Charles Drazin – författare

boo hoo is a gripping, insider's account of the rise and fall of this most controversial of internet startups - a global, online retailer of sports and designer clothes.

In 1963 John Fowles won international recognition with his first published novel The Collector. But his roots as a serious writer can be traced back long before to the journal he began as a student at Oxford in the late 1940s and continued to keep faithfully over the next half century. Written with an unsparing honesty and forthrightness, it reveals the inner thoughts and creative development of one of the twentieth century's most innovative and important novelists. This first-hand account of the road to fame and fortune holds the reader's attention with all the narrative power of the novels, but also offers an invaluable insight into the intimate relationship between Fowles's own life and his fiction.

The first volume of John Fowles's Journals ended with him achieving international literary renown after the publication of The Collector and The Magus, and leaving London behind to live in a remote house near Lyme Regis. This final volume charts the rewards and struggles of his continuing literary career, but at the same time reveals the often reluctant celebrity behind the outward success. Enjoying a reputation as one of the world's leading novelists, Fowles wins enormous wealth, kudos and attention, has the satisfaction of seeing The French Lieutenant's Woman turned into a highly acclaimed Hollywood film, but none the less comes to regard his fame with deep ambivalence. It cannot repair the growing strains between himself and his wife Elizabeth, who does not share his taste for rural isolation, nor can it cure the disenchantment he feels for an increasingly materialist society. This concluding volume of the Journals marks a writer's continuing quest for wisdom and self-understanding.

Filmmaking is a business—someone has to pay the bills. For much of the industry’s history, that role was shouldered by the studios. The rise of independent filmmakers then led to the rise of independent financiers. But what happens if bad weather closes down a production or a director’s vision pays no heed to the limitations of time and money?  Enter Film Finances. The company was founded in London in 1950 to insure against the risk that a film would exceed its original budget or not be completed on time. Its pioneering development of the “completion guarantee”—the financial instrument that provides the essential security for investors to support independent filmmaking—ultimately led to the creation of many thousands of films, including some of the most celebrated ever made: Moulin Rouge (1953), Dr. No (1962), The Outsiders (1982), Pulp Fiction (1994), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), La La Land (2016), and more.  Film Finances’s role in filmmaking was little known outside the industry until 2012, when it opened its historical archive to scholars. Drawing on these previously private documents as well as interviews with its executives, Making Hollywood Happen tells the company’s story through seven decades of postwar cinema history and chronicles the growth of the international independent film industry. Focusing on a business that has operated at the meeting point between money and art for more than seventy years, this lavishly illustrated book goes to the heart of how the movie business works.

In The Faber Book of French Cinema, Charles Drazin explores the rich film culture and history of the country that first established the cinema as the most important mass medium of the twentieth century.Offering portraits of such key figures as the Lumière brothers, Georges Méliès, Charles Pathé and Léon Gaumont, he looks at the early pioneers who transformed a fairground novelty into a global industry. The crisis caused by the First World War led France to surrender her position as the world's dominant film-making power, but French cinema forged a new role for itself as a beacon of cinematic possibility and achievement. Suggesting a Gallic attitude that has always considered the cinema to be as much a cause as a business, Drazin looks at the extraordinary resilience of the French film industry during the Second World War when, in spite of the national catastrophe of defeat and occupation, it was still able to produce such classics as Le Corbeau and Les Enfants du Paradis.Finally, he traces its remarkable post-war regeneration. He looks at the seminal impact of the New Wave of film-makers - typified by Truffaut and Godard - but also at the other waves that have followed since. As he brings the story into the twenty-first century - with Jacques Audaird's award-winning A Prophet - he seeks to capture the essence of the French film tradition and why it continues to matter to anyone who cares about the cinema.

"Blue Velvet" is perhaps David Lynch's best film to date, and certainly his most well-known. Beneath its tranquil, small-town ambience lies violence and depravity on a hideous scale, with Dennis Hopper as Frank at its core. This work covers everything one could possibly want to know about the film.

Half a century after its opening, The Third Man remains an unquestioned masterpiece of film artistry and, for many, the greatest British movie ever made. Whether it is Harry Lime's magical first appearance or the celebrated cuckoo clock speech or the climactic chase through the sewers beneath Vienna or the haunting theme music of Anton Karas, the film contains some of the most memorable moments in screen history. Drawing on both contemporary documents and accounts of the people involved, In Search of The Third Man explores the many myths that over the years have grown around this extraordinary film, and seeks to unravel the facts from the fiction.“...you'll want to read The Third Man...The story of the film's creation is as intriguing as the film itself” –Leonard Maltin, Playboy

The producer behind such celebrated films as The Four Feathers and The Third Man is one of the most colourful and important figures in the history of the British cinema. This gripping biography tells how with extraordinary ambition, enterprise and showmanship, Alexander Korda established in Britain a film industry that rivalled Hollywood, built Europe's biggest studio, and created world-class stars, including Charles Laughton and Vivien Leigh. The biography traces Korda's path from his rural childhood in a remote part of Hungary to a British knighthood. Korda's legacy, it argues, was a film industry that dared to dream on the largest possible scale. But he also exemplified the pattern of boom and bust that dogged the British cinema ever since he first came into the limelight in 1933 with the international success of The Private Life of Henry VIII. To understand his often turbulent career is to gain a profound insight into the nature of the British cinema both then and now.