PERHAPS A GIFT VOUCHER FOR MUM?: MOTHER'S DAY
J. J. Murphy is professor of film and Hamel Family Distinguished Chair in Communication Arts at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He is the author of Me and You and Memento and Fargo: How Independent Screenplays Work (2007) and The Black Hole of the Camera: The Films of Andy Warhol (2012).
J. J. Murphy's love and passion for U.S. indie cinema is evident on every page. His in-depth dissection and analysis of trends in the cinematic arts show us that the medium is still evolving, and different approaches to screenwriting, directing, and producing films are what keep it alive.--Sean Baker, director of The Florida Project Rewriting Indie Cinema demonstrates that independent US films since the 1950s have explored many paths between pure improvisation and the script-based pre-production of the classical Hollywood cinema. Murphy wears his erudition lightly, and the continuities and distinctions that he establishes between methods of improvisation in cinema and theatre are lucid, convincing, and well-informed, without the author ever over-theorizing for the sake of it.--Steven Price, author of The Screenplay: Authorship, Theory and Criticism Rewriting Indie Cinema exemplifies one of the best things cinema scholarship can do: it demonstrates an important continuity within a wide range of interesting films while providing the general film-interested reader as well as the academic film historian with a new list of accomplished filmmakers to explore. Murphy is the person to mine the considerable territory between comparatively big-budget indie filmmaking based on screenplays and the free-form experimental filmmaking of Warhol.--Scott MacDonald, author of Avant-Doc: Intersections of Documentary and Avant-Garde Cinema
