Books by Richard Schickel

From the late forties through the sixties, Elia Kazan was the most important and influential director in America, and the only one who managed simultaneously to dominate both theater and film. This is a biography that looks at the man and his art in the context of the social, political, and cultural environments in which he lived and worked.

Here, the author takes on eight of the finest Hollywood directors in conversation, including Alfred Hitchcock and Frank Capra. The directors reminisce about their working lives, and give valuable insights into the film-making industry, as well as behind-the-scenes stories.

In explaining the power of celebrity in modern life, Richard Schickel ranges through every realm of our culture-film, theatre, television, literature, art, the media, pop music, politics-for examples of how celebrity shapes our world and bends our minds.

Richard Schickel traces in fascinating detail the genesis of the film: its literary origins in the crime fiction of the 1930s, the difficult relations between Wilder and his scriptwriter Raymond Chandler, the casting of a reluctant Fred MacMurray, the late decision to cut from the film the expensively shot final sequence of Neff's execution.