Going to the Movies

August 6, 2001
Watching a movie is easy. But it's hard to figure out how its structure, images, acting, camera work and scripts can make us respond so powerfully. Writing in a chatty, informal manner, the author of several popular screenplay-writing manuals (including Screenplay, which is used in numerous college courses) turns to autobiography to meditate on what makes a movie great. Whether he is addressing his friendship with the great French director Jean Renoir, whose masterpiece La Grande Illusion
Field considers one of the foundations of modern cinema, or about his classes with the great feminist film director Dorothy Arzner, Field conveys an enormous amount of technical and practical knowledge. Often delivering fascinating, miscellaneous bits of information (e.g., Jim Morrison named his band the Doors after Aldous Huxley's book about drugs, The Doors of Perception), Field centers his theoretical ideas on specific films and actors. He notes, for example, that the films of John Garfield almost always follow the mythic structure described by Joseph Campbell. His odd comparison of Resnais's obscure Last Year at Marienbad
with the predictable Hollywood romance An Affair to Remember
illustrates the difference between a subjective and an objective position in a film script. As head of the story department at Cinemobile, Field has read "more than two thousand screenplays and more than a hundred and fifty novels" and has worked with or known almost everyone in the industry since the late 1950s. Although cloaked in modesty, his illuminating, consistently entertaining memoir displays enough wit, intelligence and empathy to inspire a host of great films.

September 15, 2001
"What makes a great movie experience?" asks Field (Screenplay: The Foundations of Screenwriting) in this account, which traces his own lifelong involvement with the film industry as a documentary filmmaker, film critic, studio executive, screenwriter, and lecturer on screenwriting. Field attempts to isolate the underlying elements common to all "great" films by reflecting on some of his favorites which include La Grande Illusion, The Wild Bunch, and Chinatown and influential works like Pulp Fiction. His recollections and insights are worthwhile and occasionally moving as when he recounts his meetings with Michelangelo Antonioni. Field's passion for cinema shines throughout, and it helps to propel readers through encounters with a variety of types of film. The end result will likely please movie buffs and belongs in public libraries with film collections. Neal Baker, Earlham Coll., Richmond, IN

Copyright 2001 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

September 15, 2001
Field began teaching the art of screen writing in the early '70s at the tiny Sherman Oaks Experimental College and went on to lecture and conduct workshops around the world. He believes all great screenplays assume a rough three-act form, with plot changes and major climaxes at pretty much the same points; the same basic structure undergirds films as different as " Chinatown," " An Unmarried "Woman, and " Annie Hall." Field has written other books detailing that structure, and he elaborates his theories again here. But what really makes this book is how well he conducts us on his journey from confused college student, majoring in literature before finding his true love for the movies, to Hollywood professional and friend to such luminaries as directors Jean Renoir and Sam Peckinpah. En route, he lets us glimpse the less glamorous, 9-to-5 side of Hollywood: in his days as a script reader, he estimates that he slogged through thousands of scripts, most hopelessly flawed, to find the 50 or so he eventually passed on to his bosses.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2001, American Library Association.)