Backstory 3, a fascinating anthology of interviews with some of moviedom's best screenwriters, covers, in the words of its editor, "one of Hollywood's rockiest periods, the decade of the 1960s, when the studios were undergoing a process of collapse and renovation, when turmoil in the world meant extreme changes in narrative style and screen values, when events in Hollywood, as elsewhere, sometimes seemed a confusing, delirious stampede." One of the surprises of Backstory 3 is that many of the writers of the '60s "youth films" were middle-aged by that time, established and serious craftsmen who felt little of the contempt for movies that their screenwriting predecessors held. Through the conversation of the marvelous Jay Presson Allen, George Axelrod, Walter Bernstein, Horton Foote, Charles B. Griffith, John Michael Hayes, Ring Lardner Jr., Richard Matheson, Stirling Silliphant, Terry Southern, and others, we get a sense of the '60s as the last gasp of the old Hollywood generation, the end of the studio system, and the beginnings of modern cinema.


From Booklist
McGilligan's third book of interviews with screenwriters upholds the high standards that led a Los Angeles Times panel to designate its predecessors two of the "100 essential film books." The 15 subjects this time include Walter Bernstein, whose The Front reflected his experience with the 1950s anti-Communist Hollywood blacklist; Horton Foote, Oscar winner for To Kill a Mockingbird, Pulitzer laureate for The Young Man from Atlanta, and author of A Trip to Bountiful, too; Irving Ravetch and Harriet Frank Jr., husband-and-wife coauthors of Hud, Norma Rae, and other literate, socially conscious scripts; and the late black humorist Terry Southern, who wrote a screenplay a year, though after 1970 only one was produced. All 15 are complainers but highly listenable nevertheless. Ray Olson

FROM THE PUBLISHER