Taking Woodstock: The Shooting Script

Front Cover
HarperCollins, Aug 4, 2009 - Performing Arts - 176 pages

A generation began in his backyard. . . . Taking Woodstock is a new comedy inspired by the true story of Elliot Tiber and his family, who inadvertently played a pivotal role in making the famed Woodstock Music and Arts Festival into the happening that it was.

It's 1969, and Elliot Tiber, a down-on-his-luck interior designer in Greenwich Village, New York, has to move back upstate to help his parents run their dilapidated Catskills motel, the El Monaco. When Elliot hears that a neighboring town has pulled the permit on a hippie music festival, he calls the producers, thinking he could drum up some much-needed business for the motel. Three weeks later, half a million people are on their way to his neighbor's farm in Bethel, New York, and Elliot finds himself swept up in a generation-defining experience that would change his life—and American culture—forever.

Taking Woodstock is directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by James Schamus, based on the book by Elliot Tiber with Tom Monte, and stars Demetri Martin, Dan Fogler, Henry Goodman, Jonathan Groff, Eugene Levy, Jeffrey Dean Morgan, and Imelda Staunton, with Emile Hirsch and Liev Schreiber.

This Newmarket Shooting Script® Book includes:

  • Exclusive Foreword by Ang Lee
  • Exclusive Introduction by James Schamus
  • Complete Shooting Script
  • 32-page color portfolio, including production notes, movie stills, and historical photos
  • Timeline and glossary
  • Complete cast and crew credits

About the author (2009)

James Schamus is the CEO of Focus Features as well as a Professor in Columbia University's School of the Arts, where he teaches film history and theory. His script for The Ice Storm (which Ang Lee directed) won the Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes Film Festival. Ang Lee won the Academy Award® for Best Director for Brokeback Mountain and also received an Oscar® nomination for directing Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (from the script by James Schamus). Schamus and Lee have also collaborated as writer and director on Lust, Caution; Hulk; Ride with the Devil; Eat, Drink, Man, Woman; The Wedding Banquet; and Pushing Hands.

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