Making Movies (hardback)

From one of America's most acclaimed directors comes a book that is both a professional memoir and a definitive guide to the art, craft, and business of the motion picture. Drawing on 40 years of experience on movies ranging from Long Day's Journey Into Night to The Verdict, Lumet explains the painstaking labor that results in two hours of screen magic.

Lumet is not the first filmmaker to write about filmmaking in order to praise it as an art form, but he may be the first to cover the process in detail from beginning to end, without missing any point of the action. That doesn't mean a reader will know how to make a feature film after reading the book. Lumet's approach is to provide a framework for both his memoirs as a film director and his argument for the purity of filmmaking, though he would probably deny both charges. Two aspects of the work are invigoratingly revealing: the ongoing discussion of his films and the last chapter, "The Studio: Was It All for This?" For all the talk about technique, camera lenses, art decorators, camera operators, and so on, the excitement of the book lies in Lumet's encounters with other artists. Rather than attempt to glean instruction from the story about using only one take to get a dolly shot of a moving train for Murder on the Orient Express, most readers will prefer the fun of simply riding the dolly with camera operator Peter McDonald or listening to the account of the time the crew and Lumet agonized on the set of The Fugitive Kind when it took Brando 34 takes to complete a scene. Lumet writes, "He looked at me and smiled as only Brando can smile, so that you think daybreak has come." The final chapter on the studio offers a harrowing look at the kind of greed people can fall into given the chance to operate with endless amounts of money. At the close, Lumet seems to be letting people know that what he has described is moviemaking, and he shows us how the studios threaten it. Bonnie Smothers