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	Books made into movies, movies made into books, books about movies, the inside story of your favorite TV shows. This is the newsletter for the multimedia fan. your email:

	This intelligent and surprisingly down-to-earth look at the sordid wheeling-and-dealing of today's Tinseltown is penned by two inside players who clearly know from whence they speak, scarily so.
	Stan Schwartz on Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood by Peter Bart and Peter Guber

Of course, there have always been how-to books that cover every aspect of filmmaking from scripting to post-production, but the newer offerings have expanded to reflect the most recent advances of the new digital age. Rick Schmidt's excellent book Feature Filmmaking at Used-Car Prices is a perfect case in point. The first part of the book thoroughly covers all the traditional phases of film production, but its final chapters discuss in impressive detail—not to mention in comprehensible layman's terms—all the finer points of digital shooting and editing.

But here's the thing. As thousands of would-be auteurs furiously proliferate, the formidable gap between filmmaking in its pure form and the impure realities of how Hollywood actually functions (or shall I say, dysfunctions) becomes ever wider. Any fledgling indie-director would do well to commit every word of Schmidt's useful text to memory, but further down on the movie shelf of your local bookstore, you'll find Shoot Out: Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in Hollywood by Peter Bart and Peter Guber. Pick up a copy for an essential and altogether different angle. This intelligent and surprisingly down-to-earth look at the sordid wheeling-and-dealing of today's Tinseltown is penned by two inside players who clearly know from whence they speak, scarily so. It's a tangled tale of producers, directors, writers, actors and lawyers all at each other's throats, where money, power, celebrity and beauty rule all.

Notwithstanding all the "how-to" stuff, would film schools today do better to offer classes in basic Power lunching 101? Advanced Botox 303? Here's a scary thought: maybe now, they do. It has, after all, been a long time since I was in film school.

 
Stan Schwartz is a freelance film and theatre critic based in New York City. He has written for The New York Times, Time Out New York, Filmmaker Magazine and Film Comment. He has written for various websites including IndieWire and NYToday. Stan also spends time in Sweden, where he has written for Dagens Nyheter, Expressen and Teatertidningen about Swedish film and theatre.