[.ca] Magnolia (ISBN 1557044066)

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

Pure Excellence:
Magnolia is the only film that made me cry last year. The way the characters fall apart bit by bit makes this an amazing look into the lifes of people who appear to be strong. Every character in the script is amazingly ordinary and fasinating , and the actors who played them did a PERFECT job. Also how the film builds in tenison of saddness makes you wonder what will happen next. And then something you forget and unexpected happens. It is brillant, moving film.

Operatic:
In the bonus features of the Magnolia DVD, Julianne Moore calls the screenplay she's been reading for the last few minutes operatic, with big emotions that require sincerity to work. "Otherwise they wouldn't sound true," Moore says. That earnest praise is on display in PTA's astonishing cinematic masterpiece, but the film works so well not only because the director ensured sincere emotions from his actors, but because scope and power were already there in the script. PTA as a screenwriter , in my personal view, is more attuned with the charisma of cinematic medium than PTA the director. This screenplay, unconventionally, verbalizes the complex mechanics of a shooting script in advance, so here you will find everything on how the camera ought to maneuver, symbolic layers ought to be folded--from most superficial to the most arcane written out in advance--and it's a pity that not all of those details find their realization in the movie. The script is therefore more illuminating in terms of visual storytelling than even the movie by itself. When held next to one another, each one points out to the dissonances between the realm of the imagined and the realm of the possible. Magnificently grandiose, operatic screenplay--I recommend it to every moviegoer.

Gold:
Anderson is brilliant and this is a great screenplay to buy for anyone interested in screenwriting and/or directing. The story, or stories, are so compelling that the suspense is there even when you read this book. Good stuff, good times.

Rain. But not water.:
Paul Thomas Anderson has created a great movie when he wrote and directed 'Magnolia'. This book is a great companion as it documents the entire screenplay(including the edited scenes from the released copy), an interview with P.T Anderson and about fourty companion pictures at the back. By itself, the script would be worth buying if you really enjoyed the movie, but the little extras that they have added really make it worth the money.

Excellent film but the script????:
I have to say when I first read the script I was kinda of disappointed because there are changed lines in it like the scene where Frank meets his father for the first time its almost completely changed but I'm not mad its cool reading stuff from what Anderson wrote first But disappointing there are so many great stuff that are in the film but not in the script thats why I'm disappointed. Its a very well done script but changed. See Magnolia first and then read the screenplay. Matt