Writers on Film

Al Clark comes back to the podcast to talk the second half of his career. Having left London and Virgin, Al embarked on a massively influential career in the Australian film industry. His films launched many an Australian star both in front of behind the camera. Here's the blurb from his second memoir: "Time Flies Too is the sequel to 2021’s beguiling and absorbing memoir Time Flies by Al Clark, w...

James Peaty is film maker and writer. He's written for publishers including Marvel Comics, DC Comics and Dark Horse Comics in the US as well as Rebellion Publishing and Titan Comics in the UK. During that time he has written for titles including The Batman Strikes!, X-Men Unlimited, Green Arrow. Supergirl, Justice League Unlimited and Doctor Who. For 2000AD he wrote and co-created Skip Tracer (wit...

Melanie Williams  is Professor in Film and Television Studies at the University of East Anglia, UK. A specialist in British cinema, her publications in this area include  British Women’s Cinema  (2009),  Ealing Revisited  (BFI, 2012),  David Lean  (2014),  Female Stars of British Cinema: The Women in Question  (2017) and  Transformation and Tradition in 1960s British Cinema  (2019). A Taste of Hon...

Ethan Warren is a member of the Boston Society of Film Critics. He holds an MFA in creative writing from the University of North Carolina, Wilmington, and is the writer and director of the film West of Her. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and...

Adrian Martin was film reviewer for The Age between 1995 and 2006. For his numerous books, essays and public lectures he has won the Byron Kennedy Award (Australian Film Institute) and the Pascall Prize for Critical Writing, and his PhD on film style won the Mollie Holman Award. He is the author of ten books and hundreds of essays on film, art, television, literature, music, popular and avant-gard...

Al Clark is an Australian film producer. He is best known for his producer role on The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert and his executive producer role on the film, Chopper . Clark is also the author of four books. Time Flies and Time Flies Too are Clark's memoirs, which merge the early days of punk and new wave popular music with the truncated British film renaissance of the 1980s and...

Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large of RogerEbert.com. He is also the TV critic for  New York Magazine  and Vulture.com, and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and television has appeared in  The New York Times , Salon.com,  The New Republic  and  Sight and Sound . Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a...

George Stevens Jr. has had a long and illustrious career in the entertainment industry, passing over five generations. In his new book, " My Place in the Sun ," Stevens Jr. provides a rare glimpse into the private lives of some of America's most famous first ladies, presidents, and celebrities. He shares personal stories and anecdotes about the Kennedys, Barack and Michelle Obama, Yo-Yo Ma, Elizab...

In a burst of creativity unmatched in Hollywood history, Preston Sturges directed a string of all-time classic comedies from 1939 through 1948― The Great McGinty ,  The Lady Eve ,  Sullivan’s Travels ,  The Palm Beach Story , and  The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek  among them―all from screenplays he alone had written. Cynical and sophisticated, romantic and sexually frank, crazily breakneck and endles...

Graham Skipper  is a writer, actor, director, and producer, known for writing/directing the sci-fi/horror feature film  Sequence Break , as well as his essays on horror cinema published in  Fangoria  and  My Favourite Horror  (Black Vortex Publishing, 2018). Most recently his work can be found in Simon & Schuster's  Video Palace: In Search of the Eyeless Man  (2020). Graham is a lifelong Godzilla...

Will Scheibel is associate professor of English at Syracuse University, where he teaches film and screen studies. He is the coauthor of Twin Peaks, a volume in the TV Milestones Series (Wayne State University Press, 2020), with Julie Grossman. His articles have appeared in numerous journals, including Camera Obscura, Film Criticism, Journal of Gender Studies, and Celebrity Studies. Here's the blur...

The course of events is predetermined and cannot be changed. Forces beyond our control—or even our comprehension—shape our fates. Such is the deterministic worldview embedded in a wide swath of contemporary cinema, from arthouse experiments to popular genre films, through both thematic concerns and narrative structures. These films, especially the recent spate of “elevated” science fiction and hor...

Rahul Desai is a freelance critic who writes regularly for The Hindu among many other publications. His columns often look at film from a personal perspective and he is also the host of his own podcast. You can find some of his writing here and follow him on twitter here . Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz com...

Charles Bramesco is a writer living in Brooklyn, New York. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, Vanity Fair, The Guardian and many. many others. Taking you from the earliest feature films to today,  Colours of Film  introduces 50 iconic movies and explains the pivotal role that colour played in their success. The use of colour is an essential part of film. It has the power to  evoke powerful em...

Paul Williams is a key figure in New Hollywood and cinema generally. Along with Ed Pressman, he formed Pressman Williams Productions which brought to the screens the likes of Brian de Palma and Terrence Malick. He directed a number of films beginning in 1969 with Out of It starring Barry Gordon and Jon Voight and going on with such cult underground films as The Revolutionary and Dealing . His new...

An illustrated critical survey of Academy Award–winning writer and director Sofia Coppola’s career, covering everything from her groundbreaking music videos through her latest films In the two decades since her first feature film was released, Sofia Coppola has created a tonally diverse, meticulously crafted, and unapologetically hyperfeminine aesthetic across a wide range of multimedia work. Her...

A chance to listen to the FIRST EVER episode of Writers on Film. Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Recommended books: Andrew Killen 1973 Nervous Breakdown: Watergate, Warhol, and the Birth of Post-Sixties America  J. Hoberman The Dream Life: Movies, Media, And The Mythology Of The Sixties Buy We Are the Mutants book. Visit We Are the Mutants website. Here's their blurb: If you haven’t heard, we wrote a book! And it’s out  right now ! If you’ve followed us over the last six plus years, you know...

The epic tale of a brilliant woman who must reinvent herself to survive, moving from Mussolini's Italy to 1940s Los Angeles—a timeless story of love, deceit, and sacrifice from the award-winning,  New York Times  bestselling author of  A Constellation of Vital Phenomena . “Crackling with wit and suffused with insight, Mercury Pictures Presents explores the endless give-and-take between life and ar...

From the moment Bette Davis served up a dead rat to Joan Crawford in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? a subset of camp horror films was born. The ‘Hag Horror’ genre exploited the former Oscar-winners and glamour queens who had effectively built Hollywood, transforming them into grotesque caricatures that revealed a cultural disdain for older women.  In  Crazy Old Ladies: The Story of Hag Horror ,...

In September 1941, a handful of isolationist senators set out to tarnish Hollywood for warmongering. The United States was largely divided on the possibility of entering the European War, yet the immigrant moguls in Hollywood were acutely aware of the conditions in Europe. After Kristallnacht (the Night of Broken Glass), the gloves came off. Warner Bros. released the first directly anti-Nazi film...

A Walter Hill Film is the first critical biography of Walter Hill, the legendary writer-director producer whose filmography includes 48 HRS. films, The Warriors, The Long Riders, Southern Comfort, Geronimo, Streets of Fire, Wild Bill, Broken Trail, the Alien films, and the pilot for Deadwood. The author is Walter Chaw, film critic for Film Freak Central and a contributor to The New York Times, Vul...

A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away  provides a behind-the-scenes look at some of the most influential films of the last fifty years as seen through the eyes of Paul Hirsch, the Oscar-winning film editor who worked on such classics as George Lucas’s  Star Wars  and  The Empire Strikes Back , Brian De Palma’s  Carrie  and  Mission: Impossible , Herbert Ross’s  Footloose  and  Steel Magn...

Ten years ago, Rachel Abramowitz began interviewing the most powerful women in the movie-making business in an effort to discover how they had infiltrated this male-dominated world. From superstar actors to independent directors, women in all arenas opened up to her, and the result is extraordinary—together, these stories comprise the most comprehensive history to date of women in Hollywood. Here,...

The real story of Hollywood as told by such luminaries as Steven Spielberg, Frank Capra, Katharine Hepburn, Meryl Streep, Harold Lloyd, and nearly four hundred others, assembled from the American Film Institute’s treasure trove of interviews, reveals a fresh history of the American movie industry from its beginnings to today.  From the archives of the American Film Institute comes a unique picture...