Running The Show

Whether it's a crew of two hundred shooting a cast of thousands on horseback, or a crew of twelve filming one person in a room, each and every successful movie production requires a strong First Assistant Director (AD) at its helm. In this new and updated edition, veteran First AD Liz Gill walks you through the entire filmmaking process through the perspective of the First AD, from pre-production, shoot, wrap, and everything in between. This book provides invaluable insight into working as a First Assistant Director, featuring tricks-of-the-trade for breaking down a script, creating a schedule and organizing test shoots, alongside how to use turnaround time, weather cover, split days, overtime and continuous days to balance a challenging schedule and get the most from the cast, crew and the shoot. This new edition has been fully updated and expanded throughout to provide up-to-date coverage on new equipment and software, health and safety considerations and the implications of VFX. This is the essential guide to becoming a successful First Assistant Director, ideal for professional and aspiring AD’s seeking to further their career, students of directing and production looking to gain a better understanding of how this department works and anyone interested in film and TV production. The accompanying eResources provide an expanded selection of sample call sheets, report templates, checklists, and other useful documents.

'May God forgive us for our sorry deeds and for our glorious intentions'. So wrote Hugh Clifford, in his best selling novel, Saleh, written while he was acting governor of Trinidad, in 1904.

Dick DeVenzio was an All-American basketball player at Ambridge High School in Pennsylvania and later at Duke University. After graduating, Dick played and coached professional basketball in Europe and South America and founded the now nationally acclaimed Point Guard College. Considered a basketball genius and a gifted writer, Dick has inspired and influenced countless coaches and athletes. He died in 2001 at age 52.

Running the Show takes you inside building a show from the ground up and what a showrunner's life looks like in Hollywood. This unique job covers aspects from the creative to the managerial and everything in between. Seasoned showrunner Jeffrey Melvoin shares his fascinating insider's perspective on how to call the shots and make the final decisions when choosing and writing scripts, hiring staff, casting, making the budget, and juggling schedules. Along with the managerial responsibilities that keep the show afloat, they are also the visionary for the series and the characters. Melvoin describes how to confidently communicate abstract ideas so they can become the show's reality. Running the Show reveals the ethical side of show running and writing with humor, integrity, and wisdom. As a writer/producer/showrunner, Jeffrey Melvoin has worked on over a dozen series including Designated Survivor and Killing Eve. He has taught courses at USC, UCLA, and Harvard, led workshops at the Sundance Institute and the American Film Institute, and chaired the Writers Guild of America's Showrunner Training Program. He lives in Los Angeles, CA.

Avi Steinberg is stumped. After defecting from yeshiva to attend Harvard, he has nothing but a senior thesis on Bugs Bunny to show for himself. While his friends and classmates advance in the world, Steinberg remains stuck at a crossroads, his “romantic” existence as a freelance obituary writer no longer cutting it. Seeking direction (and dental insurance) Steinberg takes a job running the library counter at a Boston prison. He is quickly drawn into the community of outcasts that forms among his bookshelves—an assortment of quirky regulars, including con men, pimps, minor prophets, even ghosts—all searching for the perfect book and a connection to the outside world. Steinberg recounts their daily dramas with heartbreak and humor in this one-of-a-kind memoir—a piercing exploration of prison culture and an entertaining tale of one young man’s earnest attempt to find his place in the world.

Collected from a truly expansive exploration of television’s most creative minds, Showrunners is an insider’s guide to creating and maintaining a hit show in today’s golden age of television. The official companion to the documentary Showrunners, this highly informative book features exclusive interviews with such acclaimed and popular showrunners as Joss Whedon, Damon Lindelof, Ronald D.Moore, Terence Winter, Bill Prady, Shawn Ryan, David Shore, and Jane Espenson.

A science writer and recreational runner explores the science behind popularly held beliefs about shoes, injuries, nutrition, "runner's high," and more. Conventional wisdom about running is passed down like folklore (and sometimes contradicts itself): the right kind of shoe prevents injury--or running barefoot, like our prehistoric ancestors, is best; eat a high-fat diet--and also carbo load before a race; running cures depression--but it might be addictive; running can save your life--although it can also destroy your knee cartilage. Often it's hard to know what to believe. In Running Smart, Mariska van Sprundel, a science journalist and recreational runner who has had her fair share of injuries, sets out to explore the science behind such claims. In her quest, van Sprundel reviews the latest developments in sports science, consults with a variety of experts, and visits a sports lab to have her running technique analyzed. She learns, among other things, that according to evolutionary biology, humans are perfectly adapted to running long distances (even if our hunter-gatherer forebears suffered plenty of injuries); that running sets off a shockwave that spreads from foot to head, which may or may not be absorbed by cushioned shoes; and that a good sports bra controls the ping pong-like movements of a female runner's breasts. She explains how the body burns fuel, the best foods to eat before and after running, and what might cause "runner's high." More than fifty million Americans are runners (and a slight majority of them are women). This engaging and enlightening book will help both novice and seasoned runners run their smartest.

Welcome to America in 2025 when the best men don't run for president. They run for thier lives--in the ultimate death game.

From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

Peter Sagal, the host of NPR’s Wait Wait...Don’t Tell Me! and a popular columnist for Runner’s World, shares “commentary and reflection about running with a deeply felt personal story, this book is winning, smart, honest, and affecting. Whether you are a runner or not, it will move you” (Susan Orlean). On the verge of turning forty, Peter Sagal—brainiac Harvard grad, short bald Jew with a disposition towards heft, and a sedentary star of public radio—started running seriously. And much to his own surprise, he kept going, faster and further, running fourteen marathons and logging tens of thousands of miles on roads, sidewalks, paths, and trails all over the United States and the world, including the 2013 Boston Marathon, where he crossed the finish line moments before the bombings. In The Incomplete Book of Running, Sagal reflects on the trails, tracks, and routes he’s traveled, from the humorous absurdity of running charity races in his underwear—in St. Louis, in February—or attempting to “quiet his colon” on runs around his neighborhood—to the experience of running as a guide to visually impaired runners, and the triumphant post-bombing running of the Boston Marathon in 2014. With humor and humanity, Sagal also writes about the emotional experience of running, body image, the similarities between endurance sports and sadomasochism, the legacy of running as passed down from parent to child, and the odd but extraordinary bonds created between strangers and friends. The result is “a brilliant book about running…What Peter runs toward is strength, understanding, endurance, acceptance, faith, hope, and charity” (P.J. O’Rourke).