Product Description

Featuring insights ... analysis ... great films and filmmakers from “the most-sought-after screenwriting teacher in the world” (The Hollywood Reporter).

A life in film. An extraordinary career. An unforgettable story — from noted lecturer, teacher, and bestselling author Syd Field.

What makes a great movie great? ... An actor legendary? ... A screenplay extraordinary or just ordinary?

Syd Field has spent a lifetime seeking answers to these questions. His bestselling books on the art and craft of screenwriting have become the film industry’s gold standard.

Now Syd Field tells his own remarkable story, sharing the insight and experience gleaned from an extraordinary career. Using classic movies from the past and present — from Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane to Andy and Larry Wachowski’s The Matrix — Field provides a guided tour of the basic elements common to all great films.

Learn what makes La Grande Illusion a groundbreaking, timeless classic ... how Casablanca teaches one of the most important elements of creating memorable characters for the screen ... why Pulp Fiction might be one of the most influential films of our time.

Discover the legendary filmmakers, films, and stars who shaped Field’s understanding of the medium.... Meet Jean Renoir, the great French director who steered his young Berkeley protégé away from medicine into film.... Watch a dazzling young Francis Ford Coppola as he directs his thesis film at UCLA.... Spend an amazing summer with Sam Peckinpah as he shares the screenwriting techniques behind his classic western The Wild Bunch.

Rich in anecdote and insight, Going to the Movies will both entertain and inform, deepening every moviegoer’s appreciation of the magic behind the silver screen.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #738470 in Books
• Published on: 2001-10-09
• Released on: 2001-10-09
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 336 pages

From Publishers Weekly
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.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
"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 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
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. Jack Helbig
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Customer Reviews

He should stick to analysis . . .
Field is probably the country's current best analyst of screenplays and teacher of the theory and mechanics of screenplay-writing, and I own all his previous books. This one was a bit of a disappointment, though, being heavy on self-conscious, egocentric autobiography and light on analysis of the films he discusses as being "turning points" in his development. (And he uses that phrase way too often.) Though he purports not to believe in luck or coincidence, he does seem to have been in the right place at the right time far more than most of us -- a crawl-on role in _Gone With the Wind_ as an infant, nephew of one of the great cinematographers, student at Berkeley when Jean Renoir was Writer in Residence, buddies at the UCLA film school with the niece of Sam Peckinpah, first job at David Wolper Productions when it was just beginning, and so on. Oddly, in between the fits of ego and overwriting ("this is how I invented/discovered . . ."), there's also a lot of "aw shucks, little ol' me"-ness. For this kind of thing, I think William Goldman's two (so far) volumes of Hollywood autobiography are much better.

Essential Reading for Budding Screenwriters
As a biography, it is compelling reading. Field lived in interesting times, surrounded by interesting people. Though a minor player in Hollywood, his story provides a perspective on the movie-making process in the second-half of the last century that I haven't seen before.

The real value of this book, though, is as an unintentional primer on screenwriting. His process, developed over more than a decade, of identifying what makes a movie work and what doesn't is, in my view, more enlightening than all the "how to" books ever written, including his own.

With this book, Goldman's "Adventures in the Screen Trade", and to a lesser extent his follow-up "Which Lie Did I Tell", I think the budding screenwriter has everything he or she needs to start writing.

Great Teaching Experience
I read Syd Field's Going to the movies. It's a great experience because not only does he teach about what makes a good/great screenplay, he also talks about his time in Hollywood and how difficult it was for him to find a job. It is a very realistic, yet hopeful, book. I am working on the English version of the Different Flags script and it's helped me a lot. Eugenia RenskoffDifferent Flags