David Thomson (born 1941, London, UK) is a film critic and historian based in the United States and the author of more than 20 books, including The New Biographical Dictionary of Film, lauded as one of the best reference works on the cinema.

Career

Thomson taught film studies at Dartmouth College, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Times, Film Comment, Movieline, The New Republic and Salon. He has served on the selection committee for the New York Film Festival and scripted an award-winning documentary, The Making of a Legend: Gone With the Wind.

Thomson has written several biographies (see below), novels (Suspects, Silver Light) and unproduced screenplays, including Fierce Heat, which was to be produced by Martin Scorsese and directed by Stephen Frears.

He has confessed that he prefers books.

Variations of an article by Thomson on Heath Ledger appeared in news sites around the world in October 2009. The theme of the articles was whether "in career terms early death may be a mercy for a young actor." On leading national newspaper website of The Age, where the shorter version of the article appeared, readers' comments revealed disapproval for the article's apparently casual attitude to the death of the actor, with one reader writing that Thomson had 'allowed his brain to defecate in the word processor.'

Thomson lives in San Francisco, California with his wife and their two sons.

Top ten

In the 2002 Sight and Sound poll, Thomson revealed his ten favorite films of all time:

• Blue Velvet (1986)
• Celine and Julie Go Boating (1974)
• Citizen Kane (1941)
• The Conformist (1970)
• His Girl Friday (1940)
• A Man Escaped (1956)
• Pierrot Le Fou (1965)
• The Rules of the Game (1939)
• That Obscure Object of Desire (1977)
• Ugetsu Monogatari (1953)

Bibliography

• Movie Man (1967)
• A Bowl of Eggs (1970)
• Hungry as Hunters (1972)
• Wild Excursions: The Life and Fiction of Lawrence Sterne (1972)
• A Biographical Dictionary of Film (first edition 1975)
• Scott's Men (1977, reissued in 2002 as Scott, Shackleton and Amundsen)
• America in the Dark: Hollywood and the Gift of Unreality (1978)
• Overexposures: A Crisis in American Filmmaking (1981)
• Suspects (1985)
• Warren Beatty and Desert Eyes (1987)
• Silver Light (1990)
• Showman: The Life of David O. Selznick (1993)
• 4-2 (1996)
• Rosebud: The Story of Orson Welles (1997)
• Beneath Mulholland: Thoughts on Hollywood and Its Ghosts (1998)
• The Alien Quartet: A Bloomsbury Movie Guide (Bloomsbury Publishing, 208 pages, 1999, ISBN 1-58234-030-7, as The Alien Quartet (Pocket Movie Guide), 2000 ISBN 0747551812
• The Big Sleep (BFI guide) (2000)
• In Nevada: The Land, The People, God, and Chance (2001)
• Hollywood: A Celebration (DK, 2001)
• Cinema: Year by Year (Intro only) (DK, 2005)
• Marlon Brando (2003)
• The Whole Equation: A History of Hollywood (2004)
• Fan Tan (introduction; a novel written by Donald Cammell and Marlon Brando) (2005)
• Nicole Kidman (2006)
• "Have You Seen...?": A Personal Introduction to 1,000 Films (2008)
• Try to Tell the Story (2009)

External links

• Random House: David Thomson
• Review: Nicole Kidman
• Radio interview: "Philosophy Talk" (December 17, 2006)

References