Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers amplifies the voices of a wide-ranging group of filmmakers whose identities, perspectives, and works don't conform to typical Hollywood standards. Author Gerald Peary, whose experience as a film studies professor, film critic, arts journalist, and director of documentaries culminates in a lifetime of film scholarship, presents a riveting collection of interviews with idiosyncratic directors-including Black, queer, female, and non-Western filmmakers-whose unconventional work is marked by their unique artistic points of view and molded by their social and political consciousness. Beginning in the 1970s and ending at the dawn of the new millennium, the collection includes Peary's talks with more than twenty film pioneers. Prior to Kathryn Bigelow's 2010 win as the first woman to receive an Oscar for best director, Peary interviewed cutting-edge female directors, including Iran's Samira Makhmalbaf (Blackboards, 2000), Poland's Agnieszka Holland (Europa, Europa, 1990), Norway's Liv Ullmann (Sofie, 1992), and America's Roberta Findlay (Snuff, 1975), who is the first female director of pornographic films. While some of the collection's conversations focus on a single film, other interviews are an ambitious discussion of the filmmaker's whole career. Interviews with a disparate range of male filmmakers are also included: Howard Alk (The Murder of Fred Hampton, 1971), Ousmane Sembene (Mandabi, 1968 and Emitai, 1971), Mel Brooks (The Producers, 1967, Young Frankenstein, 1974, and Blazing Saddles, 1974), Gus Van Sant (My Own Private Idaho, 1991, Good Will Hunting, 1997, and Milk, 2008), and John Waters (Pink Flamingos, 1972, Hairspray, 1988, and Pecker, 1998). With contextualizing introductions and insightful questions, Peary reveals the brilliance of these maverick directors and offers readers a lens into the minds of these incredible and engaging artists. In the New Hollywood Era of the 1960s and 1970s, as weakening studio control granted directors more artistic freedom, the auteur theory, which regards the director as the primary artist among all those who contribute to filmmaking, gained traction. It was embraced by both the media and by directors themselves, who were glad to see their contribution so glorified. One positive was the discovery of filmmakers whose work was under the radar but virtually all the feted directors were white and overwhelmingly heterosexual-only in recent decades have the contributions of marginalized auteur filmmakers been recognized. Mavericks: Interviews with the World's Iconoclast Filmmakers amplifies the voices of a wide-ranging group of groundbreaking filmmakers, including Samira Makhmalbaf, Roberta Findlay, Howard Alk, Ousmane Sembene, and John Waters, whose identities, perspectives, and works are antithetical to typical Hollywood points of view. Author Gerald Peary, whose experience as a film studies professor, film critic, arts journalist, and director of documentaries culminates in a lifetime of film scholarship, presents a riveting collection of interviews with directors-including Black, queer, female, and non-Western filmmakers-whose unconventional work is marked by their unique artistic points of view and molded by their social and political consciousness. With contextualizing introductions and insightful questions, Peary reveals the brilliance of these maverick directors and offers readers a lens into the minds of these incredible and engaging artists. AUTHOR: Gerald Peary, an American filmmaker, professor, and critic, is the author of nine books on cinema. His work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Toronto Globe, Chicago Tribune, and the Boston Globe. Peary has directed feature documentaries, Archie's Betty (2015), For the Love of Movies: The Story of American Film Criticism (2009), codirected The Rabbi Goes West (2019), and he acted in the cult independent feature, Computer Chess (2013). 26 b/w illustrations
