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Original Title:	Making Movies
ISBN:	0679756604 (ISBN13: 9780679756606)
Edition Language:	English

Making Movies

Sidney Lumet

Paperback | Pages: 240 pages

Rating: 4.23 | 4978 Users | 324 Reviews

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Title	:	Making Movies
Author	:	Sidney Lumet
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 240 pages
Published	:	March 19th 1996 by Vintage (first published March 14th 1995)
Categories	:	Culture. Film. Nonfiction. Media Tie In

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lumet's an interesting guy to think about if one decides to make a film -- the guy's made some of the best films of our time. but for me, lumet provides a cautionary tale of what not to become.

12 Angry Men
Dog Day Afternoon
Network
The Verdict
Serpico
Before the Devil Knows You're Dead

all good. and Network is great.

and he's made about fifty bad movies including A Stranger Among Us, Guilty as Sin, the remake of Gloria, etc...

lumet's obviously an intelligent guy with good taste (cites Carl Dreyer as his favorite director - nice) -- and he's an auteur: a thematic quality runs through his best work and he clearly chooses his material by a certain standard. but lumet is at the mercy of two things: (1) the time in which he lives and (2) his cinematographer. (it's also worth noting that he comes from television which is about as visually distinctive as high school yearbook photography) check it out:

(1) why are his 70s movies better? why do his 90s movies suck?

well, he was a younger man in the 70s than in the 90s and had more fire in his belly. of course. but he was also making films in american cinema's 2nd golden age - the spirit of the time dominated his films: gritty, tough films both thematically and visually; intense character studies about flawed people; obsessive and paranoid films as a response to nixon/watergate/vietnam.


(2) lumet's great w/actors. for sure. his pacing is great, he knows how to construct a scene... but visually, is there a 'lumet style'? well - in making movies he states, for example, that the color blue never once appears in The Verdict (paul newman's eyes!) as he wanted the film to have an autumnal feel. ok. that's kinda cool. but, ultimately, is there anything visual to distinguish a sidney lumet film? naw, not really. and this is ok. same for howard hawks - for hawks it's all a 'code of masculinity' and saucy dames. he left the visuals to the camera guy.


fuck that. i don't wanna be at the mercy of my cinematographer. greg toland (cinematographer of Citizen Kane) famously explained that orson welles was able to reinvent cinema with his first feature in that he didn't know the 'rules', he didn't understand the limitations -- he demanded shots from toland that hadn't been done before and refused to hear that they couldn't be done. but there's only one orson welles. the rest of us will believe our DP when s/he tells us that a shot cannot be done. the rest of us will allow our DP to construct a shot. fuck that.


filmmakers rule #1 -- on set, know how to do everybody's job better than them.


spielberg has kaminski, a visual fucking god, but every spielberg film looks like a spielberg film.

in the early 90s francis ford coppola said that new technology would democratize cinema. a few years back james gray said that new technology hasn't done much in the way of the democratization of cienema in that 99.9% of 'homemade' movies suck. gray's right.

you gotta know the technical stuff.

lumet is a very good filmmaker. (and i thank him kindly for Before the Devil Knows You're Dead -- the naked marisa tomei scenes have provided invaluable masturbatory assistance). and making movies is a great read. but, for me, it's a cautionary tale. i might never make a film as good as network. shit, i hope i make one half as good. but fuck if i let my cinematographer or the time in which i live be the deciding factor of what my film looks like! be like a writer banging out the beats of his novel only to have someone else handle the prose!

* this is in no way meant to disparage cinematographers. the great ones are every bit the genius as the great directors. and a great cinematographer matched with a great director (bergman/nykvist godard/coutard, coppola/willis) can create something transcendent. but i ain't a cinematographer. and in terms of my shit, i'm an insufferable egomaniac. and hopefully the tension b/t a tough-minded director and tough-minded cinematographer will make 'em both better than they could've been on their own.

Rating About Books Making Movies

Ratings: 4.23 From 4978 Users | 324 Reviews

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Sidney Lumet directed a lot of movies. He has 73 credits on IMDB. That's a tremendous body of work, and he has some beautiful insights in this book. My favorite chapter was The Camera. He really gets into the weeds about how to use the camera to tell your story. He treats the camera like another character in the film and how he used the camera to create a story arc for the film and for the other actors. Pretty neat. It's slightly dated because this book was written in the 90's when everyone was

Didn't completely finish it, this is a book you can jump to whichever part of the movie-making process you would like to know more about. Sidney Lumet does a great unbiased job of elaborating on the processes before during and after a movie is made. I learned quite a bit, especially about camera angles and particular reasons some shots are the way they are which helped me to better understand some shots I have seen in movies that left me wondering, wtf?. Great, simple read for a medium to avid

Must-read for any cinephile, moviemaker, or motion picture enthusiast who's curious about the gears that move the magical motion picture factories of the golden age of studio cinema. Sidney Lumet applies his flair for storytelling into a genuine and personable account of the rare privilege he's had creating Hollywood giants, from the first days of color through to the last days before the digital revolution.

Informative and passionateI adore the films of Sidney Lumet. This book is a straight forward explanation of the process of how he made them. Each phase of movie making is rendered in detail and colored by relevant stories from specific movies made by him. Anyone serious about a career in film should read this book. Indeed if you are an aspiring filmmaker, actor, writer, etc just think of this as a 5 star review. You will learn a lot from it, even though the business has changed over the past 25

An interesting read for those who want to learn more about how movies are made. Sidney Lumet is one of the most prolific film maker of our time and in this book he takes us through a tour of what its like to make a movie. I found some good tips (mostly based on common sense) although the book is a little dated. These days everything is digital and Lumet made his last movie in 2007. But his views on cinema and style are as relevant today as they were back in the day. Style is something which

I recently opened an old box which had been packed years back with books. It is wonderful when we pack a box and leave it to gather dust and then open it after many years. We are surprised by some of the treasures that we find inside. Sometimes we dont know how a particular treasure got into the box and why it has been lurking there for many years. That is exactly what happened when I opened this box. I was surprised by some of the treasures I found and I was very excited. One of these was

Sidney Lumet, who died in 2011, has no less than four film masterpieces: 12 Angry Men, Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. Serpico and Dog Day Afternoon, are two of my favorite New York films of all time (others include: The French Connection, The Marathon Man, Day Of The Condor, Taxi Driver, Manhattan, Goodfellas). There are several other exceptional films also directed by Sidney Lumet: Prince Of The City, The Verdict, The Hill, and Before The Devil Knows You're Dead. Woody Allen also