Final Cuts

Critic-producer Nat Segaloff was granted access to private papers, production records, never-before-published interviews, and specialized archives in reconstructing the colorful, touching, and sometimes scandalous stories behind the making of the last films of some of Hollywood’s top directors. Winningly readable and yet meticulously researched, its substantial entries range from Robert Aldrich and Robert Altman to Peter Yates and Fred Zinnemann, and John Ford and Howard Hawks to Otto Preminger and Richard Brooks. Certain to attract controversy because of whom it ignores as well as whom it includes, Final Cuts presents fifty widely varied chronicles of success and failure, inspiration and ennui, elation and heartache, and every other emotion enjoyed or endured by the greatest filmmakers that Hollywood ever knew.