Books on Martin Scorsese
and his films

Author Ellis Cashmore writes about how Martin Scorsese, the most influential living filmmaker, envisions America. Greed, manhood, the city and romantic love feature on Scorsese's landscape of secular materialism. They are among the themes Cashmore argues have driven and inform Scorsese's work. This is America, as seen through the eyes of Martin Scorsese and it is a deeply unpleasant place. It's an image assembled from the perspectives of obsessive people, whether burned-out paramedics, compulsive entrepreneurs, tortured lovers, or celebrity-fixated comedians. It's collected from pool halls, taxicabs, boxing rings and jazz clubs. It's an image that's specific, yet ubiquitous. It is Martin Scorsese's America.

Martin Scorsese's America
Publication Date: 15 November 2009

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Review: Ethics, aesthetics, film theory, and popular culture all meet in this new collection, which sheds new light on all aspects of Scorsese''s work. This much-awaited edition brings alive philosophical themes in Scorsese''s films that both the novice and the expert can appreciate. The contributors manage to be accessible and scholarly at the same time. (John Davenport, associate professor of philosophy and Magis Fellow, Fordham Univ )

The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese:
Publication Date 15 May 2009

Read more about: The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese

Review: "This book is proof that the greatest criticism is simply careful and educated observation that connects a filmmaker with his subject, his audience, and his time. Ebert is one of the most acclaimed and perceptive critics of his time, and this unique book is an invaluable study in the canon of both film and criticism."-Library Journal

Scorsese by Ebert:
Publication Date 1 October 2008

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The Interview series offers a wealth of information on contemporary writers and filmmakers. This installment devoted to director Martin Scorsese, effectively mixes in-depth, question-and-answer interviews, often from film journals, with narrative profiles from the mainstream press. The chronological arrangement allows the reader to watch Scorsese's distinguished career develop from film to film, as most of the pieces originally appeared in conjunction with the opening of a film. A valuable resource for contemporary film collections.

( THIS BOOK IS A SCORSESEFILMS.COM favorite! Highly RECOMMENDED )

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The latest book of Playboy interviews (long considered the gold standard for in-depth discussion with leading cultural figures) contains 17 talks with filmmakers, from Billy Wilder in 1963 to Quentin Tarantino in 2003. Other subjects include Ingmar Bergman, Francis Ford Coppola, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee, Martin Scorsese, and Orson Welles, with Clint Eastwood and Oliver Stone featured twice in interviews conducted decades apart.

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Hollywood Under Siege: Martin Scorsese, the Religious Right, and the Culture Wars by Thomas Lindlof

A Behind the Scenes story of the making of and controversy of "The Last Temptation of Christ."

"Tom Lindlof has written a breakthrough book on many levels. He traces Scorsese's determination to compleete this passion project. Lindlof also provides the closest look yet at the step-by-step creation of a Scorsese film, as well as the filmmaker's relationship with the studio that backed him and his picture despite enormous pressure." ~Thomas Schatz

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Catherine Scorsese's recipes! Remember the scene in GoodFellas when Catherine Scorsese fixes pasta for Joe Pesci and Ray Liotta after they'd committed bloody murder? Now director Martin Scorsese's Mama (aided by Georgia Downard) shares her culinary skills in Italianamerican: The Scorsese Family Cookbook, a collection of family recipes for dishes (Veal Spiedini; Macaroni with Lamb and Veal in White Sauce; Sicilian Cake) gathered from her mother and her mother-in-law. Accompanying the recipes are photos and anecdotes covering three generations of Scorseses, moving from Sicily to New York's Little Italy..

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Finally - a biography of Scorsese! In what will be a "Must Read" for all Scorsese fans, author Vincent LoBrutto traces what some of the things we already know about Scorsese - the Italian-American heritage, a strict Catholic upbringing, his obsessive love of cinema history, and the impact of he mean streets of New York City on his personal life and film career - and then goes further. LoBrutto will delve into the Scorsese's intense passion, his private relationships, his stormy marriages, and his battles with drugs and depression are all chronicled here, and, in many cases, for the first time. Author Vincent Lobrutto has written a number of film book including "Becoming Film Literate" (Praeger, Spring 2005) and "Stanley Kubrick: A Biography" (1999). He teaches editing, production design, and cinema studies at the School of Visual Arts in New York City.

Click the cover to order your copy. (Publishing November 2007)

America's greatest living film director, Martin Scorsese is also, some argue, the pre-eminent Italian American artist. Although he has treated various subjects in over three decades, his most sustained filmmaking and the core of his achievement consists of five films on Italian American subjects - Who&'s That Knocking at My Door?, Mean Streets, Raging Bull, GoodFellas, and Casino - as well as the documentary Italianamerican. In "Gangster Priest" author Robert Casillo examines these films in the context of the society, religion, culture, and history of Southern Italy, from which the majority of Italian Americans, including Scorsese, derive.

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The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese as the philosophy of pop culture. Edited by Mark T Conard. This title will be released May 2007. You may order it now and it will ship it to you automatically when published. This is a hard cover edition.

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Special Discount Offer for UK residents on "The Philosophy of Martin Scorsese", and other select titles! Click the banner below or see Details at Eurospangroup.com

With a Foreword by Martin Scorsese. Edited by James Sanders. This title will be released on October 17, 2006. You may order it now and it will ship it to you when it arrives. Ships from and sold by Amazon.com.


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The only book in which Martin Scorsese speak for himself. In what is essentially a long and fascinating interview, David Thompson and Ian Christie encourage Scorsese to recall the whole of his life, from his childhood in Little Italy to the creation of his most recent films. More than any major director working in America today, Scorsese proves himself to be terrifically articulate and wonderfully open when speaking about his life and work. Scorsese on Scorsese also contains a biography, a filmography and lots of terrific behind-the-scenes photographs. This new, revised edition (January 2004) includes chapters on Goodfellas, Cape Fear, The Age of Innocence, and other projects up to Casino, thus bringing up to date the story of America's most exciting and articulate contemporary filmmaker.

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No this isn't a Scorsese book, but Jack Nicholson is such a legend in Hollywood that you may want to check out this new work by Dennis McDougal. The book covers Nicholson's career - including "The Departed."

Excerpt - "On playing the role of mob boss Jack Costello, Nicholson wasn't interested. The Departed was a "lay down script." "All you do is lay it down," explained Jack. "Any moron could play the part and the movie would still be great." But as author McDougal points out, Scorsese let Nicholson "create a party monster to rival Joker, only more attuned to the gross-out standards of the present day."

Click Here or on the cover to order. (Published Oct 19, 2007)

Street Smart offers a novel approach to understanding the cultural influences of New York’s neighborhoods on the work of four quintessentially New York filmmakers: Sidney Lumet, Woody Allen, Martin Scorsese, and Spike Lee. The city’s diverse economic and ethnic enclaves, where people live, work, shop, worship, bank, and go to school, often have little relationship to the concept of New York City created by the movies. Their New York, however, is as real as the smell of fried onions in the stairwell of an apartment building, and it is this New York, not the movie New York, that has left its impression on their films. Lumet, Allen, Scorsese, and Lee’s imaginations have been shaped by their neighborhoods, not the New York of the movies. In turn, these directors have used their own life experiences to shape their films. Richard A. Blake examines their home villages—from Flatbush and Fort Green in Brooklyn to the Lower East Side of Manhattan—to enrich our critical understanding of the films of four of America’s most accomplished contemporary filmmakers.

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Though this volume is essentially the script of the successful 1995 TV series of the same name commissioned by the British Film Institute and later rebroadcast on PBS, and while the cinematic illustrations portrayed on the screen are obviously lost in book format, there is much here for the serious film student to consider. Recommended for academic libraries and cinema collections.

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From Library Journal This luscious volume, a companion to the recently released film The Age of Innocence , offers an inside view of its production from the director and the screenwriter. The book is divided into four sections. The first, filled with turn-of-the-century quotes and photos and full-color renditions of paintings by Whistler and Sargent, evokes the period in which the movie is set. The second contains the complete screenplay with stills from the film as well as photos of the filming process. The third is a list of 22 films that the authors feel influenced them while they made The Age of Innocence. Finally, there is a section of quotes from the cast and crew members. This glorious celebration of the film is simply beautiful to look at.

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Not only is Peter Biskind's Easy Riders, Raging Bulls the best book -- ever -- on the Hollywood film scene from the 1970s (the Scorsese-DiPalma-Spielberg-etc ERA), it is beyond question the best book we'll ever get on the subject. Why? Because once the big names who spilled the beans to Biskind find out that other people spilled an equally piquant quantity of beans, nobody will dare speak to another writer with such candor, humor, and venom again.

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Mark Nicholls traces Martin Scorsese’s central theme of melancholia, nostalgia, and loss through five of the director’s finest films: The Age of Innocence, Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Goodfellas, and Cape Fear. Scorsese’s Men reflects on the heroes of these films and their "tribal groups": 19th-century New York Society, the Italian American Mob, and the Yuppified New South. Nicholls asserts that for all of this melancholic man’s perversions, he ultimately becomes a universally adored and culturally empowered Superman of loss.

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Written by Maria Miliora, we see Scorsese through a trained analyst's eye and we come to feel as if we've been sitting next to Scorsese on the psychiatrist's couch all these years. We are voyeurs eavesdropping as Scorsese bares his soul, his innermost fears and his anxiety to us, and we will watch more closely now when we view Scorsese's psyche on the screen. MORE

Published: March 2004 by McFarland & Co
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Ben Nyce's thorough examination of Scorsese's work in the shooting and editing process. Chapters focus on the individual films with close attention to the artistry and the craft of filmmaking with in-depth scenes reviews and shot-by-shot analysis.
Published: February 2004 by Scarecrow Press.

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After thirty years filmmaking Scorsese is one of the few directors working in Hollywood whose movies still surprise and shock. He is still prepared to take risks and is still producing great movies. So what is it that makes Scorsese tick? What makes him take on a movie? How does he approach the script and decide the what he wants up there on the screen? Andy Dougan has interviewed Scorsese many times and has talked to many of the stars who have appeared in his movies including, most recently, Sharon Stone, to create a fascinating inside look at the making of his movies.

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Edited by Peter Guralnick and Robert Santelli: this is the companion BOOK to the PBS series. The result is a unique and timeless celebration of the blues, from writers and artists as esteemed and revered as the music that moved them. In these pages one not only reads about the blues, one hears them, feels them, lives them. MARTIN SCORSESE PRESENTS THE BLUES is more than a timeless collection of great writing to be savored and shared: it is an unforgettable initiation into the very essence of American music and culture.

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Scorsese’s obsession with sin and redemption, conflict and violence runs through much of his work. This book explores Martin Scorsese’s career from his early student works to the present day, covering his personal examinations of his Italian-American heritage – Mean Streets, Italianamerican and Goodfellas, the extreme violence of Raging Bull, Taxi Driver, Cape Fear; and the religious themes – from a director who originally wanted to be a priest – of The Last Temptation of Christ and Kundun. It discusses his influences, the controversy surrounding his films, includes exhaustive music lists and long-time collaborators. This is an extensive analysis of the work of this widely respected director. Read a review
Author: Jim Sangster
Published: 4 April 2002 by Virgin Books

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Set in the turbulent streets of Lower Manhattan in the mid-nineteenth century, Martin Scorsese's Gangs of New York depicts the politically corrupt and volatile social climate of New York during the early years of the Civil War.

Included in the book are interviews of the principal people involved with the making of the film: the director, actors, cinematographer, designers, screenwriters, and producers; the complete shooting script; a historical introduction by the writer Luc Sante, the film's technical advisor; color stills taken during the shooting; sketches of the lavish sets and costumes, and a portfolio of behind-the-scenes photographs taken by Brigitte Lacombe. This is an inside look at how an epic movie, one which the director had envisioned for twenty-five years, got made.

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Scorsese's 1988 film "The Last Temptation of Christ" arguably generated more resistance and conflict upon its release than any film before or since, engendering intense debate and even hatred between religious conservative protesters and liberal progressive defenders of the picture. This is the first full examination of the controversy, its participants, and their claims concerning the film's religious meaning.


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