In May 1979, Francis Ford Coppola unveiled a 'work in progress' cut of his film, Apocalypse Now, at the Cannes Film Festival. After winning the prestigious Palme d'Or, the convention-shattering film was nominated for eight Academy Awards and became a worldwide phenomenon. In 2001 Coppola introduced a new version - wholly re-edited from the original raw footage - that included forty-nine minutes of never-before-seen footage: Apocalypse Now Redux.Apocalypse Now relocates Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness to the Vietnam War, focusing on the hazardous mission of Captain Willard to find and terminate 'with extreme prejudice' a renegade American colonel in Cambodia.

Now available in paperback! No movie has ever been made, or made well, without the character who toils just outside the spotlight. He arranged for the spotlight, hired the spotlight operator, and even made sure that it was trained correctly on the stars. At the end of the day, there would be no blinking movie screens, no blinking Oscar winners, no finished films, good or bad, without the Assistant Director. Jerry Ziesmer was an assistant director for over thirty years, working on countless films before his retirement in the middle-nineties. He has worked with some of Hollywood's biggest directors, and its biggest stars. In this memoir, he recounts his time in Hollywood including his work on the sets of Apocalypse Now, Close Encounters, and Jerry Maguire. Written with the craft and humor that made Jerry Ziesmer one of the most sought-after assistant directors in Hollywood, this book will be a treasure for students and fans of twentieth-century Hollywood. Cloth edition previously published in 2000.

A cinematic legend: The making of Francis Ford Coppola's epic about Vietnam and the folly of war, based on unprecedented access to Coppola's private archives

An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson. A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.

Often disguised in public discourse by terms like "gay," "homoerotic," "homosocial," or "queer," bisexuality is strangely absent from queer studies and virtually untreated in film and media criticism. Maria San Filippo aims to explore the central role bisexuality plays in contemporary screen culture, establishing its importance in representation, marketing, and spectatorship. By examining a variety of media genres including art cinema, sexploitation cinema and vampire films, "bromances," and series television, San Filippo discovers "missed moments" where bisexual readings of these texts reveal a more malleable notion of subjectivity and eroticism. San Filippo's work moves beyond the subject of heteronormativity and responds to "compulsory monosexuality," where it's not necessarily a couple's gender that is at issue, but rather that an individual chooses one or the other. The B Word transcends dominant relational formation (gay, straight, or otherwise) and brings a discursive voice to the field of queer and film studies.

Landmark of anthropological and mythological scholarship explores the connection between the legend of the Grail and ancient mystery cults. A major source for T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land."

Twenty years as an outsider scouring the underbelly of American culture has made Howard Hampton a uniquely hard-nosed guide to the heart of pop darkness. Bridging the fatalistic, intensely charged space between Apocalypse Now Redux and Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” his writing breaks down barriers of ignorance and arrogance that have segregated art forms from each other and often from the world at large. In the freewheeling spirit of Pauline Kael, Lester Bangs, and Manny Farber, Hampton calls up the extremist, underground tendencies and archaic forces simmering beneath the surface of popular forms. Ranging from the kinetic poetry of Hong Kong cinema and the neo–New Wave energy of Irma Vep to the punk heroines of Sleater-Kinney and Ghost World, Born in Flames plays odd couples off one another: pitting Natural Born Killers against Forrest Gump, contrasting Jean-Luc Godard with Steven Spielberg, defending David Lynch against aesthetic ideologues, invoking The Curse of the Mekons against Fredric Jameson’s Postmodernism, and introducing D. H. Lawrence to Buffy the Vampire Slayer. “We are born in flames,” sang the incandescent Lora Logic, and here those flames are a source of illumination as well as destruction, warmth as well as consumption. From the scorched-earth works of action-movie provocateurs Seijun Suzuki and Sam Peckinpah to the cargo cult soundscapes of Pere Ubu and the Czech dissidents Plastic People of the Universe, Born in Flames is a headlong plunge into the passions and disruptive power of art.

From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.

From a master of cinema comes this “gold mine of a book . . . a rocket ride to the potential future” of filmmaking (Walter Murch). Celebrated as an “exhilarating account” of a revolutionary new medium (Booklist), Francis Ford Coppola’s indispensable guide to live cinema is a boon for moviegoers, film students, and teachers alike. As digital movie-making, like live sports, can now be performed by one director—or by a collaborative team online— it is only a matter of time before cinema auteurs will create “live” movies to be broadcast instantly in faraway theaters. “Peppered with brilliant personal observations” (Wendy Doniger), Live Cinema and Its Techniques offers a behind-the-scenes look at a consummate career: from Coppola’s formative boyhood obsession with live 1950s television shows and later attempts to imitate the spontaneity of live performance on set, the book usefully includes a guide to presenting state-of-the-art techniques on everything from rehearsals to equipment. A testament to Coppola’s prodigious enthusiasm for reinvigorating the form, Live Cinema is an indispensable guide that “reenergizes . . . the search for a new way of storytelling” (William Friedkin).

'It may be the most lucid account of the strain of epic moviemaking that we'll ever get. At it's center there's a great artist-hero caught in a trap - struggling to find the theme of the picture he's already shooting.' Pauline Kael, New YorkerIn the Spring of 1976, Eleanor Coppola, her husband, Francis Ford Coppola, and their children left California for the Philippines, where Apocalypse Now was to be filmed.As the months stretched into years, Eleanor Coppola's Notes became an extraordinary record not only of the making of a movie, but of the emotional and physical price exacted from all who participated in it.