Product Description

The only companion book to the much-anticipated follow-up to Paul Thomas Anderson's critically hailed Boogie Nights that "leaves you no doubt you are in the presence of a natural-born filmmaker."--David Ansen, Newsweek. The much-heralded writer-director deliberately withheld information about his new film during production because "I feel lately as if I know everything about a movie before I see it, and I really want the audience to discover this purely." Featuring an ensemble cast (see below), in, in an unbilled role, Tom Cruise (who called Anderson to express interest in working with him), the film is now described as "a story about family relationships and bonds that have been broken and need to be mended in one day...set in the San Fernando Valley on a day full of rain with no clouds." Magnolia: The Illustrated Screenplay includes the complete shooting script, introduction and script notes by Anderson, a photo section with about 40 photos in color, and interview with the writer/director, and complete cast and crew credits.

The cast:

The Dying Father--Jason Robards
His Young Wife--Julianne Moore
The Caretaker--Philip Seymour Hoffman
The Boy Genius--Jeremy Blackman
His Father--Michael Bowen
The Game Show Host--Philip Baker Hall
The Daughter--Melora Walters
The Mother--Melinda Dillon
The Ex-Boy Genius--William H. Macy
The Police Officer in Love--John C. Reilly

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #71938 in Books
• Published on: 2000-01-19
• Original language: English
• Dimensions: .63" h x 8.04" w x 10.02" l, 1.20 pounds
• Binding: Paperback
• 212 pages

From Amazon.com
At three hours long, Paul Thomas Anderson's Magnolia qualifies as an epic, with a broad scope of characters whose lives become entwined over the course of a day in the San Fernando Valley. Despite its vast canvas, though, this is probably one of the most intimate epics you'll ever experience, because Anderson and his cast of actors delve into their characters so deeply that you feel you instantly know them. Anderson's screenplay of Magnolia is similar--a few pages in, you'll be hooked by the story and the characters. Numerous critics have derided Anderson's talents as a screenwriter while praising him to the skies as a director, but the screenplay for Magnolia shows a filmmaker at work with a keen eye for character development and a penchant for both brilliant monologues and amazingly deft one-liners. And unlike most published screenplays (which bill themselves as a "shooting script" but are in reality just a transcript of the finished product), this screenplay is truly the working script, complete with typos and scenes that didn't make it into the final cut of the film. Reading the screenplay, you'll see Tom Cruise's scenes with Jason Robards become more fleshed out, more scenes from Cruise's motivational workshop on "Seduce and Destroy," and most significantly, a subplot involving whiz kid Stanley Spector and the mysterious character known as "the Worm," who pops up only briefly in the film. Also included are some stunning color photographs and a great interview with Anderson, where you'll find out who gave him the idea of the rain of frogs, which character in the film is his favorite, and why he used a game-show milieu for a large part of the film. Truly a companion piece to the movie, a testament to the vision of a filmmaker, and, as Anderson puts it in his introduction, "an interesting study of a writer writing from his gut." --Mark Englehart

About the Author
Paul Thomas Anderson previously wrote and directed Boogie Nights. A self-taught filmmaker, he began writing as a teenager. His short Cigarettes and Coffee was accepted in the 1993 Sundance Festival Shorts Program, leading to an invitation to develop a feature at Sundance's 1994 Filmmaker's Workshop, with became Hard Eight, his first full-length film. he lives in Los Angeles.