Ebert's anthology of film.

A glance at the cover of film critic Roger Ebert's new book, Roger Ebert's Book of Film (W.W. Norton and Company, 781 pp.), tells you that you are in for a real treat: Ebert, pictured in color, is sitting in a movie theater surrounded by black-and-white images of Film legends such as Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock and Charlie Chaplin. Once inside the book, the reader is taken on magnificent journey through an anthology of writing on film that includes more than 100 selections on filmmaking and filmgoing.

The book covers a wide range of topics, including "Going to the Movies," "The Business," "Early Days," "Movie Stars" and "Directors." And although the book's size may be intimidating at first, the entertaining contents make up for it. Don't get me wrong - a lot of the essays Ebert showcases in the book are by and about individuals who many a babyboomer may not know, particularly in the "Early Days" chapter. But Ebert overcomes this through his impeccable choice of selections, making the obscure interesting to even novice filmgoers. Ebert said that he "was not trying for some sort of 'survey' suitable for a classroom." He explains, "I was simply looking for good writing about the movies."

Ebert provides short introductions, which are sometimes anecdotal and at other times just plain informational, to each essay or excerpt. The "Going to the Movies" chapter features the first-person memories of moviegoers. For the excerpt from Larry McMurtry's book "The Last Picture Show" (which was made into a feature film), Ebert writes a sentimental intro in which he reminisces about the first time he took a girl to the movies and how he finally got his arm around the girl's "sacred" shoulder. He writes: "A movie theater was about the only place where teenage boys and girls could be alone and unsupervised. And from those moments in the dark arose a whole matrix of eroticism, so that to this day, for all of us, there is always something sexy about going to the movies."

The "Business" chapter contains a 1934 The New Yorker profile of Darryl F. Zanuck by Alva Johnston. Her words are somewhat prophetic, as she captured a truth that is still apparent in the film industry today: "College men have not covered themselves with glory in Hollywood. Some have been brilliant successes as directors and writers, but few are in places of power. Generally speaking, the university alumni are working for the high school alumni and the high school alumni are working for the grammar school alumni. You can roughly measure the importance of a man in the movie industry by the number of stories told about his ignorance. ... University training is an essential in the old, standard profession, but is apparently a handicap in a new, changing, experimental calling in which imagination and judgment are more important than specialized knowledge." She continues: "Darryl F. Zanuck has had a dazzling career in Hollywood. From the greatness of his achievements it would be inferred that he had stopped school in the sixth grade."

The "Movie Stars" chapter contains an excerpt from Klaus Kinski's memoirs in which he verbally attacks German director Werner Herzog and the working conditions on the film Aguirre, the Wrath of God. Ebert noted in his introduction that it became legend that Herzog drew a gun on Kinski to keep him on the impossible location. Kinski writes of his initial meeting with Herzog and of the director rambling on about the film: "His speech is clumsy, with a toadlike indolence, long-winded, pedantic, choppy. The words tumble from his mouth in sentence fragments, which he holds back as much as possible, as if they were earning interest. It takes forever and a day for him to push out a clump of hardened brain snot I haven't the foggiest idea what he's talking about, except that he's as high as a kite on himself for no visible reason, and he's enthralled by his own daring, which is nothing but dilettantish innocence." Surprisingly, Kinski went on to make two other films with Herzog. This chapter also includes a touching piece by the late Chicago newspaper columnist Mike Royko about John Belushi and his portrayal of a "Royko-like" chain-smoking newspaper columnist in the film Continental Divide. Royko went back a long way with the Belushi family, and when John died, Royko wrote an endearing column on the comic and his family, commenting: "he was only 33. I learned a long time ago that life isn't always fair. But it shouldn't cheat that much."

In the "Directors" chapter, Ebert includes an excerpt from John Houseman's journal from the period when Houseman was working on the Citizen Kane screenplay with Herman Mankiewicz. Houseman recalls how the idea of Citizen Kane came to Mankiewicz and how it was shaped into the film. Houseman wrote: "At Mank's insistence and remembering how badly I myself had worked with Orson peering over my shoulder, it was clearly stated in the agreement that we would do our work without interference. ... Throughout our work on the screenplay of what later came to be called Citizen Kane, we had one special advantage: we were and we never for one instant forgot it - creating a vehicle suited to the personality and creative energy of a man who, at 24, was himself only slightly less fabulous than the mythical hero he would be portraying. And the deeper we penetrated beyond the public events into the heart of Charles Foster Kane, the closer we seemed to come to the identity of Orson Welles."

Also in the "Directors" chapter is Woody Allen's hilarious fantasy of an Elia Kazan stage production of Disney's Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs starring Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Anthony Quinn, Jason Robards Jr., Rod Steiger, George C. Scott and Sidney Poitier as the seven dwarfs, Kim Stanley as the queen and Mildred Dunnock as Snow White. Allen has Bashful killing himself at the end of act two after learning that his brother Sneezy has gone insane. Steiger is Doc, frustrated, alcoholic, impotent and "unable to whistle while he works." Robards plays Sneezy, racked with guilt over complicity with the Nazis during World War II, and he informs on Happy, who is the leader of the dwarf resistance. Ebert writes that Allen's essay qualifies for a movie anthology, "particularly after Disney realized Woody's fantasy by converting Beauty and the Beast into a Broadway musical."