In this fascinating survey of contemporary screen craft, David Cohen of Script and Variety magazines leads readers down the long and harrowing road every screenplay takes from idea to script to screen. In interviews with Hollywood screenwriters from across the board—Oscar winners and novices alike—Cohen explores what sets apart the blockbuster successes from the downright disasters.
Tracing the fortunes of twenty-five films, including Troy, Erin Brockovich, Lost in Translation, and The Aviator, Cohen offers insider access to back lots and boardrooms, to studio heads, directors, and to the over-caffeinated screenwriters themselves. As the story of each film evolves from the drawing board to the big screen, Cohen proves that how a script is written, sold, developed, and filmed can be just as dramatic and intriguing as the movie itself—especially when the resulting movie is a fiasco. 
Covering films of all kinds—from tongue-in-cheek romps like John Waters's A Dirty Shame to Oscar winners like Monster's Ball and The Hours—Screen Plays is an anecdote-filled, often inspiring, always revealing look at the alchemy of the movie business. With Cohen as your expert guide, Screen Plays exposes how and why certain films (such as Gladiator) become "tent poles," those runaway successes every studio needs to survive, and others become train wrecks. Full of critical clues on how to sell a script—and avoid seeing it destroyed before the director calls Action!—it's the one book every aspiring screenwriter will find irresistible.

Screen Plays: How 25 Scripts Made It to a Theater Near You--for Better or Worse

Arts & Photography

Cohen, David S.

Business of Art

It Books

Every green-lighted screenplay travels a long and harrowing road from idea to script to celluloid. In this fascinating survey of contemporary film craft, David Cohen of Script and Variety magazines interviews screenwriters from across the board—Oscar winners and novices alike—to explore what sets blockbuster successes apart from downright disasters. Tracing the fortunes of twenty-five films, including Troy, Erin Brockovich, Lost in Translation, and The Aviator, Cohen offers valuable insider access to the back lots and boardrooms, to the studio heads and directors, and to the overcaffeinated screenwriters themselves. Full of critical clues on how to sell a script—and avoid seeing it destroyed before the director calls "Action!"—Screen Plays is a book that both the aspiring screenwriter and curious cinephile will find irresistible.

Screen Plays: How 25 Screenplays Made It to a Theater Near You--for Better or Worse

Abortion is a legal, common, and safe medical procedure that one in three American women will undergo. Yet ever since Roe v. Wade was decided in 1973, anti-abortion forces have tried nearly every tactic to eliminate it. Legislative and judicial developments dominate the news, but a troubling and all-too-common phenomenon-targeted vigilante action against individual abortion providers-is missing from the national discussion, only cropping up when a dramatic story like the murder of an abortion provider pushes it to the forefront. Every day, men and women who are associated with abortion care are harassed, threatened, stalked, picketed, sent hate mail, and otherwise terrorized. Those who seek help from the law are sometimes successful, but not always, either because there are insufficient protections built into the law, or because law enforcement officials fail to respond. In Living in the Crosshairs, the voices of these providers are heard for the first time, through extensive interviews that David S. Cohen and Krysten Connon conducted across the country. Abortion providers are targeted at home, at work, or in community spaces; they can be harassed in person or online. Abortion opponents target not only the providers themselves but also may go after their families, neighbors, and others close to them. This kind of targeting happens anywhere in the country, not just in more conservative areas, and can victimize all providers, not just high-profile doctors. For some, being the victim of targeted harassment inspires significant fear and leads to changes in behavior; for others, it has become a normal part of life; and for yet others, it actively strengthens their resolve. The response of law enforcement at the federal, state, and local levels is spotty-though there are some strong laws on the books, especially at the federal level, abortion providers have had mixed experiences when it comes to legal recourse, and effectiveness varies. Drawing on ideas from the interviews, the authors propose several legal and societal reforms that could improve the lives of providers, foremost among them redefining targeted harassment as terrorism rather than protest. Living in the Crosshairs is a rich and humane portrait of women's health professionals who persist in their work despite harassment because they believe in what they are doing. These providers' voices have not been heard in recent debates, leaving the public with a deficient understanding of exactly how abortion is limited in this country, yet their experiences illuminate the truth of the issue and offer us a path to a better policy.

Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Politics & Social Sciences

Connon, Krysten

Social Sciences

Oxford University Press

How to turn company values into competitive advantage We are inclined, for whatever reason, to treat values like works of art. We view them as nice to hang on the wall, and beautiful to look at, but we don’t act as though they truly mean much to us in the real world. In fact, the opposite is true. The best organizations understand their values, articulate them clearly, and hold them higher than any short-term concerns or short-cut methods. This does not put these companies at a competitive disadvantage. It is the source of their competitive advantage. If there's no clarity at the top about what values really mean, then there's no consistency at the management level or further down the organization. This means that there's no way to measure, coach, assess, promote or fire people in line with those values. Any organization that does not articulate its values concretely functions like a modern Tower of Babel. No one can be quite sure that they are speaking the same language at different levels or different locations within the organization. Decisions don't always make sense or feel right. Confusion reigns. No matter how compelling and inspirational the organization's vision may be, its aspirations fall far short in reality. Values are about achieving results in a way that is consistent with what an organization stands for. They provide a direct connection between the CEO, the factory worker and everyone in between; and form the basis of the organization's "brand" as understood by employees, customers, suppliers and even shareholders. When the work is done right, values provide an organizing principle, a directional compass that helps organizations succeed; they become a source of energy for an organization's vision, strategy and day-to-day efforts. Vision, strategy, market share, reputation and profits are all very important – but having a clear and consistent set of values is far more critical in predicting whether an organization will continue to succeed and grow as its people, markets, competitive landscape and technology change. People must make their contributions to an organization willingly and independently to bring passion, commitment, creativity and energy to a job. But they will do so only so long as they believe that what they are doing is authentic and meaningful, and is part of a code of commitment shared by the organization as a whole. Inside the Box focuses on values in a clear and practical way to understand what they are, where they come from and how they are transmitted from employee generation to generation. Inside the Box provides a roadmap for any leader or manager on how to identify the values that make an organization, department, team, or individual unique. It also shows how to measure whether an organization or individual is operating according to those values, and how managers can use values as the basis for all of their people decisions and drive superior performance as a result.

Inside the Box: Leading With Corporate Values to Drive Sustained Business Success

Business & Money

Management & Leadership

Jossey-Bass

A practical step-by-step approach to hiring the right person. Every hiring manager knows that the traditional hiring and interviewing process is a poor tool for predicting organizational fit and future on-the-job success. Behavioral interviewing can improve your chances of picking the right candidate two to five times over traditional processes. It focuses on how the candidate works rather than on skills, qualifications, and impressions. The Talent Edge shows how you can develop a concrete understanding of what your own top performers do differently than the majority of their peers, and how to translate that knowledge into a better hiring system. While using case studies from organizations that have successfully transformed their hiring practices, the book articulates the business case for a Behavioral Interviewing system, and provides a roadmap for implementing it. Comprehensive coverage includes: how to write job profiles and translate them into questions and answers that can be used in the interview; how to prepare for the interview, ask questions, and probe for the right information. The book also offers advice on how behaviors that are defined and proven to be useful in the hiring process can be incorporated into performance management, career development, and succession planning.

The Talent Edge: A Behavioral Approach to Hiring, Developing, and Keeping Top Performers

Human Resources

wiley

Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America

It seems unthinkable that citizens of one of the most powerful nations in the world must risk their lives and livelihoods in the search for access to necessary health care. And yet it is no surprise that in many places throughout the United States, getting an abortion can be a monumental challenge. Anti-choice politicians and activists have worked tirelessly to impose needless restrictions on this straightforward medical procedure that, at best, delay it and, at worst, create medical risks and deny women their constitutionally protected right to choose.&nbsp; Obstacle Course tells the story of abortion in America, capturing a disturbing reality of insurmountable barriers people face when trying to exercise their legal rights to medical services. Authors David S. Cohen and Carole Joffe lay bare the often arduous and unnecessarily burdensome process of terminating a pregnancy: the sabotaged decision-making, clinics in remote locations, insurance bans, harassing protesters, forced ultrasounds and dishonest medical information, arbitrary waiting periods, and unjustified procedure limitations. &nbsp; Based on patients' stories as well as interviews with abortion providers and allies from every state in the country,&nbsp;Obstacle Course reveals the unstoppable determination required of women in the pursuit of reproductive autonomy as well as the incredible commitment of abortion providers. Without the efforts of an unheralded army of medical professionals, clinic administrators, counselors, activists, and volunteers, what is a legal right would be meaningless for the almost one million people per year who get abortions. There is a better way--treating abortion like any other form of health care--but the United States is a long way from that ideal.&nbsp; &nbsp;

Joffe, Carole

Sociology

University of California Press

Why do children play and why do they stop playing? David Cohen's book answers these questions in light of recent research.  Psychologists argue that children play to learn how to move, how to speak, how to think, how to cope emotionally, how to be imaginative, and how to interact with other people.  David Cohen suggests that we need to look at the origins of play in the family, and excamine how children play with objects, language, and with each other and their parents. "An excellent critical appraisal of research on play.  Cohen offers a refreshing open perspective, although he acknowledges that we seem to need a serious reason for play in order to justify studying it....Very readable and entertaining."—Choice

The Development of Play

Health, Fitness & Dieting

Psychology & Counseling

NYU Press

Under the influence of European historians, scholarship about the Dutch in America has generally emphasized what was derived from the urban and merchant character of the Netherlands, particularly the single province of Holland in the seventeenth century. But it was among the farmers of New York and New Jersey, according to David Steven Cohen, rather than the urban merchants of Albany and New York City, that a distinctive Dutch-American regional subculture arose, thrived, and survived through the end of the nineteenth century.By examining the life of the early emigrant Dutch settlers, the author constructs a picture of their culture through the farmhouses they built, the landscapes they cultivated, and the tools and equipment they used, relating it all to the structure of their families, their folklore, and folklife. It was in the second quarter of the eighteenth century, according to Cohen, that a change occurred in the culture of the Dutch in America by which they became Dutch-American, and the most striking material evidence of this transformation was in the development of a new type of farmhouse, which began to replace those still traceable to the Netherlands.Thirty black-and-white illustrations including both photographs and floorplans, help to trace this evolution, which was occurring at about the same time the Great Awakening was Americanizing the Dutch Reformed Church, and which resulted in the Dutch-American culture that was not an Anglo-Dutch amalgam so much as a distinctive regional subculture within the American culture emerging at that time.

The Dutch-American Farm (American Social Experience Series)

History

Americas

New York University Press

"A rich and readable source of information and interpretation." New York History "Cohen presents a detailed description of the everyday life of early Dutch settlers in New York and New Jersey. He gives special attention to the rise of the Dutch Reformed Church in these areas, and particularly the denomination's transformation into a subculture that could truly be considered American." Bookman's Weekly "An impressive study of material culture" Choice

The Dutch American Farm (The American Social Experience, 24)

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cohen, David S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Cohen, David S.

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Cohen, David S.. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Screen Plays: How 25 Scripts Made It to a Theater Near You--for Better or Worse

Screen Plays: How 25 Screenplays Made It to a Theater Near You--for Better or Worse

Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Living in the Crosshairs: The Untold Stories of Anti-Abortion Terrorism

Inside the Box: Leading With Corporate Values to Drive Sustained Business Success

The Talent Edge: A Behavioral Approach to Hiring, Developing, and Keeping Top Performers

Obstacle Course: The Everyday Struggle to Get an Abortion in America

The Development of Play

The Dutch-American Farm (American Social Experience Series)

The Dutch American Farm (The American Social Experience, 24)