Author Description

Lillian Ross was a staff writer at The New Yorker for seven decades, starting there in 1945. During this time she frequently wrote on cinema, and many of these extraordinary pieces are collected here together for the first time. Featured are lengthy articles on: the House of Un-American Activities in Hollywood during the 1940s; Otto Preminger fighting television censorship of his Anatomy of a Murder; Francis Coppola during the release of One from the Heart; Akira Kurosawa on a visit to New York in the early 1980s; and Clint Eastwood during the production of Mystic River; along with a number of shorter pieces on: Gene Kelly shooting On the Town; Charlie Chaplin casting Limelight; Jacques Tati; Alfred Hitchcock; the MoMA film department; Jean-Luc Godard; French New Wave producer Mag Bodard; John Cassavetes, Peter Falk and Ben Gazzara on Husbands; Donald Shebib; John Huston at a screening of Fat City; Francois Truffaut at the New York Film Festival; the New York Mayor's Office of Film, Theater and Broadcasting; Frederico Fellini; Oliver Stone; Anjelica Huston; the Harlem shoot of Wes Anderson's The Royal Tennenbaums; and an anniversary screening of Scarface with the cast.