Author: Humphrey Carpenter Publisher: Faber & Faber ISBN: 9780571248322 Category : Languages : en Pages : 700
Book Description
Dennis Potter's death in 1994 deprived British television of its most controversial figure. Potter was a prolific writer of genius. Yet while his subversive television plays, such as Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective, scandalized and delighted the nation, they also made him the butt of the tabloids, who nicknamed him 'Dirty Den' for his 1989 serial Blackeyes. Humphrey Carpenter, acclaimed biographer of Tolkien, Auden, Pound, Britten and Robert Runcie, interviewed everyone who came close to Potter, and had exclusive access to Potter's archives, including the many unmade television and film scripts. Carpenter portrays a very different Potter from the aggressive public image: a deeply shy and reclusive man, who was psychologically as well as physically scarred by the illness which struck him down at the age of twenty-six. Potter was a man with a vast interest in sex but also a terrible loathing of it, thanks to an appalling experience he suffered in childhood. Potter was a man much gossiped about. Carpenter's remarkable biography establishes the extraordinary truth behind the rumours; describes Potter's strange, obsessive relationships with women such as Gina Bellman, who played Blackeyes; and gives a vivid portrait of the backstage dramas and fights behind Potter's screen triumphs. 'What is valuable about this book is that it reveals Potter's real private life, which barely features in his plays ... A wonderfully vivid portrait of the man: his generosity and cruelty, his coarseness and tenderness, and the thwarted sexual yearning that underlay everything.' Lynn Barber, Daily Telegraph
Author: Dennis Potter Publisher: ISBN: 9780571174362 Category : Authors, English Languages : en Pages : 84
Book Description
Contains the interview between Dennis Potter and Melvyn Bragg conducted on 5 April 1994 on Channel 4 television. Potter knew he had only a few weeks to live so the discussion is of great poignancy and power. Their conversation records Potter's honest dissection of his life and work. This book also contains Potter's celebrated James MacTaggart Memorial Lecture at the Edinburgh Film Festival in 1993 and an earlier BBC2 television interview.
Author: W. Stephen Gilbert Publisher: ABRAMS ISBN: 1468305611 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 524
Book Description
The first critical biography of the innovative television writer whose off-kilter creations helped spark the Golden Age of modern television. TV writer Dennis Potter is widely credited with revolutionizing television. The innovative shows he created for the BBC, including The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven, trailblazed new paths for genre-bending entertainment and demonstrated the creative possibilities of episodic television. Potter also adapted both of those shows into critically acclaimed major motion pictures: Pennies from Heaven starring Steve Martin, and The Singing Detective starring Robert Downey Jr. In The Life and Work of Dennis Potter, W. Stephen Gilbert analyzes Potter’s impressive body of work, emphasizing the dramatic interplay between his life and the medium he loved. At the age of twenty-four, Potter was diagnosed with psoriatic arthopathy, a rare debilitating skin disease whose horrors he portrayed with biting black humor through his alter ego, the character Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective. Gilber traces Potter’s career from its beginnings to his astonishing final interview to Melvyn Bragg, weeks before his death. Unforgettable for its honesty about life, work, and dying, the result was yet another gripping piece of television—and quintessential Dennis Potter. “[T]he late dramatist’s influence can be seen in many places, from Twin Peaks to Mrs. Brown’s Boys.” —The Guardian “Gilbert recalls the lacerating wit, passionate intelligence, and courage behind the television playwright responsible for The Singing Detective and Pennies from Heaven.” —Vanity Fair
Author: Dennis Potter Publisher: Random House Incorporated ISBN: 9780571145904 Category : Detective and mystery television programs Languages : en Pages : 249
Book Description
The narrative counterpoints life in a hospital ward of a writer crippled by a horrific skin disease with the plot of his atmosperic thriller to the point where fantasy and reality seem to change places.
Author: Dennis Potter Publisher: ISBN: 9780571170463 Category : Dramatists, English Languages : en Pages : 171
Book Description
If one writer embodies the unique character of British television drama, it is Dennis Potter. Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective amply demonstrate how far he has pushed the frontiers of television drama. In the course of this book, British television's pre-eminent playwright - latterly a novelist and film-maker - talks with passionate erudition, disarming candour and acerbic wit about the early influences that shaped him and led to his pioneering use of non-naturalism to his self-reflexive subversion of film and TV cliches, his controversial approach to sex, politics, religion and the double-edged puritanism of the English condition. The book presents a remarkable portrait of a man for whom writing is, first and foremost, a vocation.
Author: Dennis Potter Publisher: ISBN: 9780571174782 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 392
Book Description
Cold Lazarus is set 400 years in the future. Feeld's cryogenically preserved head is being commercially exploited. An American media tycoon realizes the astronomical ratings potential of a TV show in which the 'real' twentieth-century story of Daniel Feeld's life, via his chemically induced memories, can be fed to millions of viewers.
Author: Brett Martin Publisher: Penguin ISBN: 0143125699 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 337
Book Description
The 10th anniversary edition, now with a new preface by the author "A wonderfully smart, lively, and culturally astute survey." - The New York Times Book Review "Grand entertainment...fascinating for anyone curious about the perplexing miracles of how great television comes to be." - The Wall Street Journal "I love this book...It's the kind of thing I wish I'd been able to read in film school, back before such books existed." - Vince Gilligan, creator of Breaking Bad and co-creator of Better Call Saul In the late 1990s and early 2000s, the landscape of television began an unprecedented transformation. While the networks continued to chase the lowest common denominator, a wave of new shows on cable channels dramatically stretched television’s narrative inventiveness, emotional resonance, and creative ambition. Combining deep reportage with critical analysis and historical context, Brett Martin recounts the rise and inner workings of this artistic watershed - a golden age of TV that continues to transform America's cultural landscape. Difficult Men features extensive interviews with all the major players - including David Chase (The Sopranos), David Simon and Ed Burns (The Wire), David Milch (NYPD Blue, Deadwood), Alan Ball (Six Feet Under), and Vince Gilligan (Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul) - and reveals how television became a truly significant and influential part of our culture.
Author: Dennis Potter Publisher: ISBN: 9780571152025 Category : Models (Persons) Languages : en Pages : 184
Book Description
The elderly half-forgotten author Maurice Kingsley uses his beautiful fashion model niece Jessica's life as a model for a book, embroidering it with his own quirky insights into a surprise best-seller, a modern parable for a wasted life that becomes a candidate for the Booker Prize.
Author: Martin Crowley Publisher: Rodopi ISBN: 9789042014329 Category : Authors Languages : en Pages : 232
Book Description
This volume presents a series of essays which consider the ways in which the death scenes of different writers have inflected the reception of their work. Figures and topics addressed include: Molière, Mayakovsky, Pasolini, Proust, Dennis Potter, Foucault; the death mask, the literary encomium and the place of the critic in relation to this scene. Of interest to all those involved in literary studies and critical theory, this collection reveals the moment of death as that which binds life and work together - a relation which, here, is as urgent as it is impossible.
Author: Humphrey Carpenter
Author: Dennis Potter
Author: W. Stephen Gilbert
Author: W. Stephen Gilbert
Author: Dennis Potter
Author: Dennis Potter
Author: Dennis Potter
Author: Brett Martin
Author: Dennis Potter
Author: Martin Crowley