The 100 Greatest Film Books of All Time (original) (raw)

There has long been an assumption that people in the movie business — and Hollywood specifically — aren’t exactly well read. “Millions to be grabbed out here and your only competition is idiots,” Herman Mankiewicz telegrammed Ben Hecht upon his arrival out West in 1926. Meanwhile, 2023 awards contender American Fiction includes the laugh line, “Nobody in Hollywood reads. They get their assistants to read things and then summarize them. The whole town runs on book reports.”

But THR, suspecting that’s painting with too broad a brush, and aware that many usually busy people had some time on their hands during the first simultaneous strike of actors and writers in 63 years, reached out to hundreds of distinguished members of the global film community and asked them to share their picks for the greatest books related to film — autobiographies, biographies, novels, how-to, making-of and every other sort — factoring in quality, impact and influence. They each received a “ballot” listing some 1,200 notable titles, plus slots for write-ins.

Among the 322 respondents were directors (including Steven Spielberg, Ava DuVernay, Oliver Stone, John Waters and Celine Song); actors (Liza Minnelli, Alec Baldwin, Laura Dern, Colman Domingo and Sarah Paulson); producers (Jerry Bruckheimer and Amy Pascal); writers (Tom Stoppard, Paul Schrader and John Mulaney); executives (David Zaslav, Sherry Lansing, Michael Barker, Tom Rothman and Bela Bajaria); documentarians (Ken Burns, Sheila Nevins and Errol Morris); animators (Floyd Norman); composers (Nicholas Britell); agents (Toni Howard); the heads of the Academy, Academy Museum, Golden Globes, BAFTA, MPA, AFI, American Cinematheque, Black List, Alamo Drafthouse theater chain and Sundance, Toronto and Karlovy Vary film festivals; journalists (Maureen Dowd, Graydon Carter, Roxane Gay, David Remnick, Lynn Hirschberg, Michael Wolff and Lawrence O’Donnell); film critics; academics; and, yes, a host of top authors of film books.

There have previously been “greatest film books” surveys of some of these constituencies, but never all of them, and never of this size and scope. It’s with the hope that THR readers will be inspired to check out these books and learn more about the art form and business that we cover that we proudly present — in order from fewest votes to most — the 100 greatest film books of all time (click here for a printable checklist), as chosen by the people who would know best.

• 98 (tie). Transcendental Style in Film: Ozu, Bresson, Dreyer

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By Paul Schrader
1972 • University of California Press • Criticism/Theory/Essay
16 votes
The man who would go on to write Taxi Driver, co-write Raging Bull and write and direct First Reformed penned this study of spirituality in film as his UCLA film school thesis. It zeroes in on three filmmakers whose work, he argues, investigates the “mystery of existence.” Read it here.
Related reading: The World Viewed: Reflections on the Ontology of Film, by Stanley Cavell

• 98 (tie). Haywire: A Memoir

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By Brooke Hayward
1977 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
16 votes
The daughter of agent/producer Leland Hayward and actress Margaret Sullavan, aided by famous family friends whose memories she solicited, reflects on what became of her seemingly picture-perfect family: her father left, her brother was institutionalized, her mother and sister committed suicide and she was left a single mother desperate to spare her kids from similar heartbreak. It was a #1 New York Times bestseller. Read it here.
Related reading: A Private View, by Irene Mayer Selznick

• 98 (tie). Film as a Subversive Art

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By Amos Vogel
1974 • Weidenfeld & Nicolson Ltd • Criticism/Theory/Essay
16 votes
The founder in the ’40s of New York’s Cinema 16 film society and co-founder in the ’60s of the New York Film Festival, Vogel “exerted an influence on the history of film that few other non-filmmakers can claim,” according to his New York Times obit. In this volume, he continued his life’s work of highlighting non-mainstream films that he felt deserved a larger audience. Read it here.
Related reading: I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries, 1950–1969: Volume 1 and I Seem to Live: The New York Diaries, 1969–2011: Volume 2, by Jonas Mekas

• 88 (tie). Wishful Drinking

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By Carrie Fisher
2008 • Simon & Schuster • Autobiography
17 votes
Fisher, in her first memoir, adapted from a 2006 one-woman stage show, the Hollywood survivor wryly comments on growing up the daughter of two eccentric movie stars, being cast in Star Wars at 19 and struggling with alcoholism, addiction and mental illness. “I feel very sane about how crazy I am,” she says at one point, and at another “If my life wasn’t funny it would just be true, and that is unacceptable.” Read it here.
Related reading: Shockaholic, by Carrie Fisher

• 88 (tie). Walt Disney: The Triumph of the American Imagination

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By Neal Gabler
2006 • Alfred A. Knopf • Biography
17 votes
There have been many Disney biographies, but none as well researched or written as this one. It lays out how Uncle Walt came to drawing as an escape from a joyless childhood, goes in-depth on the making of Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, captures how the man and his studio were forever changed by a 1941 strike and reveals that it wasn’t until Disneyland opened that he ever had much financial security. Read it here.
Related reading: Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life, by Ollie Johnston & Frank Thomas

• 88 (tie). Negative Space: Manny Farber on the Movies

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By Manny Farber
1971 • Studio Vista • Criticism/Theory/Essay
17 votes
This collection of 45 pieces that Farber wrote for The Nation or Artforum between the late ’40s and the early ’70s showcases his independent thinking (he gravitated to unpretentious “termite art”) and unique style of writing. NPR said it’s “on every critic’s bookshelf, and it’s amazing how often it’s been quoted, borrowed from, strip-mined or used as a launching pad.” Read it here.
Related reading: Farber on Film: The Complete Film Writings of Manny Farber, by Manny Farber, edited by Robert Polito

• 88 (tie). The Moon’s a Balloon

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By David Niven
1971 • Hamish Hamilton • Autobiography
17 votes
In the laugh-out-loud — and factually suspect — first installment of his memoirs, the British Oscar-winning actor and bon vivant reflects on his delinquent childhood, abbreviated military service and rise to prominence in pre-WWII Hollywood. It became a huge bestseller. Read it here.
Related reading: Bring on the Empty Horses, by David Niven

• 88 (tie). A Killer Life: How an Independent Film Producer Survives Deals and Disasters in Hollywood and Beyond

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By Christine Vachon, with Austin Bunn
2006 • Simon & Schuster • Autobiography
17 votes
This third book by the giant of indie cinema, which derives its name from her production company Killer Films, addresses why she abandoned early directing aspirations, discusses her work with Todd Haynes and the evolution of queer cinema and recounts challenges she encountered while guiding to fruition great indie films like Boys Don’t Cry and Far from Heaven. Read it here.
Related reading: Shooting to Kill: How an Independent Producer Blasts Through the Barriers to Make Movies that Matter, by Christine Vachon

• 88 (tie). The Friedkin Connection: A Memoir

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By William Friedkin
2013 • Harper • Autobiography
17 votes
The New Hollywood filmmaker, who died in August, dishes on the challenges of making classics like The French Connection and The Exorcist (and his regrets for risking people’s safety), his infamous ego and stubbornness (he passed on Star Wars) and a 1980 heart attack that made him look at things differently. Read it here.
Related reading: Leading Lady: Sherry Lansing and the Making of a Hollywood Groundbreaker, by Stephen Galloway

• 88 (tie). David O. Selznick’s Hollywood

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By Ron Haver
1980 • Alfred A. Knopf • Coffee Table
17 votes
Haver, the longtime director of LACMA’s film department, was obsessed with Gone with the Wind — he saw it some 150 times at a time before it was easily accessible — and worshipped Selznick. He devoted five years to this massive book, which the LA Times called “as elaborate as any Selznick production,” and which reportedly cost $1 million to print. Read it here.
Related reading: GWTW: The Making of Gone with the Wind, by Gavin Lambert

• 88 (tie). Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir

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By Eddie Muller
1998 • St. Martin’s Griffin • Coffee Table
17 votes
Employing amusing slang and gorgeous stills and posters to highlight relevant films and people both well-known and underappreciated, the “czar of noir” — now film fest curator and a TCM host — tells the story of a genre of post WWII films that has a French name, but is primarily American. Read it here.
Related reading: King of the Bs: Working Within the Hollywood System, by Charles Flynn & Todd McCarthy

• 88 (tie). Catch and Kill: Lies, Spies and a Conspiracy to Protect Predators

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By Ronan Farrow
2019 • Little, Brown and Company • History
17 votes
Farrow documents his efforts to expose Harvey Weinstein’s sexual crimes, recalling obstruction from employers, intimidation from Weinstein allies and conversations with his sister, who has alleged that she was sexually abused, about how to interact with other survivors. His reporting helped to launch the #MeToo movement and won him a Pulitzer Prize. Read it here.
Related reading: She Said: Breaking the Sexual Harassment Story That Helped Ignite a Movement, by Jodi Kantor & Megan Twohey

• 88 (tie). Cassavetes on Cassavetes

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By Ray Carney
2001 • Faber & Faber • Interview/Oral History
17 votes
Carney conducted 400 hours of interviews with Cassavetes and then, after the indie filmmaking trailblazer’s 1989 death, spent more than a decade interviewing everyone who knew and worked with him, getting to the bottom of his desire to make films, production techniques and disinterest in mainstream success. The author describes his book as “the autobiography Cassavetes never lived to write.” Read it here.
Related reading: Robert Altman: The Oral Biography Book, by Mitchell Zuckoff

• 83 (tie). The Star Machine

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By Jeanine Basinger
2007 • Alfred A. Knopf • History
18 votes
During Hollywood’s Golden Age, studios more or less owned the actors and actresses they had under contract, changing their names and appearances, shaping their on and off screen images, building them up or throwing them aside. Basinger gets into the mechanics of how that star system worked, using in-depth case studies like Lana Turner, Tyrone Power and Deanna Durbin. Read it here.
Related reading: The Fixers: Eddie Mannix, Howard Strickling and the MGM Publicity Machine, by E.J. Fleming

• 83 (tie). The Making of The Wizard of Oz: Movie Magic and Studio Power in the Prime of MGM — and the Miracle of Production #1060

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By Aljean Harmetz
1977 • Alfred A. Knopf • Making Of
18 votes
This pioneering “making of” book dissects all of the elements that resulted in an MGM classic. Harmetz, who’d become the _New York Times_’ Hollywood correspondent, interviewed dozens of surviving cast and crew and emerged with incredible stories — why “Over the Rainbow” was almost cut, where the ‘Munchkins’ were found, how the studio hid Garland’s physical maturation, how the Wicked Witch ‘melted,’ etc. Read it here.
Related reading: The Making of Casablanca: Bogart, Bergman and World War II, by Aljean Harmetz

• 83 (tie). The Conversations: Walter Murch and the Art of Editing Film

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By Michael Ondaatje
2002 • Alfred A. Knopf • Interview/Oral History
18 votes
The novelist Ondaatje and the sound/film editor Murch met and hit it off during the making of the film version of The English Patient and conducted five “conversations” over two years about how Murch confronted various challenges over the course of his illustrious career. John Boorman wrote, “This book should be required reading for anyone working in film.” Read it here.
Related reading: A Long Time Ago in a Cutting Room Far, Far Away: My Fifty Years Editing Hollywood Hits ― Star Wars, Carrie, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Mission: Impossible and More, by Paul Hirsch

• 83 (tie). Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood’s Golden Age at the American Film Institute and Conversations at the American Film Institute With the Great Moviemakers: The Next Generation

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By George Stevens Jr.
2006 & 2012 • Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group • Interview/Oral History
18 votes
Stevens, the son of a legendary director and founder of AFI, presents, with commentary, transcribed highlights from seminars held there with filmmakers — many but not all American. The first volume features pearls of wisdom from the likes of Harold Lloyd, Federico Fellini and Satyajit Ray, the latter from younger legends including George Lucas, Meryl Streep and Steven Spielberg. Read it here.
Related reading: The Men Who Made the Movies, by Richard Schickel

• 83 (tie). By Myself

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By Lauren Bacall
1978 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
18 votes
Betty Joan Perske, “a nice Jewish girl from New York,” was discovered by Howard Hawks at 19, changed her name and became a star thanks to her sultry turn in To Have and Have Not opposite Humphrey Bogart, who she’d marry. This memoir, which recounts her many ups and downs before and after, including Bogie’s death and a relationship with Frank Sinatra, was chosen for a National Book Award. Read it here.
Related reading: The Lonely Life, by Bette Davis

• 76 (tie). Valley of the Dolls

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By Jacqueline Susann
1966 • Bernard Geis Associates • Novel
19 votes
Susann’s first novel, which follows three young women with showbiz dreams whose lives take unexpected turns, not least because of “dolls” (a nickname for upper and downer pills), was described by The Washington Post as a “trash read” and “everything that is wrong with America” — but it was #1 on the New York Times bestseller list for 22 weeks, spawned a 1967 film and has sold 31 million copies. Read it here.
Related reading: Dolls! Dolls! Dolls!: Deep Inside Valley of the Dolls, the Most Beloved Bad Book and Movie of All Time, by Stephen Rebello

• 76 (tie). Spike Lee’s Gotta Have It: Inside Guerrilla Filmmaking

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By Spike Lee
1987 • Fireside Books • Making Of
19 votes
Spike Lee’s 1986 feature directorial debut She’s Gotta Have It put him on the map. This is the story — derived from a diary that he kept during the year and a half he worked on the film, as well as a Billboard interview — of how he hustled and defied considerable odds (and a photo lab that threatened to auction off his negatives unless he settled his debts) to see it through. Read it here.
Related reading: Do the Right Thing: A Spike Lee Joint, by Spike Lee with Lisa Jones

• 76 (tie). Powerhouse: The Untold Story of Hollywood’s Creative Artists Agency

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By James Andrew Miller
2016 • HarperCollins • Interview/Oral History
19 votes
Miller, our most impressive oral historian since Studs Terkel (he’s also chronicled SNL, ESPN and HBO), got some of Hollywood’s tightest-lipped people — CAA agents past and present, including Michael Ovitz and Ron Meyer — to open up, revealing the intelligence, ambition and greed at the center of an operation that caused studios to spend wildly on talent, changing the types of movies it made financial sense to make. Read it here.
Related reading: Who Is Michael Ovitz? The Rise and Fall (and Rise) of the Most Powerful Man in Hollywood, by Michael Ovitz

• 76 (tie). My Lunches With Orson: Conversations Between Henry Jaglom and Orson Welles

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Edited by Peter Biskind
2013 • Metropolitan Books • Interview/Oral History
19 votes
As in This Is Orson Welles, Welles is in conversation with a younger filmmaker, this time at tape-recorded lunches at Ma Maison during the last three years of his life. Bloated by overconsumption and ego but deflated by the industry, he is at his wackiest: rude to Richard Burton, spouting conspiracies about the Nazis killing Carole Lombard and fearful of contracting AIDS from a hug.
Related reading: Afterglow: A Last Conversation with Pauline Kael, by Francis Davis

• 76 (tie). Montgomery Clift: A Biography

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By Patricia Bosworth
1978 • Harcourt Brace Jovanovich • Biography
19 votes
Bosworth, who profiled Hollywood types in magazines and books for decades, did her best work crafting this portrait of a gifted actor who was sexually conflicted and was haunted after a car accident robbed him of his once flawless beauty. She spent five years on the project and, as the New York Times noted, “seem[ed] to have talked to everybody who ever had anything to do with Clift.” Read it here.
Related reading: Rainbow: Stormy Life of Judy Garland, by Christopher Finch

• 76 (tie). Hollywood: The Oral History

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By Jeanine Basinger & Sam Wasson
2022 • Harper • Interview/Oral History
19 votes
This brick of an 800-page book features quotes pulled from hundreds of seminars held at AFI over the decades, which are masterfully curated so as to create the appearance of a conversation between people from across the professions of the film industry about a variety of times and themes. The New York Times described the authors’ work as “structural origami.” Read it here.
Related reading: People Will Talk, by John Kobal

• 76 (tie). Hawks on Hawks

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By Joseph McBride
1982 • University of California Press • Interview/Oral History
19 votes
McBride met Hawks in 1970 and, at the urging of François Truffaut, convinced him to sit for several interviews over seven years for a _Hitchcock/Truffaut_-style book about his half-century career. Hawks memorably discusses his attraction to stories about male friendship and to strong female characters, and his perplexing The Big Sleep (“I wasn’t going to explain things, I was just going to try and make good scenes”). Read it here.
Related reading: Howard Hawks: The Grey Fox of Hollywood, by Todd McCarthy

• 72 (tie). Scorsese on Scorsese

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By Ian Christie & David Thompson
1989 • Faber & Faber • Interview/Oral History
21 votes
Three interviews in England and another in Scotland, all conducted in 1987, provide the majority of material in this profile of one of America’s most significant filmmakers of the past 50 years. The master speaks about growing up in Little Italy, his cinematic influences and the making of all of his films through The Last Temptation of Christ. Read it here.
Related reading: A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Movies, by Martin Scorsese & Michael Henry Wilson

• 72 (tie). Rebel Without a Crew: Or How a 23-Year-Old Filmmaker with $7,000 Became a Hollywood Player

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By Robert Rodriguez
1995 • Dutton • Making Of
21 votes
Best known today for the Spy Kids franchise, Rodriguez started out as indie as you can get, raising money for his 1992 Spanish-language debut feature El Mariachi by participating in medical studies. It ultimately sold to Columbia, grossed seven figures and put him on the map. This book draws from his old diary and includes his full screenplay.
Related reading: Thinking In Pictures: The Making of the Movie Matewan, by John Sayles

• 72 (tie). Mommie Dearest

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By Christina Crawford
1978 • William Morrow & Co. • Autobiography
21 votes
A year after the death of Joan Crawford, one of the biggest stars in Hollywood history, came this shocking book, authored by an adopted daughter who she had disinherited, alleging that Crawford had been mentally unstable and abused her during her childhood. (“No wire hangers, ever!”) Disputed by some of Crawford’s other children, it was nevertheless made into a 1981 narrative film. Read it here.
Related reading: Joan Crawford: A Biography, by Bob Thomas

• 72 (tie). A Life in Movies

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By Michael Powell
1987 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
21 votes
One of the greatest British filmmakers shared this detailed account of his first 43 years, which discusses his childhood, breaking into the movies under Alfred Hitchcock, working for Alexander Korda and making The Red Shoes for J. Arthur Rank, while living a colorful life outside of work. He died three years later, but the second installment of his memoirs was finished by his widow, Thelma Schoonmaker. Read it here.
Related reading: Million-Dollar Movie: Volume II of a Life in Movies, by Michael Powell

• 69 (tie). George Hurrell’s Hollywood: Glamour Portraits, 1925-1992

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By Mark A. Vieira
2013 • Running Press • Coffee Table
22 votes
Coffee table books don’t come more stunning than this one, thanks both to the images taken by Hurrell, a game-changing portrait photographer, and the presentation of them by Vieira, a photographer in his own right and the author of more than a dozen impressive books. The author and subject actually met and worked together on a book project back in 1975; Hurrell died in 1992. Read it here.
Related reading: Photographs, by Annie Leibovitz

• 69 (tie). 5001 Nights at the Movies

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By Pauline Kael
1982 • Holt, Rinehart and Winston • Criticism/Theory/Essay
22 votes
While some prefer Kael’s longform work, many a film lover struggling to decide what to watch next has made great use of this collection of her short capsule reviews that appeared in _The New Yorker_’s “Goings On About Town” section. The New York Times declared that they “read like mini-Barthes essays: provocative, polished and idiosyncratic.” Read it here.
Related reading: Pauline Kael: A Life in the Dark, by Brian Kellow

• 69 (tie). 85 Years of the Oscar: The Official History of the Academy Awards

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By Robert Osborne
2013 • Abbeville Press Publishers • History
22 votes
The first book by Osborne, an actor turned journalist (he wrote for THR), was 1965’s Academy Awards Illustrated, a dispassionate history of the organization behind the Oscars, which then enlisted him to write its official history, which was released in 1979. The last of his six updates to that one was published in 2013, by which time he was a beloved TCM host. He died in 2017. Read it here.
Related reading: The Academy and the Award: The Coming of Age of Oscar and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, by Bruce Davis

• 66 (tie). Spike, Mike, Slackers and Dykes: A Guided Tour Across a Decade of Independent American Cinema

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By John Pierson
1996 • Hyperion • Business
23 votes
Pierson, a producer’s representative, explains how he has helped filmmakers with no profile at the time to get their work made, sold and seen by the world, sharing stories about Lee’s She’s Gotta Have It, Moore’s Roger & Me and Linklater’s Slacker, plus Hoop Dreams, Clerks and many others. Chats with Kevin Smith serve as interstitials between chapters. Read it here.
Related reading: How I Made a Hundred Movies in Hollywood and Never Lost a Dime, by Roger Corman with Jim Jerome

• 66 (tie). Shock Value: A Tasteful Book About Bad Taste

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By John Waters
1981 • Dell • Autobiography
23 votes
The Baltimore-based “Pope of Trash,” the subject of a new exhibit at the Academy Museum, herein shares the stories behind his early films like Pink Flamingos, and the worldview that has guided his unusual work: “To me, bad taste is what entertainment is all about. If someone vomits watching one of my films, it’s like getting a standing ovation.” Read it here.
Related reading: Mr. Know-It-All: The Tarnished Wisdom of a Filth Elder, by John Waters

• 66 (tie). Film Form and The Film Sense

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By Sergei Eisenstein, translated by Jay Leyda
1959 • Meridian Books • Criticism/Theory/Essay
23 votes
Eisenstein, in his 54 years, made six films, most notably 1925’s Battleship Potemkin, which was highly influential on other filmmakers. His influence also extended to his writing: The Film Sense, a 1942 essay, discussed montage. Film Form, comprised of 12 essays of theory and analysis, followed in 1949. Years later, they were translated and combined this book, which The New York Times called “essential reading.” Read it here.
Related reading: Beyond the Stars: The Memoirs of Sergei Eisenstein, by Sergei Eisenstein, edited by Richard Taylor, translated by William Powell

• 64 (tie). Story: Substance, Structure, Style and the Principles of Screenwriting

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By Robert McKee
1997 • HarperCollins • How To
24 votes
As was memorably portrayed by Brian Cox in Adaptation, McKee is a real character who teaches a massively influential seminar on screenwriting that was the basis for this book, which every screenwriter has on his or her shelf. In case you haven’t heard, he hates voiceover narration and loves “inciting incidents.” Read it here.
Related reading: Save the Cat! The Last Book on Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, by Blake Snyder

• 64 (tie). The Great Movies, The Great Movies II, The Great Movies III and The Great Movies IV

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By Roger Ebert
2003, 2006, 2011 & 2016 • Three Rivers Press (first two) and University of Chicago Press (second two) • Criticism/Theory/Essay
24 votes
These collections of incisive and personal essays that Ebert wrote for the Chicago Sun-Times allow admirers of his writing and thinking to read what are essentially his reviews of standout films that predated his career as a critic, as well as his fresh evaluations of standout films that he had previously written about. The final edition was published after his death. Read them here, here, here and here.
Related reading: The Great Films: Fifty Golden Years of Motion Pictures, by Bosley Crowther

• 61 (tie). Without Lying Down: Frances Marion and the Powerful Women of Early Hollywood

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By Cari Beauchamp
1997 • Scribner • Biography
25 votes
Beauchamp, a PI turned politico turned prolific writer on Hollywood, shines a seminal light on women who carried considerable weight in nascent Hollywood, especially Marion, who was Hollywood’s highest-paid screenwriter, won two screenwriting Oscars (and used them as doorstops) and knew everyone. The title comes from Marion’s lifelong search “for a man to look up to without lying down.” Read it here.
Related reading: Off with Their Heads!: A Serio-Comic Tale of Hollywood, by Frances Marion

• 61 (tie). Something Like an Autobiography

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By Akira Kurosawa, translated by Audie E. Bock
1983 • Iwanami Shoten • Autobiography
25 votes
In a memoir modeled after Jean Renoir’s My Life and My Films, the Japanese master behind Rashomon and The Seven Samurai gets candid about childhood struggles, the suicide of the older brother who introduced him to films, his country’s hesitance to embrace him and his philosophy that “There is nothing that says more about its creator than the work itself.” Read it here.
Related reading: The Japanese Film: Art and Industry, by Joseph L. Anderson & Donald Richie

• 61 (tie). My Autobiography

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By Charlie Chaplin
1964 • Simon & Schuster • Autobiography
25 votes
Arguably the greatest creative force Hollywood has ever known, and one of the most famous men who ever lived, wrote his memoir while in exile from the U.S. due to the Red Scare. In the massive bestseller, he recounts his Dickensian childhood, the origin of his Little Tramp character and, with questionable accuracy, interactions with virtually every famous person of his time.
Related reading: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me, by Lillian Gish

• 59 (tie). My Last Sigh

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By Luis Buñuel, translated by Abigail Israel
1983 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
26 votes
With the tremendous and uncredited assistance of his go-to screenwriter Jean-Claude Carrière, the most celebrated Spanish filmmaker ever offers musings on his life and work, but also on booze, death and dreams. A surrealist whose career began with a film in which an eyeball is sliced open, he declares, “I love dreams, even when they’re nightmares, which is usually the case.” And he took his last sigh that same year. Read it here.
Related reading: Every Man for Himself and God Against All: A Memoir, by Werner Herzog, translated by Michael Hoffmann

• 59 (tie). The Last Mogul: Lew Wasserman, MCA and the Hidden History of Hollywood

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By Dennis McDougal
1998 • Crown • Biography
26 votes
McDougal, formerly of the L.A. Times, conducted 200 interviews to determine how a man who came from nothing grew MCA into the world’s largest talent agency, ran the Universal studio and became the most powerful person in Hollywood history. Some aspects of his story are less savory than others, and the preface begins: “Lew Wasserman did not want this book published.” Read it here.
Related reading: The Agency: William Morris and the Hidden History of Show Business, by Frank Rose

• 57 (tie). The Studio

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By John Gregory Dunne
1969 • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • Business
27 votes
Dunne managed to secure unrestricted access to the 20th Century Fox lot for a full year, spanning May 1967 through May 1968, during which the business was rapidly changing. His portraits of studio chief Richard Zanuck, Doctor Dolittle producer Arthur P. Jacobs and others provide an unparalleled look into the lives and creative considerations of Hollywood power players of the time. Read it here.
Related reading: The Magic Factory: How MGM Made An American in Paris, by Donald Knox

• 57 (tie). Godard on Godard

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By Jean-Luc Godard, translated and edited by Tom Milne
1972 • Viking Press • Criticism/Theory/Essay
27 votes
This portrait of Godard, a film critic (for Cahiers du Cinéma and elsewhere) before he was a filmmaker (ushering in the French New Wave), gathers reviews and essays that he wrote about other filmmakers and their work as well as interviews that he himself later gave about his own films. The included works collectively span 1950 through 1967. Read it here.
Related reading: Everything Is Cinema: The Working Life of Jean-Luc Godard, by Richard Brody

• 51 (tie). Notes: The Making of Apocalypse Now

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By Eleanor Coppola
1979 • Simon & Schuster • Making Of
28 votes
Francis Ford Coppola encouraged his wife to film a documentary about the making of Apocalypse Now, which years later came out as Hearts of Darkness. But first, she made a book of the notes she took throughout the chaotic shoot, which saw one star show up hugely overweight and another suffer a heart attack, was delayed by weather and military conflicts and went way over budget and schedule. Read it here.
Related reading: The Cleopatra Papers: A Private Correspondence, by Jack Brodsky & Nathan Weiss

• 51 (tie). From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film

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By Siegfried Kracauer
1947 • Princeton University Press • Criticism/Theory/Essay
28 votes
Kracauer, a critic who fled Germany in 1933, looks back on films of the Weimar era for clues about how the Nazis rose to power and argues that “through an analysis of the German film, deep psychological dispositions predominant in Germany from 1918 to 1933 can be exposed,” he wrote. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. called it “the most ambitious attempt to use films as a historic source.” Read it here.
Related reading: Hollywood’s Spies: The Undercover Surveillance of Nazis in Los Angeles, by Laura B. Rosenzweig

• 51 (tie). The Devil Finds Work

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By James Baldwin
1976 • Dial Press • Criticism/Theory/Essay
28 votes
The great writer and thinker reflects on the role that movies played in his life and thoughts — as a kid (he was comforted that Bette Davis also had bulging eyes), as an adult moviegoer (sniffing at naïve films about race like In the Heat of the Night) and as a screenwriter (recounting his attempt to script a film about Malcolm X). Read it here.
Related reading: The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison

• 51 (tie). The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock

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By Donald Spoto
1983 • Little, Brown and Company • Biography
28 votes
The first of many biographies penned by Spoto, published three years after the Master of Suspense’s death, reflects the inner conflict of an author who greatly admired the filmmaker’s twisted work, but who also recognized that it was to some degree reflective of his own repressed and sadistic behavior towards certain collaborators, especially The Birds and Marnie star Tippi Hedren. Read it here.
Related reading: Alfred Hitchcock and the Making of Psycho, by Stephen Rebello

• 51 (tie). The Citizen Kane Book

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By Pauline Kael
1971 • Little, Brown and Company • Making Of
28 votes
This book includes _Citizen Kane_’s shooting script but is primarily notable for including Kael’s 50,000-word essay “Raising Kane,” which first ran in back-to-back issues of The New Yorker in 1971. In it she argues that Herman J. Mankiewicz, not Orson Welles, deserved primary credit for the film’s screenplay. Her claims, which were fueled by Welles ex-pal John Houseman, were later challenged by a host of other journalists. Read it here.
Related reading: The Making of Citizen Kane, by Robert L. Carringer

• 51 (tie). Cinema Speculation

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By Quentin Tarantino
2022 • Harper • Criticism/Theory/Essay
28 votes
The Oscar-winning filmmaker’s second book in a two-book deal (following his novelization of Once Upon a Time in Hollywood) is, as the New York Times put it, “as much a filmgoing memoir as a work of criticism,” exploring the movies of the 1970s that shaped him. He champions unsung titles (Rolling Thunder), takes issues with classics (Taxi Driver) and even pays homage to a favorite film critic (Kevin Thomas). Read it here.
Related reading: The Films in My Life, by François Truffaut

• 50. This Is Orson Welles

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By Peter Bogdanovich & Orson Welles, edited by Jonathan Rosenbaum
1992 • HarperCollins • Interview/Oral History
29 votes
Welles, an admirer of Bogdanovich’s biography of John Ford, urged Bogdanovich, who was a quarter-century younger and on the rise in Hollywood, to write a similar book with him. Their conversations, which address things like the butchering of Welles’ The Magnificent Ambersons, began in 1969 and continued intermittently over 15 years, during which both men experienced personal and professional ups and downs. Read it here.
Related reading: John Ford, by Peter Bogdanovich

• 48 (tie). Sculpting in Time: The Great Russian Filmmaker Discusses His Art

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By Andrey Tarkovsky, translated by Kitty Hunter-Blair
1987 • University of Texas Press • Autobiography
30 votes
This collection of writings, lectures, interviews and stills, which was published shortly after Tarkovsky died of cancer at the age of 54, addresses the inspirations, challenges and meaning of the seven feature films that he completed in his lifetime — which had prompted widespread questions and debate among many cineastes — and his complex feelings about the Soviet Union. Read it here.
Related reading: Kuleshov on Film: Writings by Lev Kuleshov, by Lev Vladimirovich Kuleshov, edited by Ronald Levaco

• 48 (tie). Five Came Back: A Story of Hollywood and the Second World War

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By Mark Harris
2014 • Penguin Press • History
30 votes
Harris’ sophomore effort, like Pictures at a Revolution, centers on five central elements, this time not films, but A-list Hollywood directors who served during World War II, namely Frank Capra, John Ford, John Huston, George Stevens and William Wyler. It brilliantly explores how they and their filmmaking were changed by their time overseas. Read it here.
Related reading: Hollywood Independents: The Postwar Talent Takeover, by Denise Mann

• 47. Get Shorty

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By Elmore Leonard
1990 • The Delacorte Press • Novel
31 votes
The great American crime novelist, who spent years working in Hollywood before becoming a household name, tells the story of Chili Palmer, a loan shark who pitches an idea for a movie to a producer from whom he has come to collect a debt, in this dark-as-night comedy. It was made into a 1995 film starring John Travolta and, in 2017, a TV series. Read it here.
Related reading: The Black Dahlia, by James Ellroy

• 46. Naming Names

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By Victor S. Navasky
1980 • Viking Press • History
32 votes
Navasky, the longtime editor of The Nation, embarked on a “moral detective story” to figure out why the Hollywood blacklist happened and how it impacted people, spending seven years conducting 187 interviews with people who were blacklisted (such as Dalton Trumbo) and who named names (including Elia Kazan and Budd Schulberg). It won a National Book Award. Read it here.
Related reading: Tender Comrades: A Backstory of the Hollywood Blacklist, by Paul Buhle & Patrick McGilligan

• 45. Life Itself

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By Roger Ebert
2011 • Grand Central Publishing • Autobiography
33 votes
The Pulitzer Prize-winning critic, battling cancer that would kill him in 2013, reflects, in characteristically beautiful prose, on falling in love with the movies, his relationship with his late TV sparring partner Gene Siskel (“how meaningless was the hate, how deep was the love”) and the support of his loving wife, Chaz (“a wind pushing me back from the grave”). Steve James adapted the book into a 2014 documentary. Read it here.
Related reading: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier

• 44. Lulu in Hollywood

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By Louise Brooks
1982 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
34 votes
Like a comet, this American actress with a trademark black bob burned brightly (she was one of the biggest stars of the 1920s, especially in the German films Pandora’s Box and Diary of a Lost Girl) and then was gone — until she resurfaced late in life as a writer. This collection of essays captured the frustrations of being a liberated woman in early Hollywood. Read it here.
Related reading: The Kindness of Strangers, by Salka Viertel

• 43. Notes on the Cinematograph

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By Robert Bresson, translated by Jonathan Griffin
1975 • Éditions Gallimard • Criticism/Theory/Essay
35 votes
The French filmmaker, a hero to the New Wave filmmakers who followed, shares a wide variety of notes, ideas and philosophies — some more profound than others — about film-related topics ranging from silence versus sound to professional actors versus nonprofessional “models.” It offers a lot for filmmakers to contemplate. Read it here.
Related reading: Kino-Eye: The Writings of Dziga Vertov, by Dziga Vertov, translated by Kevin O’Brien

• 42. A Biographical Dictionary of Cinema [aka _The New Biographical Dictionary of Film_]

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By David Thomson
1975 • Martin Secker & Warburg Ltd • Criticism/Theory/Essay
36 votes
One of the most prolific authors of books on film, Thomson, a Brit who has long lived in America, is best known for this giant and often updated tome, which is comprised of thousands of biographical sketches about people associated with film in one way or another. His takes are often contrarian, and always thought-provoking. Read it here.
Related reading: The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood, by David Thomson

• 38 (tie). Toms, Coons, Mulattos, Mammies and Bucks: An Interpretative History of Blacks in American Films

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By Donald Bogle
1973 • Viking Press • Gender/Race/Sexuality
37 votes
Now a veteran professor and frequent TCM guest widely regarded as the preeminent scholar on African Americans in film, Bogle made his first mark with this landmark examination of the stereotypical ways in which Black people have been portrayed throughout film history. It was described by the New York Times as “a quietly revolutionary book.” Read it here.
Related reading: Hollywood Chinese: The Chinese in American Feature Films, by Arthur Dong
Read an excerpt from Bogle’s new book, Lena Horne: Goddess Reclaimed.

• 38 (tie). The Name Above the Title: An Autobiography

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By Frank Capra
1971 • Macmillan • Autobiography
37 votes
Capra, a three-time best director Oscar winner, writes about immigrating from Italy, growing up in poverty and, against all odds, becoming a Hollywood filmmaker responsible for all-American classics like Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and It’s a Wonderful Life. It’s a great read, but many details now seem suspect; indeed, the New York Times declared that it “appears to have been a lie practically from beginning to end.” Read it here.
Related reading: Frank Capra: The Catastrophe of Success, by Joseph McBride

• 38 (tie). Hit and Run: How Jon Peters and Peter Guber Took Sony for a Ride in Hollywood

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By Nancy Griffin & Kim Masters
1996 • Simon & Schuster • Business
37 votes
Griffin and Masters, co-workers at Premiere (Masters is now at THR), teamed up to tell the story of the Japanese company Sony taking over the Hollywood studio Columbia and then entrusting it to a pair of eccentric producers (they attended therapy together, the book reports) who presided over flop after flop, and whose massive compensation and eventual kiss-off money jolted Hollywood’s economic ecosystem. Read it here.
Related reading: High Concept: Don Simpson and the Hollywood Culture of Excess, by Charles Fleming

• 38 (tie). The Big Goodbye: Chinatown and the Last Years of Hollywood

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By Sam Wasson
2020 • Flatiron Books • Making Of
37 votes
Wasson, at just 42, has already written seven outstanding books, none better than this examination of the making and cultural context of this 1974 masterpiece directed by Roman Polanski and produced by Robert Evans, both of whom spoke with him for the book. His research reveals that writer Robert Towne had an uncredited collaborator and that Polanski changed Towne’s ending to reflect his own fatalism after Sharon Tate’s murder. Read it here.
Related reading: Rock Me on the Water: 1974 — The Year Los Angeles Transformed Movies, Music, Television and Politics, by Ronald Brownstein

• 37. Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance and the Rise of Independent Film

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By Peter Biskind
2004 • Simon & Schuster • History
38 votes
Having written about the ’70s in Easy Riders, Raging Bulls [#2], Biskind employs a similarly chatty style to tell the story of the rise and decline of the indie film boom of the ’90s, setting the scene with 1989’s sex, lies and videotape, which premiered at Robert Redford’s Sundance and was distributed by the Weinsteins’ Miramax, both of which are central players throughout. Read it here.
Related reading: Cinema of Outsiders: The Rise of American Independent Film, by Emanuel Levy

• 36. Who the Devil Made It

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By Peter Bogdanovich
1997 • Ballantine Books • Interview/Oral History
39 votes
Bogdanovich, who grew up obsessed with classic films, interviewed legendary filmmakers both before and after he became an A-list director himself. This volume compiles his smart conversations with 16 of them, including Hitchcock and Howard Hawks, the latter of who said of his taste in directors, “I liked almost anybody that made you realize who in the devil was making the picture.” Read it here.
Related reading: Who the Hell’s in It: Conversations with Hollywood’s Legendary Actors, by Peter Bogdanovich

• 35. What Is Cinema? [Volumes 1 and 2]

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By André Bazin, translated by Hugh Gray
1967 & 1971 • University of California Press • Criticism/Theory/Essay
40 votes
Bazin, a French film critic who co-founded Cahiers du Cinéma and championed “objective reality” (forcing a viewer to decide what’s important via methods like deep focus), opines in volume one about “Ontology and Language” and “Cinema and the Other Arts” and in volume two about “Cinema and Sociology” and “Neorealism: An Aesthetic of Reality.” He died at just 40 of leukemia. Read it here.
Related reading: Signs and Meaning in the Cinema, by Peter Wollen

• 34. Postcards From the Edge

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By Carrie Fisher
1987 • Simon & Schuster • Novel
42 votes
In a debut novel that was clearly shaped by her own battles with alcoholism and addiction, Fisher tells the story of Suzanna Vale, an actress who recently suffered a drug overdose and is struggling to get her life together. “It’s like I’ve got a visa for happiness, but for sadness I’ve got a lifetime pass,” she remarks at one point. Fisher later adapted it into the screenplay for a 1990 film. Read it here.
Related reading: American Dream Machine, by Matthew Specktor

• 32 (tie). Play It as It Lays

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By Joan Didion
1970 • Farrar, Straus and Giroux • Novel
43 votes
Inimitable Didion’s second novel centers on Maria, an L.A.-based actress and single mother whose daughter is institutionalized and who is having an existential crisis of her own, often driving the highway, seemingly in search of something. Deeply haunting (“I know what nothing means, and keep on playing”), it was adapted into a 1972 film and was chosen in 2005 as one of _Time’_s 100 best English-language novels since 1923. Read it here.
Related reading: Less Than Zero, by Bret Easton Ellis

• 32 (tie). Agee on Film [Volumes 1 and 2]

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By James Agee
1958 & 1960 • McDowell, Obolensky • Criticism/Theory/Essay
43 votes
Considering that he died of a heart attack at just 45, it’s remarkable how much great work Agee did in his lifetime. Volume one contains film reviews he wrote for Time and The Nation (they required completely different styles) and volume two contains his three screenplays (The African Queen and The Night of the Hunter among them). And he also wrote Let Us Now Praise Famous Men and Pulitzer Prize winner A Death in the Family. Read it here.
Related reading: The Pleasure Dome: Graham Greene — The Collected Film Criticism 1935-1940, by Graham Greene, edited by John Russell Taylor

• 30 (tie.) The Player

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By Michael Tolkin
1988 • Atlantic Monthly Press • Novel
44 votes
Inspired by the Iran-Contra hearings to contemplate “the modern sociopath,” Tolkin set his black-as-coffee comedy in the business in which he grew up (his father, Mel, was a top TV writer) and worked with great frustration, and around Griffin Mill, a neurotic studio exec who fears that his job may be in jeopardy — and turns to murder. It was adapted by Robert Altman into a cameo-filled 1992 film. Read it here.
Related reading: The Return of the Player, by Michael Tolkin

• 30 (tie). Picture: A Story About Hollywood

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By Lillian Ross
1952 • Rinehart & Company • Making Of
44 votes
The New Yorker staff writer spent more than a year in Hollywood chronicling the MGM production The Red Badge of Courage from start to finish — observing director John Huston on set, tensions between execs Louis B. Mayer and Dore Schary at the studio and speaking with Loew’s chief Nick Schenck in New York — for a five-part series in the magazine, which was later turned into this book. Read it here.
Related reading: The Jaws Log, by Carl Gottlieb

• 29. Indecent Exposure: A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street

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By David McClintick
1982 • HarperCollins • Business
46 votes
McClintick, a Wall Street Journal reporter, broke the story of “the Begelman affair” — when Columbia Pictures production president David Begelman forged checks and embezzled money, but was protected by his superiors — and then expanded it into a book that was unlike any before it, and became the model for many that have subsequently tried to capture the corrupting influence of money and power in Hollywood. Read it here.
Related reading: Outrageous Conduct: Art, Ego and the Twilight Zone Case, by Stephen Farber & Mark Green

• 28. City of Nets: A Portrait of Hollywood in the 1940s

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By Otto Friedrich
1988 • Headline Book Publishing • History
47 votes
Friedrich, a film journalist and historian as well read as any, herein gathers the most amusing stories about a decade of cinema that was shaped by World War II and the Europeans who fled Hitler for America, the House Committee on Un-American Activities’ investigations into Hollywood, and more. The New York Times described it as “extraordinarily readable.” Read it here.
Related reading: Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling, by David Bordwell

• 27. Memo From David O. Selznick: The Creation of Gone With the Wind and Other Motion Picture Classics, as Revealed in the Producer’s Private Letters, Telegrams, Memorandums and Autobiographical Remarks

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By Rudy Behlmer
1972 • Viking Press • Business
49 votes
Daniel Selznick, one of the legendary producer’s sons, enlisted Behlmer, a film journalist, to review his late father’s papers, including memos dictated to secretaries throughout his half-century career, which Behlmer curated and contextualized in this book. In the age of email, barring another Sony hack, it’s hard to imagine we’ll ever again get such a window into how filmmaking decisions large and small are made. Read it here.
Related reading: Memo from Darryl F. Zanuck: The Golden Years at Twentieth Century-Fox, by Rudy Behlmer

• 26. In the Blink of an Eye

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By Walter Murch
1995 • Silman-James Press • How To
51 votes
Murch, one of the all-time great editors of film and sound — his credits include all three Godfather films, American Graffiti, The Conversation and Apocalypse Now — expanded a 1988 lecture that he gave in Australia into this book-length manifesto about editing “on the fly.” His thesis: that humans blink when they move from one thought to another, so cuts should do the same. Read it here.
Related reading: When the Shooting Stops… the Cutting Begins, by Robert Karen & Ralph Rosenblum

• 25. The Devil’s Candy: The Anatomy of a Hollywood Fiasco

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By Julie Salamon
1991 • Houghton Mifflin • Making Of
54 votes
A Wall Street Journal film critic, Salamon wanted to write a modern version of Lillian Ross’ Picture (#30), a landmark 1950s chronicle of a film from conception through aftermath. Brian De Palma invited her to do that with The Bonfire of the Vanities, his big-screen adaptation of Tom Wolfe’s novel about Wall Street, which turned out to be an unmitigated disaster, but provided the author with a wealth of priceless material. Read it here.
Related reading: The Disaster Artist: My Life Inside ‘The Room,’ the Greatest Bad Movie Ever Made, by Greg Sestero

• 22 (tie). The Last Tycoon

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By F. Scott Fitzgerald, finished by Edmund Wilson
1941 • Charles Scribner’s Sons • Novel
55 votes
More than a decade after The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald was writing for the movies and widely regarded as washed-up. He began writing a book about Monroe Stahr, a Thalberg-like “boy wonder” who understood “the whole equation of pictures,” in which he famously noted, “There are no second acts in American life.” Had he not died of a heart attack in 1940, at just 44, and lived to see the reception of this book, he’d have been proved wrong. Read it here.
Related reading: The Disenchanted, by Budd Schulberg

• 22 (tie). Conversations With Wilder

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By Cameron Crowe
1999 • Alfred A. Knopf • Interview/Oral History
55 votes
The product of a friendship that emerged after Crowe tried to get Wilder to cameo in Jerry Maguire, this _Hitchcock/Truffaut_-inspired book features two journalists-turned-filmmakers — one in his 40s, the other in his 90s — dissecting the latter’s life (he almost directed Schindler’s List as a tribute to his mother, who died in the Holocaust) and films (e.g., Brief Encounter inspired The Apartment). Read it here.
Related reading: Conversations With Brando: 10 Days on Brando’s Island, by Lawrence Grobel

• 22 (tie). The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies

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By Vito Russo
1981 • Harper & Row • Gender/Race/Sexuality
55 votes
Russo, a film critic and gay activist, adapted his lecture about film depictions of gays and lesbians — as objects of ridicule or fear who almost always wound up dead — into a trailblazing book. Shortly before dying of AIDS he said, “I know that after I’m dead my book is going to be on a shelf someplace and that some sixteen-year-old kid who’s going to be a gay activist will read my work and carry the ball from there.” Read it here.
Related reading: Pre-Code Hollywood: Sex, Immorality and Insurrection in American Cinema, 1930-1934, by Thomas Doherty

• 20 (tie). Goldwyn: A Biography

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By A. Scott Berg
1989 • Alfred A. Knopf • Biography
56 votes
Offered unprecedented archival access by Samuel Goldwyn Jr., Berg spent nine years reading everything and interviewing everyone (Wyler! Hepburn! Olivier!) associated with the man who was the top independent producer during Hollywood’s golden age. The story of his journey from Schmuel Gelbfisz in Poland to Oscar winner shows that those who underestimated him because of his famous ‘Goldwynisms’ were sorely mistaken. Read it here.
Related reading: Lion of Hollywood: The Life and Legend of Louis B. Mayer, by Scott Eyman

• 20 (tie). Final Cut: Dreams and Disaster in the Making of Heaven’s Gate

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By Steven Bach
1985 • William Morrow and Company • Business
56 votes
Indecent Exposure [#29] showed that the public had an appetite for stories about the business of film, so, at the urging of William Goldman, Bach, a United Artists exec, kept notes during the making of UA’s Heaven’s Gate, Michael Cimino’s first pic after The Deer Hunter, when he was at his most arrogant and indulged. The film became one of the biggest bombs in Hollywood history and resulted in the sale of the studio — and this book. Read it here.
Related reading: Final Cut: The Making and Breaking of a Film, by Paul Sylbert

• 19. Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide [annually updated]

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By Leonard Maltin
1969 • Signet Books • Criticism/Theory/Essay
57 votes
On the basis of impressive fanzines he’d been writing, Maltin was contracted to write the first edition of this collection of short reviews — which included then hard-to-find information like runtimes — when he was just 17. It began with 8,000 entries and was initially updated every few years, then annually after its amiable author became the on-air critic for Entertainment Tonight in 1982, until the internet killed it off in 2014. Read it here.
Related reading: The Film Encyclopedia, by Ephraim Katz

• 18. Hollywood Babylon

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By Kenneth Anger
1959 • J.J. Pauvert • Potpourri
58 votes
Before supermarket tabloids and TMZ, celebrity gossip was harder to come by, hence the popularity of this chronicle of celeb affairs, murders and suicides, which the New York Times said was “without one single redeeming merit.” Penned by an underground filmmaker, it became a bestseller, spawned a sequel and has been largely debunked (no, Clara Bow didn’t sleep with the entire USC football team and Jayne Mansfield wasn’t decapitated). Read it here.
Related reading: Full Service: My Adventures in Hollywood and the Secret Sex Lives of the Stars, by Scotty Bowers with Lionel Friedberg

• 17. The Genius of the System: Hollywood Filmmaking in the Studio Era

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By Thomas Schatz
1988 • Pantheon • History
59 votes
A rebuttal of sorts to the auteur theory, this deeply researched book lays out the argument that, at least during Hollywood’s Golden Age, films were the product of no individual, but rather of studios with military-like hierarchies and units. He presents compelling case studies from the MGM, Selznick International, Universal and Warner Bros. studios. Read it here.
Related reading: The Hollywood Studios: House Style in the Golden Age of the Movies, by Ethan Mordden

• 16. The American Cinema: Directors and Directions, 1929-1968

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By Andrew Sarris
1968 • Dutton • Criticism/Theory/Essay
60 votes
Village Voice critic Sarris had been exposed to the Cahiers du Cinéma crowd’s auteur theory — that the director is a film’s primary author — during a year in Paris and brought it to America with this slim volume. A prized possession of a generation of young stateside cineastes, it forced reevaluations of many filmmakers by separating them into categories like “Pantheon” and “Less Than Meets the Eye,” infuriating Pauline Kael in the process. Read it here.
Related reading: Talking Pictures: Screenwriters in the American Cinema, by Richard Corliss

• 15. Mike Nichols: A Life

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By Mark Harris
2021 • Penguin Press • Biography
61 votes
Harris, who got to know Nichols late in the filmmaker’s life (he died in 2014), received the blessing of Nichols’ family to write about him, which led to people like Meryl Streep, Robert Redford and Elaine May going on the record about him. The book explores the man’s considerable character flaws, while marveling at the enormity of his journey from Germany (he left ahead of the Nazis’ rise) to the top of Broadway and Hollywood. Read it here.
Related reading: Seduced by Mrs. Robinson: How The Graduate Became the Touchstone of a Generation, by Beverly Gray

• 14. From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies

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By Molly Haskell
1974 • New English Library • Gender/Race/Sexuality
67 votes
Haskell, then a film critic at The Village Voice, argues in this book that depictions of female characters were far more complex during Hollywood’s Golden Age than in the years that followed: “Here we are today, with an unparalleled freedom of expression and a record number of women performing, achieving, choosing to fulfill themselves, and we are insulted with the worst — the most abused, neglected and dehumanized — screen heroines in history.” Read it here.
Related reading: The Casting Couch and Other Front Row Seats: Women in Films of the 1970s and 1980s, by Marsha McCreadie

• 13. The Day of the Locust

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By Nathanael West
1939 • Random House • Novel
68 votes
This Depression-set downer about people living on the margins of Hollywood — the town and the business — is regarded as the finest work by West, who began working in Hollywood as a screenwriter in 1933, and who died in a car crash in 1940, at just 37. The L.A. Times called it “the single best-achieved, and most oracular, piece of fiction the city has inspired.” Read it here.
Related reading: Some Time in the Sun: The Hollywood Years of F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Faulkner, Nathanael West, Aldous Huxley and James Agee, by Tom Dardis

• 12. The Parade’s Gone By…

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By Kevin Brownlow
1968 • Alfred A. Knopf • History
74 votes
For this authoritative chronicle of silent cinema, Brownlow, while still in his 20s, tracked down and interviewed stars like Pickford, Keaton and Gish, and key behind-the-scenes contributors like D.W. Griffith’s film editor, to provide insights about that era’s films and filmmaking methods. In 2010, he became the first film preservationist ever awarded an honorary Oscar. Read it here.
Related reading: Silent Movies: The Birth of Film and the Triumph of Movie Culture, by Peter Kobel

• 11. What Makes Sammy Run?

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By Budd Schulberg
1941 • Random House • Novel
75 votes
Schulberg was 27 when he wrote his debut novel, the story of a New York office boy who moves to Hollywood, changes his name to Sammy Glick and claws his way to the top. Industry leaders regarded it as an attack and ostracized its author, who’d later name names before HUAC and then write — and win an Oscar for — his self-defense, On the Waterfront. Read it here.
Related reading: Moving Pictures: Memories of a Hollywood Prince, by Budd Schulberg

• 10. Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood

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By Mark Harris
2008 • Penguin Press • History
77 votes
This first book by Harris, who was an Entertainment Weekly columnist at the time, chronicles an inflection point in Hollywood history through the journeys to the screen and to the Oscars of the five 1967 movies that wound up nominated for best picture, some representing the old Hollywood fighting to hold on (Doctor Dolittle and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner) and others a new one bursting onto the scene (Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate). The New York Times hailed it as a “landmark” achievement. Read it here.
Related reading: The Measure of a Man: A Spiritual Autobiography, by Sidney Poitier

• 8 (tie). Making Movies

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By Sidney Lumet
1995 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
79 votes
“I am sometimes asked if there is ‘one book’ a filmgoer could read to learn more about how movies are made and what to look for while watching them,” Roger Ebert once wrote. “This is that book.” Lumet, who started in live TV before helming films like 12 Angry Men, Dog Day Afternoon and Network, shares the techniques and philosophy that he adopted over the course of his career (“Good style, to me, is unseen style… style that is felt”) and explains why directing, in his view, is “the best job in the world.” Read it here.
Related reading: Chasing the Light: Writing, Directing and Surviving Platoon, Midnight Express, Scarface, Salvador and the Movie Game, by Oliver Stone

• 8 (tie). Elia Kazan: A Life

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By Elia Kazan
1988 • Alfred A. Knopf • Autobiography
79 votes
In this giant tome, one of the great directors of stage (Death of a Salesman and A Streetcar Named Desire) and screen (A Streetcar Named Desire and On the Waterfront), a man equally revered and hated during his lifetime, reflects, in great depth, on the people he worked with, including Marlon Brando and James Dean, and slept with, such as Marilyn Monroe; the decisions that shaped his life and career, like naming names during the McCarthy era; and, as much as he was able, his complicated self. Read it here.
Related reading: Additional Dialogue: Letters of Dalton Trumbo, 1942-1962, by Dalton Trumbo, edited by Helen Manfull

• 7. You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again

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By Julia Phillips
1991 • Random House • Autobiography
80 votes
Look up “tell-all” in the dictionary and you’ll find this rollicking account from a producer of The Sting (for which she became the first woman ever to win the best picture Oscar), Taxi Driver and Close Encounters of the Third Kind who then became a cokehead and alcoholic, squandered her fortune and, facing financial ruin, decided to dish on the people at the center of the New Hollywood, including herself. She was drugged out of her mind during her Oscar acceptance speech, missed her mom’s funeral, and the list goes on. The book, which one producer described as “the longest suicide note in history,” spent 13 weeks atop the New York Times bestseller list. Read it here.
Related reading: Monster: Living Off the Big Screen, by John Gregory Dunne

• 6. An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood

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By Neal Gabler
1988 • Crown • History
81 votes
One of showbiz’s greatest chroniclers, in his first book (he later wrote outstanding biographies of Disney, Winchell and Streisand), addresses the familiar claims that “the Jews run Hollywood” by explaining how Eastern European immigrants like Cohn, Fox, Laemmle, Mayer, Warner, Thalberg, Zukor and the Warner brothers came to the business at a time when it wasn’t fashionable, tried to assimilate and, “by creating their idealized America on the screen … reinvented the country in the image of their fiction.” Read it here.
Related reading: Entertaining America: Jews, Movies, and Broadcasting, by J. Hoberman & Jeffrey Shandler

• 5. I Lost It at the Movies

Image Credit: Courtesy Photo
By Pauline Kael
1965 • Little, Brown and Company • Criticism/Theory/Essay
86 votes
The first of many volumes by arguably the most well-known film critic of all time, it’s comprised of reviews and essays that she wrote between 1954 (the year after she first reviewed a film) and 1965 (before she began writing for The New Yorker and became a household name). Her famous contrarian streak was already evident in her withering takedown of West Side Story. Richard Schickel, reviewing the book — which went on the become a bestseller — in The New York Times, wrote, “Miss Kael may have lost something at the movies, but in her book we have found something — the critic the movies have deserved and needed for so long.” Read it here.
Related reading: Reeling: Film Writings, 1972-1975, by Pauline Kael

• 4. The Kid Stays in the Picture

Image Credit: Courtesy Photo
By Robert Evans
1994 • Hyperion • Autobiography
123 votes
Against all odds, a 64-year-old who was widely regarded as a has-been became a folk hero after the publication of this endlessly quotable memoir of an only-in-Hollywood life (and the audio-cassette and documentary versions of it that followed). Evans dishes on his rise from women’s clothing salesman to bit actor defended by Darryl F. Zanuck against people who wanted him out of a movie (hence the title of his book and his fascination with moguldom) to a Hollywood producer and studio chief married to the biggest movie star of the day — followed by a fall and a rise again. Is it all true? You bet your ass it isn’t. But is it irresistible? You’re goddamn right it is. Read it here.
Related reading: When I Stop Talking, You’ll Know I’m Dead: Useful Stories From a Persuasive Man, by Jerry Weintraub with Rich Cohen

• 3. Adventures in the Screen Trade: A Personal View of Hollywood and Screenwriting

Image Credit: Courtesy Photo
By William Goldman
1983 • Warner Books • How To
139 votes
One of the most respected and highly paid screenwriters in Hollywood history, who was best known for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, All the President’s Men, Marathon Man and The Princess Bride, candidly explains how the business works, discusses obstacles that he encountered during his career and illustrates how a screenplay comes together. Even 40 years after its publication, the book remains famous for its admonishment about the industry’s ability to predict box office success, and most other things: “Nobody knows anything.” Read it here.
Related reading: Which Lie Did I Tell?: More Adventures in the Screen Trade, by William Goldman

• 2. Easy Riders, Raging Bulls: How the Sex-Drugs-and-Rock ’n’ Roll Generation Saved Hollywood

By Peter Biskind
1998 • Simon & Schuster • History
140 votes
_Premiere_’s former editor spent six years examining under the microscope the “New Hollywood” — which he defined as spanning Bonnie and Clyde (1967) through Raging Bull (1980) — by speaking with most of the key figures who had been a part of it decades earlier and survived to tell the tale, or as much of it as they could remember after considerable consumption of drink and drugs. It’s packed with juicy stories but not with citations, so its veracity has been questioned. (Steven Spielberg told Roger Ebert, “Every single word in that book about me is either erroneous or a lie.”) But the book — which spawned a 2003 documentary — is impossible to put down. Read it here.
Related reading: The Movie Brats: How the Film Generation Took over Hollywood, by Lynda Myles & Michael Pye

• 1. Hitchcock [aka _Hitchcock/Truffaut_]

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By François Truffaut, translated by Helen G. Scott
1967 • Simon & Schuster • Interview/Oral History
143 votes
Often emulated but never equaled, this volume is the product of 50 hours of interviews conducted over a week in August 1962, when a young French master picked the brain of an old British master who was undervalued in America, but who the Frenchman, like other Cahiers du Cinéma alums, regarded as “the greatest director of films in the world.” Truffaut, a former critic, came thoroughly prepared, and coaxed out of Hitch information about his life and films that few if any others could have. At a time when old movies were hard to revisit, the accompanying frame enlargements were particularly appreciated. Kent Jones made a 2015 doc about this book. Read it here.
Related reading: The American Friend, by Serge Toubiana
SAVE THE DATE: You’re invited to an historic gathering at AFI FEST featuring 15 authors of books on this list in conversation with _THR_’s Scott Feinberg. Among those who will be in attendance at 4 p.m. on Oct. 28 inside TCL Chinese Theatre in Hollywood: A. Scott Berg, Cameron Crowe, Nancy Griffin, Aljean Harmetz, Leonard Maltin, Kim Masters, Dennis McDougal, James Andrew Miller, Eddie Muller, John Pierson, George Stevens Jr., Michael Tolkin, Christine Vachon, Mark A. Vieira and Sam Wasson. Admission is free if you RSVP in advance at Fest.AFI.com/GreatestFilmBooks.
A version of this story first appeared in the Oct. 11 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.