Patrick McGilligan – författare

Woody Allen was once made a knight commander by France, but he didn’t know because the paperwork got lost in the mail.A decade later, he found out about the award by reading about it in the New York Times.Across nearly nine eventful decades, Allen’s life has been full of surprises. Writing jokes got him a gig as the youngest writer of Sid Caesar’s television dream team. As a rising comic, he boxed a kangaroo on TV. He made a blank-check deal with a major studio for terms unmatched in Hollywood history apart from early titans like Chaplin and Welles. All before Annie Hall.Yet despite once being one of the most consequen­tial American cultural figures, Allen is now persona non grata. In this judicious entertainment biography, acclaimed biographer Patrick McGilligan charts the meteoric rise and fall of the comedian whose nonconformity proved both his secret genius and Achilles’ heel.Drawing on meticulous research for this definitive Woody Allen biography, McGilli­gan reconstructs Allen’s Brooklyn boyhood, his salad days as a television comedy writer, his rise to stand-up, and the thoughtful, award-winning film­making of his golden years in the 1970s and ’80s. His messy relationships with wives and girl­friends, including Annie Hall costar Diane Keaton, were essential to his artistic development and undo­ing. Yet no one could have predicted his tumultuous personal and professional relationship with actress Mia Farrow, his alleged abuse of their adopted daughter Dylan, and his subsequent marriage to Mia’s daughter Soon-Yi Previn.In this comprehensive, sweeping, and rigor­ous account of Allen’s life and career, McGilligan astutely reveals the writer’s writer beyond the smoke and controversy, and paints a compelling portrait of the most creative, productive, and influential American film­maker of his time. Patrick McGilligan’s definitive account separates fact from fiction to reveal:The Rise and Fall: From a Brooklyn boyhood and his early days as a TV writer to becoming a cultural icon and, finally, persona non grata.A Singular Filmmaker: An inside look at the thoughtful, award-winning filmmaking of his golden years, including the making of classics like Annie Hall.Hollywood and Stand-Up: The surprising story of his ascent as a stand-up comic—including boxing a kangaroo on TV—and the blank-check deals that made him a Hollywood titan.The Mia Farrow Controversy: A rigorous reconstruction of his tumultuous relationship with Mia Farrow, the abuse allegations, and his marriage to Soon-Yi Previn.

Jack Nicholson has lived large on and off the screen. Patrick McGilligan, one of America’s outstanding film biographers, has plumbed research and interviews to expand his definitive biography since its publication over thirty years ago. Jack’s Life captures the essence of this most private and public of stars with a vivid depiction of Nicholson’s tangled Dickensian upbringing, his hungry years as actor and writer, his near accidental breakthrough in Easy Rider, and his prolificacy and artistry ever since, with roles in Chinatown, Five Easy Pieces, The Shining, A Few Good Men, As Good As It Gets, and The Departed, to name a beloved handful of his sixty-plus films. McGilligan captures the life and legacy of this unabashed and complex personality.

"The cinema is Nicholas Ray". (Jean-Luc Godard). The visionary filmmaker Nicholas Ray spent his lifetime creating films that were dark, emotionally charged, and haunted by social misfits and bruised young people consumed by private anguish. Notoriously self-destructive, even in his youth, Ray empathized with the broken and misunderstood - the alcohol, drugs, and rage that ate away at his core translated into characters with unrivaled depth on-screen. Beloved by critics, peers, and audiences alike, Nicholas Ray created a vision of the modern teenage experience with "Rebel Without a Cause" (1955) and reinvented the western with "Johnny Guitar" (1954). Yet, in one of the most dramatic Hollywood stories on record, Ray's meteoric rise to fame was rivaled only by his dramatic fall from grace. Now, in time for the celebration of Ray's 100th birthday, preeminent American film biographer Patrick McGilligan offers the first comprehensive, full-length biography of Nicholas Ray - a man whose troubled life was punctuated by moments of creative genius.Meticulously detailed, yet compulsively readable, "Nicholas Ray: The Glorious Failure" delves into Ray's fascinating life story in and out of the spotlight - from his small-town roots in Galesville, Wisconsin, to his four marriages, drug and alcohol addictions, his sexual relationships with actors (including both James Dean and Natalie Wood), and his ultimate banishment from the Hollywood community that helped foster his growth as a director. Thirty-one years after his death, Nicolas Ray's body of work remains as a celebrated testament to the troubled director's struggle to create meaning from an otherwise shattered existence. In this unparalleled look into the dark moments of Ray's history and secrets of his creative process, Patrick McGilligan tells the full captivating story of an American film great.

A deeply textured and compelling biography of comedy giant Mel Brooks, covering his rags-to-riches life and triumphant career in television, films, and theater, from Patrick McGilligan, the acclaimed author of Young Orson: The Years of Luck and Genius on the Path to Citizen Kane and Alfred Hitchcock: A Life in Darkness and Light.Oscar, Emmy, Tony, and Grammy award–winner Mel Brooks was behind (and sometimes in front the camera too) of some of the most influential comedy hits of our time, including The 2,000 Year Old Man, Get Smart, The Producers, Blazing Saddles, and Young Frankenstein. But before this actor, writer, director, comedian, and composer entertained the world, his first audience was his family.The fourth and last child of Max and Kitty Kaminsky, Mel Brooks was born on his family’s kitchen table in Brooklyn, New York, in 1926, and was not quite three-years-old when his father died of tuberculosis. Growing up in a household too poor to own a radio, Mel was short and homely, a mischievous child whose birth role was to make the family laugh. Beyond boyhood, after transforming himself into Mel Brooks, the laughs that came easily inside the Kaminsky family proved more elusive. His lifelong crusade to transform himself into a brand name of popular humor is at the center of master biographer Patrick McGilligan’s Funny Man. In this exhaustively researched and wonderfully novelistic look at Brooks’ personal and professional life, McGilligan lays bare the strengths and drawbacks that shaped Brooks’ psychology, his willpower, his persona, and his comedy. McGilligan insightfully navigates the epic ride that has been the famous funnyman’s life story, from Brooks’s childhood in Williamsburg tenements and breakthrough in early television—working alongside Sid Caesar and Carl Reiner—to Hollywood and Broadway peaks (and valleys). His book offers a meditation on the Jewish immigrant culture that influenced Brooks, snapshots of the golden age of comedy, behind the scenes revelations about the celebrated shows and films, and a telling look at the four-decade romantic partnership with actress Anne Bancroft that superseded Brooks’ troubled first marriage. Engrossing, nuanced and ultimately poignant, Funny Man delivers a great man’s unforgettable life story and an anatomy of the American dream of success.Funny Man includes a 16-page black-and-white photo insert.

Talks about a 1942 smash musical hit, a favorite among audiences and film buffs.

Among the countless gangster films produced by Hollywood, few are as haunting, complex, or ingeniously crafted as White Heat (1948). Students of film history and screen writing will appreciate this treatment—an engaging study of teh various artistic elements that turned what might have been just another gangster film into an innovative classic of the genre and a model of cooperative filmmaking at its best.     Crucial to White Heat's success, McGilligan stresses, was the rare manner in which every aspect of production coalesced: studio, script, cast, crew, and director.

Continuing Patrick McGilligan's highly acclaimed series on Hollywood screenwriters, these engrossing, informative, provocative interviews give wonderfully detailed and personal stories from veteran screenwriters of the seventies and eighties, focusing on their craft, their lives, and their profession. "Backstory 4" is a riveting insider's look at how movies get made; a rich perspective on many of the great movies, directors, and actors of the seventies and eighties; and an articulate, forthright commentary on the art and the business of screenwriting. The screenwriters interviewed for this volume include well-known Oscar winners as well as cult filmmakers, important writers who were also distinguished directors, and key practitioners of every commercial genre. These writers have worked with Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Peter Bogdanovich, George Lucas, Francis Ford Coppola, Robert Altman, Clint Eastwood, and other film giants of the so-called New Hollywood. The stories of their collaborations - some divine, some disastrous - provide some of the most fascinating material in this volume.They also discuss topics, including how they got started writing screenplays, their working routines, their professional relationships, their influences, and the work of other major writers and directors. "Backstory 4" features interviews with Robert Benton, Larry Cohen, Blake Edwards, Walter Hill, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Lawrence Kasdan, Elmore Leonard, Paul Mazursky, Nancy Meyers, John Milius, Frederic Raphael, Alvin Sargent, and Donald E. Westlake.

Patrick McGilligan continues his celebrated interviews with exceptional screenwriters in Backstory 5, focusing on the 1990s. The thirteen featured writers--Albert Brooks, Jean-Claude Carriere, Nora Ephron, Ronald Harwood, John Hughes, David Koepp, Richard LaGravenese, Barry Levinson, Eric Roth, John Sayles, Tom Stoppard, Barbara Turner, and Rudy Wurlitzer--are not confined to the 1990s, but their engrossing, detailed, and richly personal stories create, in McGilligan's words, "a snapshot of a profession in motion." Emphasizing the craft of writing and the process of collaboration, this new volume looks at how Hollywood is changing to meet new economic and creative challenges. Backstory 5 explores how these writers come up with their ideas, how they go about adapting a stage play or work of fiction, how they organize and structure their work, and much more.

More than sixty years ago, McCarthyism silenced Hollywood. In the pages of Tender Comrades, those who were suppressed, whose lives and careers were ruined, finally have their say. A unique collection of profiles in cinematic courage, this extraordinary oral history brings to light the voices of thirty-six blacklist survivors (including two members of the Hollywood Ten), seminal directors of film noir and other genres, starring actresses and memorable supporting players, top screenwriters, and many less known to the public, who are rescued from obscurity by the stories they offer here that, beyond politics, open a rich window into moviemaking during the Golden Age of Hollywood.