Kurt Weill’s music enjoys a timeless popularity; however, it was firmly rooted in the shifting social, political, and artistic climates in which he worked. Born a cantor’s son in Dessau, a town known as Bayreuth North, Weill showed early musical promise. He was drawn to the Berlin of the 1920s, where he studied under the great Busoni before linking up with Bertold Brecht and his own life-mate and greatest interpreter, Lotte Lenya. Creating such landmarks of Weimar theater as Mahagonny, Happy End, and The Threepenny Opera, the trio were to define a time and place. Fleeing the Third Reich, Weill emigrated to America and reinvented himself as the ultimate Broadway composer. He worked with Ira Gershwin, Maxwell Anderson, Langston Hughes and Ogden Nash, conquering the Broadway vernacular before his early death at age 50.
Extensively researched, The Days Grow Short charts Weill’s personal and career journey. Focusing on the development of Weill the composer and the creation of each work, this text evokes the theater worlds of both Berlin and New York when they were arguably at their peak. JAT

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 469 pages
Illustrated

Who can forget: Inger Stevens picks up Death as a hitchhiker! The three-armed Martian meets the three-eyed Venusian! Beauty is ugly in “The Eye of the Beholder”! “It’s a good thing you did”! The last man on Earth finally has time to read—then he breaks his glasses! William Shatner and the fortune-telling Devil! “TO SERVE MAN—It’s a cookbook”! The dummy that becomes human! “Nightmare at 20,000 Feet!” The little girl who rolls under her bed and into another dimension! The airliner that goes back in time! “Room for one more, honey!” “Five Characters in Search of an Exit!” Agnes Moorhead fighting the little aliens! “A Most Unusual Camera!” Mr. Dingle’s Martians! Mr. Bevis and the angel! “Come back, Bunny, we need you!” Anne Francis turns into a Dummy! Monsters on Maple Street! “A Stop at Willoughby!” They’re all here, every episode, including Rod Serling’s intros. Plus dialog passages from the scripts, production history and bios of such contributing writers as Beaumont, Matheson, and of course, Serling. GR

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 466 pages
Illustrated

Speak loudly in the swinging cafés, pepper your repartee with words from this book and save the $50,000 it would have cost to attend that stuffy film school. Grammar’s purpose is to present narrative techniques for film in a practical way, instruction on the proper organization of images for their presentation onscreen. This includes motion, dialogue, punctuation, camera movement and editing editing editing. While it is the only resource of its kind and is infinitely useful to the budding auteur, the author stresses that only when the celluloid is “running through your fingers” will you be near the completion of your education in film. SK

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 624 pages
Illustrated

“From the moment we get up in the morning until we close our eyes at night, the visual reality we perceive is a continuous stream of linked images: In fact, for millions of years—tens, hundreds of millions of years—life on Earth has experienced the world this way. Then suddenly, at the beginning of the 20th century, human beings were confronted with something else—edited film.” Award-winning film editor, sound designer and mixer (The Conversation, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather Parts II and III, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, Crumb, The English Patient, etc.), Murch muses on film editing, DNA, dream therapy and the blink of an eye, and shows how these enable us to perceive the “total and instantaneous discontinuity of one field of vision with another” that is film. LZ

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 114 pages
Illustrated

A movie-by-movie chronology of Chandler’s bout with Tinseltown. Nobody bitched more about the writer’s place in Hollywood than Chandler. And nobody profited more, financially or in reputation, than this British-bred American pulp novelist, creator of the white-knight gumshoe, Phillip Marlowe, who walked the mean streets of Los Angeles. The Big Sleep, Farewell My Lovely, The Lady in the Lake—all by Chandler and all examples of film noir at its finest—tough yet sentimental, at once sad, yet funny, vicious but sublimely poetic. In a town that was legendary for ruining literary giants (Hemingway, Faulkner, Hammett), it was Chandler’s mastery of the hard-boiled screenplay that left him one of few survivors.
Between 1943 and 1950, he worked for four different studios, cranking out an amazingly consistent body of work, and a total of 10 movies have been made from his six filmed novels. Examples of his brilliantly crisp, sardonic wit spice up many film classics, as in the famous “let’s trade murders” scene in Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train. Or in the sexy way Veronica Lake picks up Alan Ladd in The Blue Dahlia. GR

Publisher: Silman-James
Paperback: 228 pages
Illustrated