Backstory

Backstory 3
Interviews with Screenwriters of the 1960s

Pat McGilligan

Backstory began as a single volume devoted to the life stories, behind-the-scenes reminiscences, craft methodology, and professional point of view of the best screenwriters of the once-upon-a-time Golden Age of Hollywood. It has evolved into a running series, a stateside Paris Review devoted to screen-writers.

The first Backstory (1986) presented a collection of transcribed interviews with illustrious scriptwriters who began their careers and earned their reputations during the era of early talkies and the heyday of the 1930s. Backstory 2 (1991) grouped together interviews with the next generation of Hollywood writers who rose to prominence in the studio system of the 1940s and 1950s.

Backstory 3 continues the chronology with close-ups of expert scenarists who reigned in their field during one of Hollywood's rockiest periods, the decade of the 1960s, when the studios were undergoing a process of collapse and renovation, when turmoil in the world meant extreme changes in narrative style and screen values, when events in Hollywood, as elsewhere, sometimes seemed a confusing, delirious stampede. Screenwriters were as ever part of and integral to what was happening on- and offscreen.
The word backstory is a tried-and-true screenwriter's expression for what happens in the plot of a movie before the story on the screen unfolds. In the oral tradition of this series, the designated subjects speak into a whirring tape recorder (or, in one case, a fax machine served as the medium), answering questions about themselves, their scripts and film credits, their modus operandi, and life and activities in the motion picture capital. The result is part biography, part historical record, part anecdotage, and part instructional seminar.

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