Deep Focus: The Go Into The Movies Project
In a perfect world, I would have a trillion dollars and send each and every one of you to film school. Short of that, I came up with this idea: “Deep Focus: The Go Into The Movies Project.” The GITS community responded with some great suggestions. Thus I present to you a poor man’s/woman’s version of film school, providing you with resources to immerse yourself in the world of cinema. You may access those posts here.
If you have any other resources to suggest for the list, please post in comments here or email me.
You may look at these lists and find your head start to spin at all that stuff to cover. So I have taken the liberty of creating a Deep Focus In Brief syllabus:
25 Movies
12 Angry Men
A Clockwork Orange
Annie Hall
Blade Runner
Casablanca
Citizen Kane
The Dark Knight
Double Indemnity
Fight Club
The French Connection
The Godfather
The Gold Rush
The Graduate
Jaws
Lawrence of Arabia
Network
Patton
The Philadelphia Story
Psycho
Seven Samurai
The Silence of the Lambs
Singin’ in the Rain
Taxi Driver
To Kill a Mockingbird
Toy Story
25 Screenplays
Aliens
American Beauty
The Apartment
Back to the Future
Broadcast News
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Chinatown
Groundhog Day
Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
Fargo
Goodfellas
The Matrix
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Pulp Fiction
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Rocky
Se7en
Shakespeare in Love
The Sixth Sense
The Sting
Thelma & Louise
Tootsie
Unforgiven
The Usual Suspects
Witness
Film Analysis and Criticism
“5001 Nights at the Movies,” Pauline Kael
Filmmakers
“Making Movies,” Sidney Lumet
“Conversations with Wilder,” Billy Wilder & Cameron Crowe
The Evolution of Filmmaking
“Film History: An Introduction,” David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
“Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting,” William Goldman
25 movies. 25 screenplays. 5 books. This is my take on what at bare minimum you should watch, read, and digest. I’m not saying it’s definitive — feel free to swap out titles per your own preferences — but if you watch these movies, analyze these screenplays, and read these books, you will go a long way toward immersing yourself in the world of cinema, and advancing your overall grasp of the craft of screenwriting.