Memo to: Filmmakers, Dealmakers, Scribes, Stars, Suits, and Readers Who killed Hollywood? Who's responsible for studios hellbent on assembly-line "event" pictures? Why are production costs so high that no one can take artistic risks? Who decided that the studios should be a development arm of them parks? What happened to putting actual stories with characters onscreen? And while we're at it, what happened to taste? Where are the believable human characters buried? Are all the execs out of control? How does so much money get spent for so little? Who Killed Hollywood? is a passionate love/hate letter to the film industry. In it, Peter Bart pulls together his best columns form Variety and GQ. He groups them, juxtaposes them, and interprets them, outlining in detail the history and inner workings of Hollywood. This could only be done by someone powerful enough to phone an star or head of studio and have his calls taken on the first ring. In story after story, Bart shows how the major studios have diverted their energies away from production of the shrewdly crafted pictures that once made the industry powerful. There isn't, for example, much range or innovation in the movies. There is only a handful of salable subjects-natural disasters, aliens, dinosaurs, ghosts, monsters, or any combination thereof. All the subjects easily parlayed into theme-park environments, action figures, video games, and clothing lines. Similarly, since Jaws twenty years ago, there's been a very short list of acceptable settings. The 1998 Academy Award nominations for best picture all went to films set in Elizabethan times or during World War II. A few years ago it looked as though Pulp Fiction and other independent films were going to save showbiz. Now independent producers like Miramax and New Line have been acquired by conglomerates. Who and what will resurrect Hollywood? Peter Bart has the answers.

Legendary director Sergei Eisenstein has unquestionably emerged as cinema's most influential theorist and author of some of the most important aesthetic writings of the twentieth century. For the first time in one volume, The Eisenstein Reader presents in concise, chronological form his most significant work--including his famous theories of montage and articles on subjects as diverse as sound, film language, and Russian history. The selections range from early writings on his great silent masterpieces The Strike, October and The Battleship Potemkin, to later works, hatched in the increasingly hostile and paranoid environment of Stalin's Soviet Union. Drawn from the acclaimed four-volume Selected Works, this collection, which includes a new introduction and explanatory notes by Richard Taylor as well as many illustrations, further illuminates the startling originality, diversity, and power of the greatest and most flamboyant of all Russian filmmakers.