Giant
George Stevens, a Life on Film
Marilyn Ann Moss
Terrace Books
“Moss’s Giant represents the kind of scholarship that is enriched by access
to special collections and the kind of criticism that no mere poring over
memos, letters, and balance sheets can achieve.”
—Film Quarterly
George Stevens directed such popular and significant films as Shane, Giant, A Place in the Sun, and The Diary of Anne Frank. He was the first to pair Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy on film in Woman of the Year. Through the study of Stevens’s life and his production history, Marilyn Ann Moss also presents a glimpse of the workings of the classic Hollywood studio system in its glory days from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Moss documents Stevens’s role as a powerful director who often had to battle
the heads of major studios to get his films made his way. She traces the four
decades Stevens was a major Hollywood player and icon, from his earliest days at
the Hal Roach Studios—where he learned to be a cameraman, writer, and director
for Laurel and Hardy features—up to when his films made millions at the box
office and were graced by actors such as Elizabeth Taylor, James Dean, Alan Ladd,
and Montgomery Clift.
Marilyn Ann Moss is a film historian and a scholar of literature. A television
critic for The Hollywood Reporter, she lives in Los Angeles.
Praise
“Biographer Marilyn Ann Moss . . . shows how Stevens was reborn after the harrowing experience of World War II. The director of light comedies returned with a darker picture of human nature and serious intentions as an artist.”
—Milwaukee Shepherd Express
“Moss brings a deep sympathy and understanding to her portrait of this sensitive, enigmatic artist whose work speaks so richly to us about American life. She makes fertile use of Stevens’s voluminous papers to help illuminate his personality and working methods, while offering fresh and original interpretations of his film, appreciating their complexities as no one has done before.”
—Joseph McBride, author of Searching for John Ford
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Larger images
Paperback, August 2015
LC: 2004007797 PN
340 pp. 6 x 9
20 b/w photos
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