“I feel like Scott Ryan could have written this directly to me and others in our generation who have basically ‘given up’ on movies. It is at once tribute and eulogy, so bittersweet.” – Screenwriter Helen Childress (Reality Bites)
“The nineties are lucky to have Scott Ryan.” – Actress Natasha Gregson Wagner (Two Girls and a Guy, Lost Highway)
Ah, the nineties. Movies were something in those days. We’re talking about a decade that began with GoodFellas and ended with Magnolia, with such films as Malcolm X, Before Sunrise, and Clueless arriving somewhere in between. Stories, characters, and writing were king; IP, franchise movies, and supersaturated superhero flicks were still years away. Or so says Scott Ryan, the iconoclastic author of The Last Days of Letterman and Moonlighting: An Oral History, who here turns his attention to The Last Decade of Cinema—the prolific 1990s. Ryan, who watched just about every film released during the decade when he was a video store clerk in a small town in Ohio, identifies twenty-five unique and varied films from the decade, including Pretty Woman, Pulp Fiction, Menace II Society, The Prince of Tides, and The Shawshank Redemption, focusing with his trademark humor and insight on what made them classics and why they could never be produced in today’s film culture. The book also includes interviews with writers, directors, and actors from the era. Go back to the time of VCR’s, DVD rentals, and movies that mattered. Turn off your streaming services, put down your phones, delete your Twitter account, and take a look back at the nineties with your Eyes Wide Shut, a White Russian in your hand, and yell “Hasta la vista, baby” to today’s meaningless entertainment. Revel in the risk-taking brilliance of Quentin Tarantino, Amy Heckerling, Spike Lee, Robert Altman, Paul Thomas Anderson, and others in Scott Ryan’s magnum opus, The Last Decade of Cinema.
ISBN: 9781949024708
Ebook: 9781949024715
Audible book is available now. Click Here.
Cover by Hannah Fortune
The Last Decade of Cinema
Scott Ryan picks twenty-five unique movies released in the nineties and analyzes their impact on pop culture at the time of their release, and why they still matter today. From Goodfellas to Magnolia and a ton of classics in between, The Last Decade of Cinema covers how the fall of 35MM and the demise of the video rental market resulted in less movies being made that took risks. Interviews with Natasha Gregson Wagner, (Two Girls and a Guy) Alexander Payne (Citizen Ruth), Helen Childress Reality Bites), Tyger Williams (Menace II Soceity), and Patricia Arquette (True Romance).
Scott Ryan is the author of The Last Days of Letterman, Fire Walk With Me: Your Laura Disappeared, Lost Highway: The Fist of Love, and the best seller Moonlighting: An Oral History. He is the host of the YouTube series It’s Our Time and Tiger Talk, the copresident of Fayetteville Mafia Press and Tucker DS Press, and managing editor and creative director of The Blue Rose magazine. Yes, he does collect vinyl records, is against streaming, and thinks the internet made everything worse.