Moving Pictures

- Season 1

(1990)

BBC2's first regular cinema magazine for a decade presents features and comment on new films. This week's programme has a special report from America on the Hollywood script wars, in which a writer sells a script for $3 million one week only to see it being rewritten the next, including an interview with William Goldman, who wrote the script of All the President's Men. Plus the new Spike Lee film, Mo Better Blues.

American TV's top film critics Siskel and Ebert look at the best new films of the autumn. There are also items on the boom in Hollywood movies about American Indians and a look at the career of Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, with a contribution by film maker Bernardo Bertolucci.

Martin Scorsese's Good Fellas is a violent and compulsive gangster movie, which marks the director's return to form. It is based on a true story, following the rise and fall over three decades of a small-time Mafiosi. Moving Pictures talks to the good fellas behind the film - the cameraman, editor, designer, screenwriter, and the director himself. And film director and critic Chris Petit takes a look at the unmade films of the books of J G Ballard.

American film critic John Powers presents an illustrated reappraisal of David Lynch's work including his most recent cinema success Wild at Heart. There is also an interview with controversial British film-maker Derek Jarman on the eve of the London Film Festival premiere of his new film, The Garden. And screenwriter Richard Price, responsible for such scripts as The Color of Money and an episode of New York Stories, speaks about the trials of writing, and re-writing, the Al Pacino/Ellen Barkin thriller, Sea of Love.

The first TV profile of American director Alan Rudolph, whose output ranges from studio projects like his new romantic comedy Love at Large to cult classics like Choose Me. And a look at Steadicam, a device which allows the camera to glide smoothly as the operator walks or even runs. It's inventor, Garrett Brown, tells how he used the device on Stanley Kubrick's The Shining, and Francis Coppola's One from the Heart.

A profile of Hollywood's most powerful woman director, Kathryn Bigelow, whose films include Near Dark, Blue Steel, and The Loveless. Plus Robin Hood, an enduring English legend, brought most vividly to the screen by Hollywood. Latest to take the role is Kevin Costner, in Prince of Thieves, now shooting at Shepperton Studios, while two more versions of the story are in pre-production in Hollywood.

A look at filmmaker's Peter Bogdanovich work.

Not since the New Wave of the early '60s has French cinema boasted so many young stylists - like the directors of Diva and Subway. Meanwhile, the most successful French film ever stars Gerard Depardieu as Cyrano de Bergerac. In France, Moving Pictures talks to the film-makers and finds out if there really is a new 'New Wave'. Plus a profile of Hollywood's infamous pseudonym 'director', Alan Smithee.