If Jorge Luis Borges had equipped one of his realer-than-real alternate universes with a 16-screen megaplex cinema, the marquee would doubtless look something like the index of Chris Gore’s The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made. To read Gore’s litany of failed movie projects is to enter a Bizarro World of film history, in which Orson Welles is as prolific as Spielberg, and Disney and Dali are comrades in cartoons.

Ever since the Medved brothers compiled their Golden Turkey books in the 1980s, an entire subgenre has evolved on the subject of bad and bizarre movies that actually got made. Gore’s book is the flipside: movie ideas that were shelved before or during production. Some are legendary, like the aborted Marilyn Monroe vehicle Something’s Gotta Give. Others may have been canned for good reason for instance, Swirlee, about a mob boss with an ice-cream cone for a head. All are tantalizing glimpses of a movie heritage that never was.

Most tantalizing are the unrealized projects of cinema giants. On hand are such celluloid phantoms as Josef von Sternberg’s unfinished Roman epic I, Claudius, in which Charles Laughton reputedly gave the performance of his career; and Sergei Eisenstein’s adaptation of An American Tragedy. From these early follies Gore progresses to amazing what-ifs such as the Alfred Hitchcock-James Stewart thriller The Blind Man, an Ingmar Bergman Merry Widow, and a Stanley Kubrick Napoleon that would’ve starred you guessed it Jack Nicholson.

Not that all the projects the book cites are so lofty. If you’ve ever longed for a cinematic death match between the acid-blooded Alien and the armor-plated Predator, you can read Gore’s book and dream. Comic-book yarns, movie parodies, a Roger Rabbit sequel set in wartime the author greets each with enthusiasm and a movie nut’s righteous indignation that he’ll never get to see them.

The founder of Film Threat magazine and a burr in Hollywood’s side for the better part of a decade, Gore uses his premise as a platform for diatribes against tight-fisted moneymen, studio philistines, and a cookie-cutter production process that crushes creativity. In some cases say, a senior citizens’ Animal House directed by Jerry Lewis it’s hard not to side with the suits. And one project Gore describes, a movie about Orson Welles’s famed pro-union stage production The Cradle Will Rock, has indeed been filmed by director Tim Robbins for release this year by a major studio, at that. If a similar fate were to befall every wildcat project listed in The 50 Greatest Movies Never Made, film history would be a lot more interesting.

Jim Ridley writes about movies for the Nashville Scene.

Not since Francois Truffaut took on Alfred Hitchcock in the 1960s has there been such an illuminating exchange in print between a director and a critical fan. In Kazan: The Master Director Discusses His Films, filmmaker and writer Jeff Young interviews the renowned and controversial director Elia Kazan over an extended period, beginning the interviews in 1971 as the director neared the end of his career. The publication of Kazan’s autobiography contributed to the delays this book encountered in seeing print.

Kazan’s career as a movie director began with A Tree Grows in Brooklyn in 1945 and ended with The Last Tycoon in 1976. His total output of 19 films include the classics East of Eden, which introduced James Dean to the world, and On the Waterfront, which similarly introduced Marlon Brando. Kazan was also a prolific novelist and theater director. Unfortunately, his achievements as a director are often eclipsed by the controversy over his naming names testimony before the House Un-American Activities Committee during the McCarthy days of the 1950s. Many of Hollywood’s liberal members, such as actor Nick Nolte, sat on their hands in protest during the applause for Kazan as he received a Lifetime Achievement Award at the 1999 Academy Awards. Young is unabashed in his admiration for Kazan’s work. His films moved me more than anyone else’s, he writes. I was transported, taken into the worlds they depicted, made privy to the inner tensions, conflicts, and feelings of Kazan’s characters, in whom I’d always found some part of myself. . . . Kazan’s films both forced and enabled me to think about my life and to view the world around me as I never had before. This was artistry of a very high order. In an age in which artistry seems replaced by gimmickry, and in which computer-generated worlds replace the landscapes of the human soul, an artist like Kazan stands as a reminder of what great cinema is all about. Kazan’s greatest strength as a director understanding acting and how to bring out the best in actors is increasingly becoming a lost art. Reading this book is inspirational, because it transports the reader back into a value system that needs to be rediscovered by the next generation of filmmakers. This book is not merely an homage by an admiring fan. Instead it is an exchange between two filmmakers on the art of filmmaking, which forces the director into a searching examination of his work, blemishes and all. With a chapter on each of Kazan’s films, the interviewer pushes the director to provide reasons for doing what he did, even when they are in disagreement. As I said, all of my sentiments are diametrically opposed to yours. Nothing you’ve said changes that, Young interjects during a discussion of Kazan’s incriminating Congressional testimony. At another point, when Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, “I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. When Kazan tries to defend his direction of Gentleman’s Agreement, admittedly one of his weaker works, Young challenges Kazan by saying, I disagree. I think the details were not done well at all. The party scene at Celeste Holm’s apartment is full of cliches and stereotypes. With this frank, sometimes confrontational, but always admiring style, Young brings out the best thoughts from the fertile mind of this great filmmaker. It is invaluable for filmmakers wanting an inside look into the reasoning that goes behind the thousands of decisions made in the creative filmmaking process. After you’ve read the book, you’ll want to rent the movies.

David Hinton is the dean of Watkins Institute College of Art and Design.