The Coen Brothers, Second Edition

Front Cover
Arcade, 2016 M01 5 - 360 pages
Brought completely up to date, this insightful biography remains "a must for any self-respecting Coen fan" (Screentrade).

This fully updated edition of the first biography of the Coen Brothers includes their complete work so far, from Blood Simple to Inside Llewyn Davis (2013), with a reassessment of their remarkable career as a whole. Joel and Ethan Coen have pulled off the ultimate balancing act. Despite having their movies financed and distributed by major studios, they have managed to remain true independents, rejecting commercial clichés and never giving up on their own fiercely idiosyncratic vision. While doing so, they have established themselves among the world's leading filmmakers.

From their startling debut, Blood Simple (1984), all of their movies reveal a distinctive stamp: a flamboyant visual style, richly conceived characters, crisp dialogue, and brilliant casting. They have revitalized old Hollywood genres such as noir, screwball, and the western, giving them a contemporary sensibility. In this biography, Ronald Bergan traces the brothers' Jewish roots, their beginnings as film geeks in suburban Minneapolis, their battle to get their first feature made and released, through their early features and the movies of their maturity. He gives blow-by-blow accounts of the making of each movie. New chapters cover all those released since O Brother, Where Art Thou? (2000), with which the first edition of this book ended.

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About the author (2016)

Ronald Bergan, film historian, critics, and lecturer, is a regular contributor to the Guardian. The author of numerous film biographies, including Jean Renoir, Sergei Eisenstein, and Katharine Hepburn, all published by Arcade, he held the chair in film at Florida International University in Miami and lectured at the Sorbonne, the British Institute in Paris, and the University of Lille. He now lives in Prague, where he teaches at the famed FAMU film school.

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