George Cukor: Interviews (Conversations With Filmmakers Series) (Paperback)

~ Robert Emmet Long (Editor) "GEORGE CUKOR: I'm touched and slightly amused, but really touched, at the kind of attention that is being paid to my work by a number..." (more)
Key Phrases: dialogue director, accomplished actress, George Cukor, Katharine Hepburn, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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Cukor thrived in the Hollywood studio system, creating some of the most beloved movies of the '30s and '40s, including The Philadelphia Story and Adam's Rib. He continued making films into the '80s, but during most of his last three decades, he just tried to recapture his glory days. These interviews come from that period and possess a retrospective, valedictory feeling. Cukor provides insight on his screenwriters, cinematographers, and other collaborators, but his casts get the most attention. After all, "I achieved practically all my screen effects through actors and actresses," he says. In the latest interviews, he grows increasingly curmudgeonly, bemoaning the increased sexual freedom and other changes in Hollywood. It is ironic, then, that the last of these 21 interviews was conducted by the gay magazine The Advocate only months before his death. In it Cukor touches for the first time upon his homosexuality, well known within the industry but covert outside of it. Gordon Flagg
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

Review

"What more can we say? Except, perhaps, to reprint Katherine Hepburn's words: "The only really important thing I have to say about George Cukor is that all other directors I have worked with starred themselves... George 'starred' the actor. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 191 pages
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi; illustrated edition edition (October 24, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1578063876
• ISBN-13: 978-1578063871
• Product Dimensions: 8.8 x 5.8 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,157,299 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful multifaceted portrait of Cukor through interviews, February 14, 2008

By	Gary Morris (Portland, OR USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

George Cukor is another Hollywood director with a reputation for claiming the status of craftsman, not artist, for himself, but he's far more forthcoming than Ford in the George Cukor Interviews book, edited by Robert Emmet Long. If Ford's pose was curmudgeonly and ultimately bitter, Cukor's is witty, self-deprecating, and pragmatic. Told of Cahiers du Cinema's analyses of his films, he says "I'm very amused reading these very nice articles about my work." Asked about his firing from Gone with the Wind, he replies, "I have never wasted time regretting setbacks of this kind; I am too much a fatalist, or perhaps just too conceited for that. I have always felt that if I couldn't make one picture I would just make another." Cukor proves himself an incisive judge of other people's work. He sardonically laments Lawrence of Arabia's narrative slackness: "I didn't know what their point was. It was lost in all those surging masses." Generally he's as respectful of actors in his comments as he is in his films, though he bristled at being called a "woman's director." "That one stuck with me regardless of my other attributes. And I, supine fool that I was, said `Yes, yes, I am.' Now that I'm older, I say `What the hell do you mean?'" Asked what drives him, he replies, "the irrepressible urge to tell people what to do." Included in both the Ford and Cukor volumes are a chronology, a filmography, an index, and a photo gallery.