Bright Lights Hits Hardcover!

Despite what you've heard, publishing is not dead. (You can't be on life support and still be considered dead, can you?)

But seriously, our good news, as a glance at the pic at left will tell you, is that the first "Bright Lights book" will soon be available: Action! Interviews with Directors from Classical Hollywood to Contemporary Iran (London: Anthem Press, 2009). There was an institutionally priced hardcover issued in March, but the ultra-affordable and shockingly handsome trade paperback is now available for pre-order via Amazon for a mere $18.45, discounted from the list price of $27.95. Release date: July 1, 2009.

Amortized over 370 pages and umpteen-thousand words, $18.45 is a pretty good deal. Especially considering the veritable tidal wave of high-quality verbiage to be found inside, courtesy of Bresson, Truffaut, Fellini, Kiarostami, Caveh Zahedi, Allie Light, Allan Dwan, Melvin and Mario van Peebles, Clint Eastwood, Barbara Kopple, Sirk, Otto Muehl, Robert Wise, Mania Akbari, Michael Haneke, the Brothers Quay — you know, the gang. Some of these interviews appeared in the online Bright Lights, others in the way-gone print edition; still others are brand new. If you need additional inspiration, be aware that the Bresson interview is one of his best, an in-depth discussion that's appeared piecemeal before but here, for the first time, complete and giving quite a picture of ol' Bob. And the Truffaut is his last substantive interview, conducted a mere four months before his untimely death. And that's just for starters!

Jeanine Basinger calls Action! "a practical Ph.D. in what it takes to put a personal vision up on screen, both then and now," and Dave Kehr of the New York Times chimes in that I and my "distinguished collaborators are expert interviewers, deftly guiding conversations from tiny but illuminating details of practice to the highest and brightest flights of interpretation." The book features some of BL's most beloved scribes, including Jerry Kutner, Bert Cardullo, Andrew Grossman, Damon Smith, Dorna Khazeni, Damien Love, Karin Badt, Tony Macklin, and yours truly. Oh, and Jonathan Rosenbaum wrote the foreword!

If you like the idea of featuring this book prominently at whatever locale you now find yourself — hovel, gutter, psych ward — please consider pre-ordering it through Amazon. Get one for yourself and all your many friends. You can pre-order it through this link and we'll get a small percentage of the take:

http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1843313294?ie=UTF8&tag=briligfiljou-20.

For additional details (like the Table of Contents complete with snappy epigraphs), check out our "Action!" page: http://www.brightlightsfilm.com/action.

With thanks for helping me buy that new lederhosen I've been eyeing.

Gary

PS Due to the ever-shifting sands of blogworld, I'll be bugging you with a repost of this announcement about every week or so, until I get those lederhosen!