Word: writer-director
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...AXELROD, 81, author of saucy, acerbic plays and screenplays; in Los Angeles. Once a radio and TV writer, he helped set the tone for pop culture's postwar flirtation with infidelity and angst in his Broadway farce The Seven Year Itch. The film version, with Marilyn Monroe, brought him to Hollywood, where he wrote the scripts for Bus Stop, Breakfast at Tiffany's and that classic spiked cocktail of melodrama, satire and treason, The Manchurian Candidate. His two films as writer-director, Lord Love a Duck and The Secret Life of an American Wife, are revered by comedy cultists...
...Wisconsin, the Milwaukee Repertory Theater last fall presented writer-director Eric Simonson's big, imaginatively staged adaptation of Moby Dick; there was no whale, but a surprising amount of Herman Melville's imposing novel made it onstage. (Adaptations of epic novels, like John Irving's Cider House Rules, have a habit of flopping in New York.) Houston's enterprising Alley Theater last fall staged a fine production of The General from America, Richard Nelson's brooding, against-the-grain, surprisingly convincing historical drama about Benedict Arnold. (The play later opened off-Broadway, where the critics, predictably, dissed...
RAISING VICTOR VARGAS. The summer heat parallels the rising passions of the characters in this teen romance that marks writer-director Peter Sollett’s feature film debut. Sollett plunks his camera down in Manhattan’s East Village and spends some time sketching out the area’s culture and values, particularly as they relate to the relationships budding between three pairs of lovebirds. The inexperienced cast is winning raves from critics; Sollett had used many of the same actors in a short film that he made while studying at NYU. Raising Victor Vargas screens...
...arrives in the U.S. in 1934 knowing barely a word of English, and within a year he is writing screenplays in Hollywood. No wonder Billy Wilder's scintillatingly cynical heroes figured they could get away with murder, cross-dressing or "the girl"; they were reflections of their brilliantly duplicitous writer-director. And though his voice was caustically distinct, Wilder triumphed in a wide variety of genres. He made the sauciest farce (Some Like It Hot), the darkest film noir (Double Indemnity), the dearest romantic comedy (Sabrina) in Hollywood history--as well as the tartest evocation of Hollywood history (Sunset Blvd...
...challenge writer-director Douglas McGrath is very largely up to in Nicholas Nickleby. Now and then his film feels a bit rushed and breathless, but mostly you sink gratefully into its handsomely staged plenitude...