Rarely does a book fully live up to the promise of its title, but Lumet’s memoir-cum-manual tells us in vivid and splendid detail how he does what he does.

The emblematic figure among the New York TV directors who made the journey to Hollywood in the 1950s, Frankenheimer refined his technique in live broadcasts before millions of viewers.

As the son of theatrical tent-show performers, former DGA president George Stevens truly grew up with Hollywood.

Former DGA president Delbert Mann was the first of the generation of Television directors to make a successful trek West to Hollywood.

The undisputed master of three genres—film noir, psychological Westerns, and big-budget historical epic—Mann accumulated a majestic body of work.

A landmark assessment of the independent sector of American filmmaking in the postwar decades, a teeming bestiary of risk takers, gore pioneers, and still-underrated auteurs.

Kazan’s epic account of the century and his life is as magnificent an achievement as many of his plays and movies, and possibly the best autobiography ever written by a movie director.

Renowned primarily for detonating the 1970s Hollywood Renaissance with 1967’s Bonnie and Clyde, Penn’s life was full of achievements no less potent and pace-setting.

As this Taschen volume makes clear, the Master of Suspense remains appealing to cineastes young and old, with 50-plus features underscoring his timeless ingenuity.

Author Gwenda Young makes the case that from the silent era to the golden age, Clarence Brown deserves a place among the giants.

Director Ernst Lubitsch, who was idolized by Wilder and Welles, is brought into sharp focus.

The making of George Stevens' Texas-sized epic is recounted in Don Graham's meticulously chronicled book.

As the newly scaled down yet no less comprehensive Taschen book Stanley Kubrick’s Napoleon: The Greatest Movie Never Made demonstrates, Kubrick was nothing if not a completist.