"What a strange movie. I had been hearing about this film for years and couldn’t ever find a way to see it, but it finally played at the Hollywood Theatre in Portland. Those film stocks don’t exist anymore—this is 16 mm at its best, and it looks gorgeous. Les Blank was shooting with all this natural light, and it makes for such a great portrait of the South at a certain moment in time with a bunch of total weirdos!"

"Between 1971 and 1975, Robert Altman could do no wrong, and Nashville is the culmination of that streak. There had rarely been before him in Hollywood such a sense of liberty, of independence, of genuine spontaneity. The long takes, the tracking shots, the space he gives actors, the way he lets them overlap, the looseness and the depth of the narratives—it was a breath of fresh air in a usually stuffy and hostile environment. It didn’t last long, though."

"Shakespeare in Love is my next one. It holds up so great. I’ve seen it about 15 times. All these movies are movies that I watch a bunch, and that’s my ultimate test is can I watch them over and over. Shakespeare in Love totally holds up. It is a phenomenal metaphor for Hollywood. That’s what I love about it. It’s probably the best movie about Hollywood ever made, even though it’s not about Hollywood because it’s about writing and financiers and actors, and it just rings so true. And it’s also a movie that I don’t think… I can’t speak for you [to Wernick], but I could never have written it because it very much feels of its time, and I think that’s a particular voice. Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard did it, and it’s just a particular voice that would be incredibly hard to ape, I think. It has probably my favorite shot of all time about love, where it’s just a push in on Joseph Fiennes as he’s looking at Gwyneth Paltrow. It’s a push in on both of them, and just the look on his face and her as the object of his love; it gets me every time. Then, of course, it’s got all that Shakespeare weaved in — Romeo and Juliet, actual lines from the play. There’s a segment right in the middle of the movie where they just do Romeo and Juliet for a montage for about five minutes straight, and it’s showing all these different things, but the words are all Shakespeare, and I love it. I just love it."

"The second non-fiction book by the legendary novelist and screenwriter responsible for such classic films as The Princess Bride (a personal favorite), Marathon Man, All The President’s Men and Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid. Like the prequel, Which Lie Did I Tell includes candid behind-the-scenes stories, a window into the process of how to write good scripts and how The Princess Bride became his first screen credit in nearly nine years. A thoroughly entertaining insider’s look into how Hollywood works."