Luckily, auteurism's featurette-enabled devolution to its own cruelest parody has also afforded a welcome expansion of the market for fat anthologies of interviews with the legendary filmmakers of yore, perhaps filling in for the commentaries we really want while settling for Guy Ritchie's awe-inspiring defense of Swept Away.Įnter Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age at the American Film Institute, with a title possessed of many words and nary an ounce of poetry, even as its covers enclose a veritable gold mine.

So great is the apparent thirst for annotation of movies that one shudders to imagine the consequences had the director of Supercross not been obliged to elucidate its mysteries, or had The Pirate Movie's DVD not rated exhumation of auteur Ken Annakin for his declamations on the film's commercial failure and digressions as to the whereabouts of Amelia Earhart (she faked her death, absconded to New Jersey, and Annakin has the evidence to prove it). Maybe The Onion's 'Commentary Tracks of the Damned' now owns the world of cinephilia, and we just live in it.

Conversations With the Great Moviemakers of Hollywood's Golden Age At the American Film Institute

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