In Conversations with Wilder , Hollywood's legendary and famously elusive director Billy Wilder agrees for the first time to talk extensively about his life and work.
Here, in an extraordinary book with more than 650 black-and-white photographs -- including film posters, stills, grabs, and never-before-seen pictures from Wilder's own collection -- the ninety-three-year-old icon talks to Cameron Crowe, one of today's best-known writer-directors, about thirty years at the very heart of Hollywood, and about screenwriting and camera work, set design and stars, his peers and their movies, the studio system and films today. In his distinct voice we hear Wilder's inside view on his collaborations with such stars as Barbara Stanwyck, Gary Cooper, Marilyn Monroe, Jack Lemmon, Tony Curtis, William Holden, Audrey Hepburn, and Greta Garbo (he was a writer at MGM during the making of Ninotchka . Here are Wilder's sharp and funny behind-the-scenes stories about the making of A Foreign Affair, Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Love in the Afternoon, Some Like It Hot, The Apartment , and Ace in the Hole , among many others. Wilder is ever mysterious, but Crowe gets him to speak candidly on Stanwyck: "She knew the script, everybody's lines, never a fault, never a mistake"; on Cary Grant: "I had Cary Grant in mind for four of my pictures . . . slipped through my net every time"; on the "Lubitsch Touch": "It was the elegant use of the super-joke." Wilder also remembers his early years in Vienna, working as a journalist in Berlin, rooming with Peter Lorre at the Chateau Marmont -- always with the same dry wit, tough-minded romanticism, and elegance that are the hallmarks of Wilder's films. This book is a classic of Hollywood history and lore.

The long-awaited memoir by Cameron Crowe--one of America's most iconic journalists and filmmakers--revealing his formative years in rock and roll and bringing to life stories that shaped a generation, in the bestselling tradition of Patti Smith's Just Kids. If you've seen Almost Famous, you may think you know this story, but you don't. 'Cameron has written a book that feels like music, an intimate souvenir, like a song you can't stop listening to' STEVIE NICKS 'His clarity of observation and memory, his choice words, his people - Cameron Crowe, wonderfully, continues to serve us' WES ANDERSON 'If you're a lover of music, or you've ever been in love, then you have something to say. Cameron has always been someone who knows just how to say it' HARRY STYLES Cameron Crowe was an unlikely rock and roll insider. Born in 1957 to parents who strictly banned the genre from their house, he dove headfirst into the world of music. By the time he graduated high school at fifteen, Crowe was already contributing to Rolling Stone magazine. With his parents uneasily convinced, he went on to interview and tour with icons like Led Zeppelin; Lynyrd Skynyrd; Bob Dylan; Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young; and Fleetwood Mac. Crowe spends his teens politely turning down the drugs and turning on his tape recorder. He talks his journalism teacher into giving him class credit for his road trip covering Led Zeppelin's 1975 tour, which lands him - and the band - on the cover of Rolling Stone. He hunkers down with David Bowie as the sequestered genius transforms himself into a new persona: The Thin White Duke. Why did they give him such unprecedented access? 'Because you're young enough to be honest,' Bowie tells him. At its heart, The Uncool is a surprisingly intimate family drama that charts the path that leads Crowe to writing and directing some of the most beloved films of the past forty years. It's a touching and joyful dispatch from a lost world, a chronicle of the real-life events that became Almost Famous and a coming-of-age journey filled with music legends as you've never seen them before. 'A delicious tale of a devotee who worships at the altar of rock and roll ... It's a love letter to fandom, sealed with Cameron's trademark sincerity and heart' MAGGIE ROGERS