Books like Caught in the Web by Mark Vaz

Jenny’s summer towin a local webcast contest turns into a fierce ratings battle, pushing friendship, creativity, and social media savvy to the front of middle‑school life.

Mark Harris reveals how the five Best Picture nominees of 1967—*The Graduate*, *In the Heat of the Night*, *Doctor Dolittle*, *Guess Who's Coming to Dinner*, and *Bonnie and Clyde*—shattered Hollywood's studio system and mirrored America’s cultural upheaval.

Discover the art of visual storytelling with Francis Glebas’s graphic‑novel guide, packed with 1,001 illustrations that teach the structure and techniques of effective storyboarding for film, animation and media.

A practical guide detailing the techniques, equipment, and digital workflows essential for feature, documentary, and experimental filmmaking, updated for the modern digital era.

Roger Ebert wrote the first film review that director Martin Scorsese ever received—for 1967’s I Call First—when both men were just embarking on their careers. Ebert had never been touched by a movie in quite the same way before, and this experience created a lasting bond that made him one of Scorsese’s most appreciative and perceptive commentators. Scorsese by Ebert offers the first record of America’s most respected film critic’s engagement with the works of America’s greatest living director. The book chronicles every single feature film in Scorsese’s considerable oeuvre, from his aforementioned debut to his 2008 release, the Rolling Stones documentary, Shine a Light.Here Ebert puts Scorsese’s career in illuminating perspective, exploring the different phases of his development and the abiding themes (many of which reflect Scorsese’s Catholicism) that give his work such complexity and depth. All of Ebert’s incisive reviews of Scorsese’s individual films are here, of course, but there is much more. In the course of eleven interviews done over almost forty years, the book includes Scorsese’s own insights on both his accomplishments and disappointments. One of these interviews, the single longest ever conducted with Scorsese, appears here for the first time. Ebert has also written and included six new reconsiderations of the director’s less commented upon films, as well as a substantial introduction that provides a framework for understanding both Scorsese and his profound impact on American cinema. As Scorsese himself notes in his foreword to this volume, history is the only critic that counts, but the dialogue from which its judgments arise begins with the kind of emotionally alert, historically informed, and intellectually honest writing that Ebert has collected here in this, the ideal pairing of filmmaker and critic.

David Mamet offers a candid, often provocative tour of Hollywood, dissecting the screenplay process, production roles, and the craft that makes great films, while revealing his own tastes and critiques of the industry.

Robert Altman--visionary director, hard-partying hedonist, eccentric family man, Hollywood legend--comes roaring to life in this rollicking cinematic biography, told in a chorus of voices that can only be called Altmanesque.His outsized life and unique career are revealed as never before: here are the words of his family and friends, and a few enemies, as well as the agents, writers, crew members, producers, and stars who worked with him, including Meryl Streep, Warren Beatty, Tim Robbins, Julianne Moore, Paul Newman, Julie Christie, Elliott Gould, Martin Scorsese, Robin Williams, Cher, and many others. There is even Altman himself, in the form of his exclusive last interviews.After an all-American boyhood in Kansas City, a stint flying bombers through enemy fire in World War II, and jobs ranging from dog-tattoo entrepreneur to television director, Robert Altman burst onto the scene in 1970 with the movie MASH. He revolutionized American filmmaking, and, in a decade, produced masterpieces at an astonishing pace: McCabe & Mrs. Miller, Thieves Like Us, The Long Goodbye, 3 Women, and, of course, Nashville. Then, after a period of disillusionment with Hollywood--as well as Hollywood's disillusionment with him--he reinvented himself with a bold new set of masterworks: The Player, Short Cuts, and Gosford Park. Finally, just before the release of the last of his nearly forty movies, A Prairie Home Companion, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement from the Academy, which had snubbed him for so many years.Mitchell Zuckoff--who was working with Altman on his memoirs before he died--weaves Altman's final interviews, an incredible cast of voices, and contemporary reviews and news accounts, into a riveting tale of an extraordinary life. Here are page after page of revelations that force us to reevaluate Altman as a man and an artist, and to view his sprawling narratives with large casts, multiple story lines, and overlapping dialogue as unquestionably the work of a modern genius.From the Hardcover edition.

An insider’s look at M. Night Shyamalan’s filmmaking during the production of Lady in the Water, revealing the creative process, studio interactions, and the director’s rise as a modern thriller master.