Filmmakers' Autobiographies

A healthy ego and caustic wit fuel Richard Fleischer’s no-hold-barred “Just Tell Me When To Cry”, his highly spirited autobiography published in 1993. He retired five years earlier after a prolific career started in 1946 and an impressive 47 films to his name.

By 1995, Samuel Fuller was back in his Hollywood Hills house at 7628 Woodrow Wilson Drive, after a 13-year self-imposed exile in Paris. At 83, he had just survived a debilitating stroke.

By 1995, Samuel Fuller was back in his Hollywood Hills house at 7628 Woodrow Wilson Drive, after a 13-year self-imposed exile in Paris. At 83, he had just survived a debilitating stroke.

At the mention of Joe Pasternak, only the most hardcore cinephiles will probably recognize the name as one the most prolific producers of Hollywood’s Golden Age, with 105 films to his credit, in a 40-year long career that started in 1929. So, it is a treat to discover “Easy the Hard Way”, his breezy autobiography published in 1956, when he was still very active before retiring from the movie business 12 years later.

What better way to celebrate Federico Fellini’s centennial than reading the appropriately titled “Fellini on Fellini”? Not an autobiography per se, and initially published in 1974, a year after the release of the seminal Amarcord, this slim volume is a random selection of his articles, essays, letters, introspective musings and miscellanies on many topics dating back to 1955. A perfect complement for a different insight into the persona and work of a legendary filmmaker that has been so obsessively analyzed, documented, and scrutinized over the years.

It is very tempting, when opening Josef von Sternberg's autobiography, “Fun in a Chinese Laundry”, to go straight to the pages about Marlene Dietrich. For many cinephiles, their names are forever linked.

“It has been more than sixty years since I came to Hollywood, first to learn how to make films and then to make them myself. I have now made thirty-five of them, some better than others, some prizewinners, other money losers.

“(The) only amazing thing about my career in Hollywood is that I ever had one at all. ”This is the bittersweet confession made by Preston Sturges, midway through his unfinished autobiography, published in 1990, 31 years after his death.

In 1996, ten years before his passing at age 99, Vincent Sherman published his autobiography simply titled 'Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director'. Today, his name might not be remembered as some of his more celebrated colleagues of Hollywood’s Golden Age, but he was, as Oliver Stone rightly called him, “one of the great craftsmen from the old studio system.

In 1916, the Ushigomekan cinema, in Tokyo’s Kagurazaka district, used to play only foreign films. This is where six-year-old Akira Kurosawa remembers seeing “a lot of American action serials, like The Iron Claw, Hurricane Hutch, The Tiger’s Footprints, many others starring William S.