Charlie Kaufman and Hollywood's Merry Band of Pranksters, Fabulists and Dreamers: An Excursion Into the American New Wave

The book exceeded my expectations. It's a brilliant overview of a small group of film artists that may or may not be connected through their language of film. The author gives just the right amount of historical background, delving shortly and poignantly into 60's French cinema and 70's New Hollywood to argue why exactly the re-emergence of semi-independent cinema in the US can rightly be called a New Wave. The selection of films he focusses on is dead-on. In the limited space of the book he grabs the knowledgeable reader with just the right amount of trivia, background information and analysis. Fervently he argues for the quality of certain overlooked films, mainly Wes Anderson's, all the while providing the reader with a new understanding for beloved modern classics. Filmmakers mainly dealt with in this book are Richard Linklater, David O. Russell, Wes Anderson, Spike Jonze, Sofia Coppola, Michel Gondry and of course Charlie Kaufman, with smaller parts reserved for the likes of Roman Coppola, Richard Kelly, Steven Soderbergh and PT Anderson. The latter are examined each through one of the movies, while the former group gets both an analysis of their bibliographic and filmographic resumé as well as detailed and individual run-downs of their major cinematic achievements. Only downside for me was that this extraordinarily entertaining read comes at only 170 pages. But with extensive lists of resources about related books and movies, I will certainly re-visit this book in the future. If you're interested in the workings of cinema and have a soft spot for some of the aforementioned filmmakers, you owe it to yourself to get this book.