and dry humour. If you’re new to his writing, start with his take on the 10 Most Influential Movies of the 21st Century.

Sophie (That Final Scene)

THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE; by Robert Evans (1994)

“I found this book after watching The Offer on Paramount+ and becoming obsessed with the idea that someone could hate-watch Al Pacino's screen test for The Godfather and declare that a runt will not play Michael. Evans really said this about one of cinema's most iconic performances, then wrote an entire memoir positioning himself as the misunderstood genius of the situation.

Evans was this former pants salesman turned studio head who saved Paramount by greenlighting Love Story, Rosemary's Baby, and The Godfather while married to Ali MacGraw and doing enough cocaine to power a small city. His memoir reads like it was dictated during a three-day bender - all swagger and self-mythology, but with enough specific details to make you believe he actually lived this ridiculous life.

The Pacino story alone makes the book essential reading. Evans wanted Warren Beatty or Robert Redford for Michael, called Pacino too short, and only agreed to cast him when Coppola threatened to walk. But here's the thing - Evans was wrong about Pacino and completely right about almost everything else. He turned Paramount from a failing studio into the most successful operation in Hollywood by trusting his instincts about what audiences wanted.

His memoir reveals how great films actually get made - through a combination of artistic vision, corporate manipulation, and sheer luck. Evans shows you the machinery behind the magic: how he convinced Gulf+Western to bankroll risky projects, how he protected directors from studio interference, and how he sold art to people who only understood profit margins.

Reading it gave me a completely different understanding of how film works as both art and business. Evans demonstrates how great movies emerge from impossible circumstances - studios that hate the material, directors who refuse to compromise, and producers who somehow hold it all together through strategic lying and occasional blackmail.”

After building a large following with her final-scene-focused Instagram, has become one of the leading voices in the Filmstack movement. Her essays at are vital, personal, and incisive — the kind of writing that resists easy summary. Start with her death of cinema series, then keep going.

If you’re enjoying Rough Cuts, please consider subscribing (it’s free!) I also have a Buy Me a Coffee page if you’re feeling flush…

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Luke Honey (Weekend Flicks)

THE GO-BETWEEN; by L.P. Hartley (1953) (later adapted into a 1971 film by Joseph Losey, with a script by Harold Pinter).

“I first read The Go-Between at thirteen years old, and it has stayed with me ever since. Set in Norfolk during the long, haunted summer of 1900, L. P. Hartley's beautifully written novel explores themes of lost innocence, memory, and the passage of time, capturing the mind of a boy on the verge of adolescence — as reconstructed in the mind of his jaded, middle-aged self. Like it or not, we cannot escape the past: even if, as Hartley points out in his famous opening sentence, 'the past is a foreign country; they do things differently there...'“

Two hand-picked deep cuts every weekend. What more could you want? is a cornucopia of sharp, deeply researched film recommendations, all delivered with Luke’s characteristic good humour. Check out his piece on the film adaptation of The Go-Between.

Ted Hope (Hope For Film)

STORY OF THE EYE; by Georges Bataille (1928) | THE THREE STIGMATA OF PALMER ELDRITCH; by Phillip K. Dick (1964) | WAYS OF SEEING; by John Berger (1972) | CAMERA LUCIDA; by Roland Barthes (1980)

“When I am asked to recommend a book for filmmakers, I like to start with either Georges Bataille's Story of the Eye or Phillip K. Dick's The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. Neither are about movies, but each would make a great film (in the right hands). I recommend them because they blow my mind and take me to places I would never have gone on my own -- qualities that I want from all films. I believe many viewers have "seen it all" yet that doesn't mean you can't truly surprise or move them, make their hearts and minds soar into far off realms that they may never have thought possible. They both also to me speak in secret alphabets, the languages we don't know we know until they are spoken to us, which for me is another goal of great cinema.

If the person however insists on it being about cinema, I next suggest John Berger's Ways of Seeing or Barthes' Camera Lucida, both again not really about cinema, but each truly on "looking". Both help me see what I experience beyond the plot or action and help me focus on life and living when I am viewing.”

— legendary indie film producer and Filmstack’s godfather — publishes , an ever-growing treasure trove of resources, links, and hard-won reflections from decades in the trenches. This post officially fired the starting gun on Filmstack.

Charlotte Simmons (The Treatment)

I AM HEROD; by Richard Kelly Kemick (2019)

“I Am Herod - a non-fiction title about the author's experience participating in the Canadian Badlands Passion Play - is a book I relate to many things, including film, and particularly the craft of film criticism. The filmic parallels with art and drama and performance are obvious, but more striking, I think, is how I Am Herod reflects on the idea of turmoil. This was the book that, for me, first identified art as an externalization of an internal struggle, and the paradox of that (and, indeed the paradox at the center of all turmoil) fascinated me as both an artist and a consumer of art, and has informed much of my criticism.

How can we most honestly externalize - in the form of art criticism - our internal experiences with a piece of art? What must we resist and/or accept in order to attain a more objective and/or utilitarian way of thinking about art (and, by extension, being)? Does resisting mean to accept? Does accepting mean to resist? Lots to think about here, which isn't surprising, given the subject matter.

Also, fun fact: I actually helped sell this book during my publishing/publicity internship at Goose Lane Editions back in 2019.”

is a film critic and writer of . Her brave, bracing essays get under the skin of contemporary movies, turning them inside out and forcing us to look at them with new eyes. Her essay on Saltburn is a classic.

Dario Llinares (Contrawise)

FILMMAKERS THINKING; by Adrian Martin (2024)

“When you have read as many film books as I have, it’s rare that a new work attacks your complacency through a multilayered excellence in stylistic dexterity, interpretive insight, depth and selection of research and, crucially, goes some way to address a perennial problem of an entire discipline. This last element I’m referring to is the relationship between theory and practice in the conception of cinematic knowledge and insight. Adrian Martin’s Filmmakers Thinking hones in on the many articulations of filmmakers on their own practice and on the nature of cinema itself, attending to their reflections and insights, both logical and abstract, with foresic seriousness, critical rigour and essential passion. I highly recommend this book to both burgeoning students of film and seasoned aficionados, as the glimpses of filmmakers’ thought, refracted through Martin’s thought, will undoubtedly furnish you with new ways thinking about cinema.”

is a film scholar and writer who has read just about every film theory book under the sun. His is consistently eye-opening and rewardingly challenging. Don’t miss his Monday film-studies reading recommendations. Dario was too modest to mention it, but he interviewed author Adrian Martin about this very book here.

Ray Banks (Under the Influence)

ON FILM-MAKING: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE CRAFT OF THE DIRECTOR; by Alexander Mackendrick (2006)

"I say this without fear of hyperbole: Alexander Mackendrick's On Film-Making is the only book you need to read about movies. Other directors might give you the gossip, but you'd be hard pressed to find a more readable, clear-eyed, and pragmatic approach to film storytelling, and his "Slogans for the Screenwriter's Wall" should be branded into the brains of every writer, screen or otherwise."

is a novelist and film writer. His Substack, , explores underseen moves from the mid-1960s to 1980. His posts reliably make me: (1) desperate to see a film I’d never heard of, and (2) laugh. Start anywhere — how about this piece on the largely forgotten 1975 horror flick Murrain.

Amanda Sweikow (Talk Cinema, Save Cinema)

CINEMATIC STORYTELLING: THE 100 MOST POWERFUL FILM CONVENTIONS; by Jennifer Van Sijll (2005)

“This was the first book I discovered that truly explored how to write and craft films cinematically. Rather than focusing solely on traditional story elements like three-act structure or plot, it delves into how camerawork, lighting, screen direction, music, and other cinematic tools shape both story and character. It is very concise and written with clarity, it draws on examples from well-known scripts alongside the visuals that bring them to life. I think it's an invaluable starting point for any filmmaker seeking to tell stories in a way that feels purely and truly cinematic.”

is an award-winning filmmaker who, for many years, helped run the non-profit collective Filmmakers Alliance. I discovered her Substack, , through her regular participation in the monthly Filmstack Challenges, and was struck by her curiosity, openness and the hard-won insights she brings from a long career in moviemaking. Here, she tackles the latest challenge: films that struck an emotional chord.

Swabreen Bakr (Anti-Brain Rot)

MOVIES AND MEANING: AN INTRODUCTION TO FILM; by Stephen Prince (2012)

“A book that’s helped inform my writing and education on filmmaking process is Movies and Meaning. I found an old edition at a used bookstore and it’s great because it’s meant as a teaching tool so each chapter has bullet points on what you’ll learn plus helpful summaries/takeaways at the end. I recommend it to anyone who’s looking to better understand all the departments it takes to make a film and to understand the various types of critical writing styles you can pursue.”

is a former journalist turned digital marketer. Though I’m new to her work, I thoroughly enjoyed her sharp analysis of the sonic versus visual approaches in Kurosawa’s and Lee’s High and Low, as well as her thoughtful reappraisal of Jordan Peele’s Nope. I’m looking forward to digging into the archives.

Taylor Lewis (Luz Films & The Label)

THE SOCIETY OF THE SPECTACLE; by Guy Debord (1967) | A BOOK OF LUMINOUS THINGS; by Czeslaw Milosz (1998) | POETRY UNBOUND: 50 POEMS TO OPEN YOUR WORLD (2022); by Pádraig Ó Tuama

“I'd say Guy Debord's Society of the Spectacle should be required reading for modern filmmakers. But I suspect others might've already suggested it. Honestly I find sometimes the best education for "what cinema is" is to read poetry. The language of poetry is deeply visual and potently concentrated and I find studying how one is able to do so much with so little is essential to cinematic translation. There is an entire world pulsing in the confines of a single poem and that's what we, filmmakers, aspire to have built with each film we make - or watch.

Poetry to me, offers up Baldwin's concept of "a sentence as clean as a bone" but a great one is structured in such a way as to give you plenty of meat to chew on. That is my goal when I write every scene. For people just starting out, anthology books are good to go through. A Book of Luminous Things composed by Czeslaw Milosz and Poetry Unbound: 50 Poems to Open Your World compiled by Pádraig Ó Tuama are two good ones to begin.”

is a writer, filmmaker, and advocate for independent cinema. She has been central to the emergence of the FilmStack and NonDē movements, recently being featured in Ted Gioia’s Honest Broker. Her Substack, , is full of candid reflections on the cinema of today, while The Label, co-written with , is dedicated to the cinema of tomorrow.

Alex Rollins Berg (Underexposed)

THE SUSPENSE THRILLER: FILMS IN THE SHADOW OF ALFRED HITCHCOCK; by Charles Derry (1951) | A THIRD FACE; by Samuel Fuller (2002) | MISS MAY DOES NOT EXIST; by Carrie Courogen (2024)

“I’d recommend Charles Derry’s The Suspense Thriller: Films in the Shadow of Alfred Hitchcock. It really opened a window - a rear window, if you will - into the mechanics of suspense and the many shades of the thriller, which happens to be my favorite genre. If suspense isn’t your thing and you’d prefer something more biographical, I’d suggest Samuel Fuller’s memoir A Third Face or Carrie Courogen’s Miss May Does Not Exist, her wonderful biography of Elaine May.”

is a filmmaker and NYU film teacher. His Substack, Underexposed, lives up to its title: every Friday, it introduces me to a movement, filmmaker, or movie I’ve never heard of. The breadth of Underexposed is its superpower; it’s a weekly dose of cinematic curiosity. A couple of weeks ago, Alex posted one of his best issues yet, the S.N.O.B Manifesto.

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