“Independent Ed”

Edward Burns

Gotham Books, $26.95

It’s a scene that’s replayed itself a million times in Hollywood — the supplicant stealing a few seconds of the big shot’s time and attention with a pitch, a screenplay, or, one day in September of 1994, a nearly completed feature film on a clunky VHS tape.

“I had been a production assistant at ‘Entertainment Tonight’ for four years and probably overstayed my welcome by about three years,” Edward Burns writes in “Independent Ed,” in which he candidly recounts his struggles to retain some artistic freedom and self-respect in the movie business. “I needed to make more money and start charting a path toward a real career.”

An unsuspecting Robert Redford was the means. Mr. Redford, aging, movie-star short, but still golden, with hair as good as ever, was never more influential, what with his Sundance Film Festival going full bore. He was on set promoting his latest project, “Quiz Show,” about the 1950s television scandals involving Charles Van Doren. Our hero, sweating it out among the cables and apple boxes just outside the bright lights’ glare, rehearsed his spiel and, once the actor-turned-mogul was out in the hallway, pounced: “I’m an independent filmmaker, and . . .” You know the rest. “The Brothers McMullen” was his baby, made on the fly and on the cheap for all of $25,000. Would he take a look?

The elevator arrived. “As the doors closed, I saw him hand it to his publicist. Then they were gone.”

The industry, of course, is not for the thin-skinned. A rejection letter arrived two months later, hard on the heels of earlier turndowns from all manner of agents, managers, and even what was then a brand-new Hamptons International Film Festival — a “final straw” that, as a Long Island filmmaker, particularly outraged him.

But then something incredible happened. With another set of eyes screening submissions, Sundance reversed course and sent Mr. Burns an acceptance letter barely two months after the brush-off. Not only was he in, his film famously won the festival’s Grand Jury Prize. It went on to pull in $10.4 million at the box office. He was 27 years old.

These are the kinds of breaks young strivers need in life and too rarely get. As with most such “overnight” success stories, luck played a part. Here there was good timing at work, the breezy authenticity of “The Brothers McMullen” — about working-class Irish-American guys from New York who B.S. and bloviate about girls — amounting to a fresh offering in an age of special-effects blockbusters.

Remarkably free of score-settling and gossip, “Independent Ed” ought to be required reading in film schools, certainly more than so than Syd Fields’s “Screenplay,” which Mr. Burns mentions, with its tiresome admonitions to incite the protagonist to action, throw an obstacle in his path, have him overcome it, lesson learned, all in three tidy acts. (That may be structure, but it can send you scrambling for “My Dinner With Andre.”)

For one thing, there are all kinds of tips for guerrilla filmmaking, beginning with the way this first-time director used so many exterior shots in “McMullen.” Interiors cost money, so for a scene where his character is walking out of a restaurant with his agent, Mr. Burns set up a long lens shot across the street and he and a buddy from “Entertainment Tonight” stepped into the restaurant, counted to five, and then turned around and headed for the door. They sneaked four takes this way before getting the bum’s rush.

Elsewhere, he dissects the way his hero, Woody Allen, would orchestrate a scene of dialogue with two or three people in a room: After a close-up the camera might move with a character across the room to reveal the interlocutor, and then back, followed by a conventional two-shot, and on to a “master shot,” a wide view of the entire scene. And like that.

Mr. Burns is nothing if not frank throughout, from relaying a professor’s advice that led him to film in the first place — “As an English major, you can become a film studies minor, where you watch a bunch of old movies, write a paper, and you’re pretty much guaranteed an A” — to his admission on the next-to-last page that of his 11 movies in 20 years, half were failures.

Other advice for aspiring filmmakers comes by way of his N.Y.P.D. dad, who, listening to his son lament all the rejection as they nurse beers at the White Horse Tavern in Greenwich Village, reminds him he called the 12 days shooting “McMullen” the best of his life, adding, “As I recall, you made this film because you had something to say and because this is what you want and need to do with your life.” A nod. “Then stop complaining, sit down, and write another screenplay.”

The film world is different now, with inexpensive digital cameras and laptop editing. Mr. Burns says, in essence, ignore the resultant glut of output, kids, and follow your dream.

He realizes “there are no mistakes. And there are no bad films. Making movies is a gift, it’s a joy. . . . The work is hard, that’s true, but at the end of the day, you’re only making a movie. It’s a privilege to make a movie, and I never forget that.”

Edward Burns lives in New York and East Hampton. His latest work is a television series for TNT, “Public Mor­als,” about a division of the N.Y.P.D. in the 1960s. It is scheduled to premiere on Aug. 25.

Authors Night Tix for Sale

This summer’s Authors Night, a fund-raiser for the East Hampton Library, will happen on Aug. 8, starting with a mammoth book signing and cocktail reception from 5 to 7:30, and then dinner parties at private homes with guest authors at 8. Tickets, available at authorsnight.org, start at $100 for the reception with more than 100 writers, and range from $300 to $5,000 for the dinners.

This year’s dinners will welcome the likes of Phil Klay, whose “Redeployment” won a National Book Award; the actor and director Edward Burns, recently out with a memoir called “Independent Ed”; the designer and decorator Jonathan Adler; Ambassador Christopher Hill; Jules Feiffer, whose new graphic novel is “Kill My Mother,” and Michael Shnayerson, whose latest is “The Contender,” a biography of Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo.

Art Barge Writing Workshops

The Art Barge on Napeague is now offering writing workshops, led by Sarabelle Prince, a writing instructor, on Saturdays through Aug. 22, with the exception of Aug. 1. “This series explores how elements of the creative process merge and influence one another,” a release said.

This week’s workshop is called Portraits, with Chiaroscuro following on July 25. En Plein Air, Minimalism in Writing, and Action in Writing round out the series. Each meets from 10 a.m. to noon and costs $50. Registration is at theartbarge.org.

Journal-writing techniques will be the focus of another Art Barge workshop, in which participants will spend “a day in the art studio” and thus possibly “discover you work best with drawing, painting, or collage as a prompt for further self-expression.” It runs from Aug. 31 to Sept. 4 and again from Sept. 7 to 11.

“Peconic Bay”

Marilyn E. Weigold

Syracuse University Press, $24.95

Writing a history book about four centuries of Long Island’s East End is rather like squeezing 12 adult humans into the trunk of a Maserati — it is going to be a tight fit. Marilyn E. Weigold, a professor who teaches at Pace University in the department of economics, history, and political science, has chosen to let the blue waters of Peconic Bay form the matrix for an engrossing collage of folklore and facts that tells an abbreviated but well-curated episodic history of Long Island’s eastern forks.

The book takes the form of an exhibition with various galleries highlighting themes such as “At Home,” “At Work,” and “At Play.” Within each section, there are smaller chapters that focus on “The Shinnecock,” “Gardiner’s Island: Family Feud,” and “Saints, Sinners, and Just Plain Folks.” This is not your grandfather’s old volume of local history, as it is not really chronological in its weaving of topics to and fro. The author is clever and has fun debunking traditional myths and brings Martha Stewart’s name up in the most unusual situations.

As one might expect from an economist, some of the smartest sections of the book trace recent politics and real estate. Indeed I found myself much more engrossed by her excellent discussions of the brown tides, the wineries, the East Hampton Town Baymen’s Association, and land preservation than the digressions back into the 18th century.

The reader may be surprised by some exclusions and inclusions, but the Prellwitzes and William Steeple Davis are artists well worth being introduced to, in lieu of the well-known Pollock and de Kooning. Like any good travelogue, we need to trust our guide, and Ms. Weigold knows any number of off-the-beaten-path places to entice us. Just let her unfold the tale of Cutchogue’s bloody Wickham murders or the “Not So Dear Deer” of 1916 Shelter Island. A more delightful story involves Albert Einstein trying to buy sandals at Rothman’s Department Store in Southold.

Within a chapter titled “At Peace” is a section on Robins Island, a 445-acre island in Peconic Bay, in the Town of Southold. The author helps straighten out a very convoluted series of events. James W. Lane saw this beautiful island, once a private hunting club, at the turn of the 20th century while his company was testing torpedoes nearby. He fell under its charms and bought the island and began building a mansion. By the time the exterior was completed, his wife died and he had the construction stopped. It is said that the workers left their tools and clothing behind.

By the middle of the 20th century, John W. Mackay, whose fortune came from the Western Union Telegraph Co., bought the property. He used the island as a hunting lodge. MacKay was the author of one of the first scholarly books on antique duck decoys. By 1979 he sold the island to a European real estate syndicate that planned on building 28 luxury homes.

Both New York State and Suffolk County wanted to keep the island natural and began to look for federal funding to purchase Robins Island. The application requested $2 million and hoped that Peconic Bay would be declared a National Estuarine Sanctuary. Local governments were not happy with the idea of more federal oversight that could curtail commercial fishing in the bay.

This is but the beginning of a story that includes a claim by the Wickham family, who felt the island had been wrongfully taken from them following the American Revolution. You must read the book to find out what happened.

Ms. Weigold has successfully created a more impressionistic storytelling approach to our regional history. By taking a topic like work, she starts with a scene at Southold’s Bagel Cafe. It’s Labor Day, 15 years ago, and two ladies of a certain age are talking about a new traffic light. With a fast brushstroke, the next paragraph introduces a guy on a beach with a metal detector. Then we are on to the recession of the early 1990s and then the infamous economic meltdown of 2008. Does this sound kaleidoscopic?

In 57 pages, we have been introduced to growing strawberries in Mattituck, parking problems at wineries, duck farms, the 18th-century saltworks on North Haven, the Joseph Fahys and Co. watchcase factory in Sag Harbor, and many digressions. The pace is conversational, the information is well researched, and we have learned a great deal while being entertained. Dare a history book be a beach read? Without question!

This blending of primary source material, folklore, and contemporary media can be successful only if the writer is a scholar. Without a framework of deductive reasoning, this staccato-like style would be incomprehensible. With Professor Weigold’s grasp of our area’s historical highlights, she is able to hold our very complicated 400 years of triumph and tragedy firmly in hand. We can see how our communities developed and what mistakes were made and who came up with the positive solutions. Some of her sections end unresolved — court cases still being followed, new policies yet to be tested. Time will tell.

Behind a somewhat gaudy dust jacket, with a contemporary folk art depiction of Greenport, herein lies a fascinating story of randy ministers, submarines, McMansions, slaves, potatoes, railroads, the Montauk Project, Plum Island, Ezra L’Hommedieu, and so much more. I hope to see many copies of “Peconic Bay” in the hands of beachgoers this season. It will help put East End history in perspective and totally upgrade your conversation at the next benefit cocktail party on your calendar. This material is certainly more inspirational than talking about the traffic or the upcoming presidential election.

Richard Barons is the executive director of the East Hampton Historical Society. He lives in Springs.

Sunday marks the return of the venerable Poetry Marathon in Amagansett. This year’s series of readings starts at 5 p.m. that day with Joanne Pilgrim, an associate editor at The Star, reading from her verse, accompanied by Jan Grossman, a past fiction and poetry reviewer for the Rockefeller Foundation who has had poems published in American Arts Quarterly, among other journals. The readings are held in the East Hampton Town Marine Museum on Bluff Road, and a reception follows each.

The free series, organized by Sylvia Chavkin with the help of Annalee Collins, continues on July 19 with the playwright Joe Pintauro and the India-born Meena Alexander, whose collections include “Birthplace With Buried Stones.” The esteemed duo for July 26 is Grace Schulman, a professor of English at Baruch College and Springs part-timer whose latest book of poems is “Without a Claim,” and Kimiko Hahn of the North Fork, whose nine collections include “Brain Fever,” published last year by Norton.

Carol Sherman and Daniela Gioseffi are in store for Aug. 2, with George Wallace and Geraldine Green the following week. The series wraps up on Aug. 16, when Virginia Walker, whose latest is “Neuron Mirror,” and Carole Stone, the author of, most recently, “Hurt, the Shadow: The Josephine Hopper Poems,” read from their work.

Over at the Amagansett Library, the Authors After Hours series is back with another strong lineup of summer readings. It begins on Saturday at 6 p.m. with A.M. Homes, the East Hampton author of pungent short-story collections like “The Safety of Objects” and novels of how we live now, the most recent being “May We Be Forgiven.”

Following her on July 18 will be the hamlet’s own Carl Safina. The naturalist will talk about his new book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.” On July 25, also at 6 p.m., Chris Pavone will step to the lectern to discuss how his own experiences have informed his best-selling thrillers, “The Expats” and “The Accident.”

On Aug. 1 Tom Clavin will examine adapting books for the big and small screens, which is happening now with two of his books written with Bob Drury, “Last Men Out: The True Story of America’s Heroic Final Hours in Vietnam” and “The Heart of Everything That Is,” about Chief Red Cloud.

Also that month, on the 15th it will be Anna Bernasek and D.T. Mongan on “All You Can Pay: How Companies Use Our Data to Empty Our Wallets,” with the political cartoonist and journalist Ted Rall discussing his forthcoming “Snowden” the following week, and Christopher Bollen, the author of a new suspense novel, “Orient,” on the 29th.

Carl Safina will speak twice in short order — first at the ever-funky, ever-indie Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor, tomorrow at 5 p.m., and then at 6 p.m. on Saturday for the Authors After Hours series at the Amagansett Library.

The naturalist’s subject is, of course, his just-out-this-week book, “Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel,” which also happens to be reviewed on this very page.

“Beyond Words”

Carl Safina

Henry Holt, $32

Over the centuries, most scientists believed that nonhuman animals lacked thoughts and emotions. Scientists assumed that other species just automatically react to stimuli — unlike humans, who make plans and experience feelings such as sorrow and joy. A few pioneering thinkers, such as Charles Darwin in the 19th century and Jane Goodall in the 1960s, challenged this traditional view, but without much success. Indeed, researchers who wrote about animals’ thoughts or feelings were accused of anthropomorphism, falsely projecting human qualities onto other species. These investigators’ papers were usually rejected by scientific journals.

Finally, as the 20th century came to a close, animal researchers such as Donald Griffin and Marc Bekoff began to make a dent in the traditional attitude. Their writings created new awareness of the possibility that other animals think and feel. Carl Safina’s new book, “Beyond Words,” will expand this awareness.

Mr. Safina observes that a major reason for denying thought and emotion to other species is that they lack human language. “Because we cannot converse with other animals, animal behaviorists threw up their hands, saying we can’t know if they think or feel, and we should assume they cannot.” But other animals do communicate in their own languages. As Mr. Safina says, they use “scents, gestures, postures, hormones and pheromones, touch, glances, and sounds.” It isn’t easy for humans to decode their communications, but Mr. Safina shows that if we patiently study their exchanges and sensitively observe their behavior, we can begin to understand their mental and emotional lives.

“Beyond Words” covers a wide range of material. Mr. Safina focuses on three kinds of animals — elephants, wolves, and killer whales — but he also writes about numerous others. Mr. Safina tells us about his interviews with scientists who are studying animals in the wild, and he discusses several contemporary research topics, including tool-use in other species and comparisons between human and nonhuman physiology.

The book is beautifully written. Some passages are pure poetry. For example, this is how he describes elephants approaching from the distance:“Finally I saw that the very land itself had risen, that the sunbaked land had taken form as something vast and alive and was in motion. The land walked as multitudes, their strides so utterly of the earth that they seemed the source of the very dust.”

Mr. Safina tells us about elephant memory and other cognitive abilities, such as forethought. For example, nursing mothers need to drink water daily, but before they venture into a marsh they nurse their babies longer than usual. The mothers know that it will be difficult for their babies to nurse in the water, so they make sure their babies are filled up beforehand.

But Mr. Safina gives more attention to elephant emotions, especially grief. When a family member or companion elephant dies, elephants suddenly go silent, and they frequently visit the deceased’s remains, gently touching the body with their trunks. When Eleanor, an elephant matriarch in Kenya, died, others tried to revive her, and they stayed with her body for as long as a week later. Some elephants have been observed covering the deceased with dirt and leaves. When a young elephant dies, the mother may slowly trail far behind the herd for several days. It seems clear that she is depressed. Mr. Safina believes these expressions of grief reflect how much elephants love one another.

Grief reactions are common because so many elephants are killed. As the author explains, the slaughter of elephants for their ivory has been going on for centuries. By the 1500s, Europeans had combined the ivory and slave trades. “Captured humans marched captured ivory to coastal ports, where both were shipped.” After slavery was abolished, elephants fell victim to poachers. Africa’s elephant population dropped from about 10 million in the early 1900s to 400,000 today. At present, “an elephant dies every l5 minutes.”

Elephant life still has its happy side. Like other young mammals, young elephants love to play. Mr. Safina quotes Cynthia Moss, a legendary elephant researcher, who described youngsters “racing about, beating through bushes and tall grass, heads up, ears out, eyes open wide glinting with mischief . . . letting forth wild, pulsating play trumpets.” They sometimes pretend they are chasing lions in the brush.

During mating seasons, mature elephants are in high spirits. Males walk with a swagger; females move in a wiggly, rolling, coy-looking manner. Sometimes mature elephants just act silly, as when they walk on their knees — just having fun. Elephants become happiest after it rains, or when they see babies playing or sleeping. Babies bring them great joy.

But the descriptions of the elephants’ happiness are bittersweet. The threat of hunters is always present.

When it comes to wolves, Mr. Safina says that before the Europeans arrived, there were probably a million in the territory that became our lower 48 states. By 1930, humans had wiped out 95 percent of them, primarily through hunting. Since the 1970s, government protections have enabled populations to recover somewhat, but in the last few years protections have been weakened.

Mr. Safina emphasizes the extent to which wolves care about members of their families, sharing food and going to great lengths to help them. For example, he describes how a young, sickly wolf, seeing his sister being attacked by three hostile wolves, jumped into the fray and managed to save her life.

Killer whales, sometimes called orcas, actually belong to the dolphin family. Mr. Safina explains that there are several types of killer whales and predicts that these types will eventually be classified as separate species. The general public has become familiar with killer whales by visits to marine theme parks, where the animals are held captive.

Compared to wolves, there is less information on the sizes of killer whale populations, but the numbers of several types are clearly dwindling. This is often because humans have overfished the salmon they need for food.

Like elephants and wolves, killer whales are extremely social animals that care for one another. Surprisingly, they also have been known to look out for humans. Mr. Safina tells of people who were out boating and became lost in thick fog. They feared they would drift out to sea. Then killer whales appeared and guided them home. When we hear about these animals’ altruism toward humans, their captivity in marine parks feels all the crueler.

When Mr. Safina turns his attention away from elephants, wolves, and killer whales, one topic he discusses is animals’ sense of beauty. I found this discussion particularly intriguing. He mentions how two chimpanzees separately climbed to the top of a hill, greeted each other, clasped hands, and watched the sunset. Humans, of course, enjoy sunsets as well. Humans also find beauty in the same visual patterns and scents that attract many insects. Mr. Safina points to a fascinating topic for further research.

Running throughout the book is a central question: Just how unique are humans? Mr. Safina recognizes that each species has its own special talents and capacities that have enabled it to adapt to its particular environment. But he believes that commonalities are more fundamental. Beneath all the diversity, we are all kin.

The book includes endnotes that direct the reader to the author’s sources. I think the endnotes could have been fuller. I realize, though, that a longer list might have made the book so large that it would discourage potential readers. Perhaps expanded endnotes could be placed on a website.

But this concern pales in comparison to the impressive quality of this book. It is well reasoned and highly informative. Above all, it is an eloquent call for greater respect for the animals that share the planet with us.

William Crain, who lives part time in Montauk, is president of the East Hampton Group for Wildlife and a co-founder of the Safe Haven Farm Sanctuary in Poughquag, N.Y. His most recent book is “The Emotional Lives of Animals and Children: Insights From a Farm Sanctuary.”

Carl Safina’s books include “The View From Lazy Point.” The founder of the Safina Center on the environment at Stony Brook University, he lives in Amagansett. 

At 40 years old this year, it’s fair to say “Pushcart Prize: Best of the Small Presses” has matured into a powerful voice in American literature. It’s also fair to say WordTheatre, a nonprofit organization founded in 2003 that in its own words “gives voice to great writing” has gained momentum, with its growing list of film and television celebrities and acclaimed authors as partners.

A benefit on Saturday at Guild Hall in East Hampton Village titled Where Words Survive and Thrive will allow WordTheatre to support Pushcart’s efforts as well as kick off the celebration of Pushcart’s milestone. An impressive lineup of actors and actresses, including Amber Tamblyn, Carla Gugino, Ari Graynor, Sarah Wynter, Vincent Piazza, Zack Grenier, Ben Schwartz, and Christopher McDonald, will read some of the best of the best curated from Pushcart’s four decades of anthologies.

“It’s my biggest pleasure to do this. It’s the 40th anniversary, so I said let’s ensure this continues another 40 years,” said Cedering Fox, the event’s producer and a voiceover professional who has, for the past three years, lent her voice to the Oscars.

The Pushcart Prize holds special significance for Ms. Fox, whose mother, Siv Cedering, a poet and longtime Amagansett resident, twice was honored by Pushcart. Before her death, Ms. Cedering read at the first WordTheatre benefit at Guild Hall, held in 2007. Since then, Ms. Fox has returned every other year to Guild Hall to convene the talents of writers and actors in support of Pushcart.

“It’s my gift to my mother, and it keeps me connected to the community,” she said. Referring to the South Fork, she said, “I feel a real affinity for this part of the world. When you think about all the great writers who have come up through here and have been nurtured here, it’s just fitting.”

In addition to the man who started it all, Bill Henderson of Springs, Pushcart’s founding editors include Reynolds Price, Gordon Lish, Joyce Carol Oates, Paul Bowles, Ralph Ellison, and more than 20 other heavy-hitting names in modern literature.

For her WordTheatre performances, which are held in venues from Los Angeles to London, Ms. Fox said she has discovered many fine writers from among Pushcart’s prize recipients. On Saturday, the writers whose work will be featured include A.M. Homes, the author of the best-selling memoir “The Mistress’s Daughter” and a winner of awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts, David Means, a prolific short-story writer who was a National Book Critics Circle Award finalist and a Los Angeles Times Book Prize winner, and Richard Bausch, a novelist whose book “The Last Good Time” was made into a feature-length film.

The lineup of performers is no less impressive. Ms. Gugino, an actress and model, has appeared in movies such as “Spy Kids” and “Watchmen.” Ms. Tamblyn has starred in films such as “Django Unchained” and “The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants.” More recently, she founded the Write Now Poetry Society and published the book “Dark Sparkler,” which profiles famous women “who glimmered on screen” but fell to pieces in real life.

Ms. Graynor is an actress and producer who has starred in movies like “The Sitter,” “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist,” and “Mystic River.” Mr. Piazza is perhaps best known for his role as the Italian-American mobster Lucky Luciano in the HBO series “Boardwalk Empire.” Mr. Grenier is a Tony Award nominee of “33 Variations” fame who has more recently been involved in the TV series “The Good Wife.” Ms. Wynter is known for her work on “The 6th Day,” “Lost Souls,” “24,” “American Odyssey,” and “Californication.”

“You laugh, you cry,” Ms. Fox said. “Everybody is a 6-year-old kid when they’re listening to a great short story read by a great actor.”

Tickets to a 6:30 p.m. V.I.P. reception with the actors and writers on Saturday cost $125 and include a signed hardcover copy of Pushcart’s 40th anthology. For the show, which starts at 8 p.m., general admission tickets range from $25 to $65.

“The Lost Notebook”

John Canemaker

Weldon Owen, $75

“Don’t park your car there, you jackass!” the recluse in the muumuu would call out from a window of her bungalow near Hyperion Avenue in Los Angeles, where the Walt Disney Studio used to be. Hollywood being Hollywood, naturally she had stashed away in a drawer a notebook that amounts to “a Rosetta stone of animation special-effects cinematography,” unlocking “the secrets of how Disney’s first feature-film productions — among the greatest of animated films — were made.”

So writes John Canemaker, the director of the animation program at New York University, in his latest book of animation history, “The Lost Notebook.” The notebook, actually one of five found in Ethel Schultheis’s house upon her death in 1990, was the work of her husband, Herman Schultheis, a photographer, photographic effects engineer, and lab technician whose tenure at the Disney Studio roughly corresponded with its best and most innovative run, from “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs” in 1937 to “Pinocchio” and “Fantasia” in 1940, “Dumbo” a year later, and “Bambi” in 1942.

Disney’s early artists and animators have long since been celebrated, the author points out, but not so the technical crews, whose work, if not for Schultheis’s obsessive cataloguing of charts, tables, drawings, filmstrips, and photos of obscure equipment, was simply forgotten as technology progressed. Schultheis worked in the Process Lab and the Special Effects Camera Department, where craftsmen “invented and produced imaginative visual effects to enhance the believability of the films’ character animation,” in essence making it up on the fly and coming up with a vocabulary for the new field as they went along.

One famous sequence in “Pinocchio,” which contains some of the most beautiful animation the Disney Studio, or anyone, ever produced, highlights the technological labors: An elaborate “multiplane camera dolly” through Geppetto’s quiet village starts on a bell tower overlooking it. “The ringing bells disturb a flock of white doves, whose flight leads the camera downward” into the streets, Mr. Canemaker writes, where “townspeople begin their day and children head for school as the camera swoops past trees, over rooftops, under an arch, into the main town square, and down a cobblestone street ending at Geppetto’s toy shop.”

The scene lasts 40 seconds and cost $1.8 million in today’s currency.

“The Lost Notebook” is a big, handsome coffee table book, allowing for a complete reproduction Schultheis’s fifth notebook and his documentation of the painstaking work behind such artistry. The production of “Fantasia” is documented in even greater detail.

Mr. Canemaker describes the notebooks as time capsules, Schultheis’s meticulous scrapbooking as the invaluable work of an unintentional historian. (All of his notebooks are in the Walt Disney Family Museum at the Presidio in San Francisco.) But the book is just as much the story of an immigrant striving to make it in the movie business.

That he was an outspoken and opinionated self-promoter hurt Schultheis, though you might think the opposite in Tinseltown, and so did the fact of his multifarious skills, from the camera to the lab, from lighting to sound recording, in an industry that put a premium on specialization. What’s more, hailing as he did from Germany, in the lead-up to America’s entry into World War II he came to be viewed with increasing suspicion, and any number of times was thought to be a spy.

One of his main jobs for Disney entailed wide-ranging travels to take still photos for researchers and artists to use in their work, and away from the studio he kept the shutter snapping, taking untold thousands of shots, the most lasting of them revealing L.A. as it was in the late 1930s — not the glamour, but the working-class side: picnickers in the shadow of a forest of oil derricks, an Asian greengrocer amid her stacks of produce, stable hands taking a break, a young African-American in a bellhop’s uniform selling hats for 88 cents. They’re now being catalogued at the Los Angeles Public Library, which is making them available on its website.

Whether it was fueled by his outsider’s difficulties in assimilating to America and landing a foothold in its exclusive entertainment biz, or simply by his passion for archaeology, just one of his many avocations, is impossible to say, but Schultheis’s wanderlust never abated. In 1955, a plane deposited him in Central America and, carrying two cameras, a pocketknife, and not much else, he strode into the jungle. His scattered bones were found a year and a half later.

Not a pleasant ending, but the stuff of movies.

John Canemaker won an Academy Award in 2005 for his animated short “The Moon and the Son: An Imagined Conversation.” He lives part time in Bridgehampton.

Adoption Revisited

Lorraine Dusky’s 1979 memoir, “Birthmark,” was the wrenching account of her giving up her daughter for adoption. Now, 36 years later, the longtime Sag Harbor resident is returning to the story and her critique of how adoption is handled in this country.

The follow-up memoir, “Hole in My Heart,” published through Amazon, explores her reunion with her daughter, the difficulties for a child with two families, and her daughter’s death in 2007. She’ll read from it at Canio’s Books in Sag Harbor on Saturday at 5 p.m.

Park Avenue “Primates”

You’ve heard of Wednesday Martin’s new “anthropological memoir,” “Primates of Park Avenue,” involving her experiences raising children on the Upper East Side of Manhattan among the privileged, the gym-frequenting, the blond? Well, she’ll be interviewed about it next Thursday at the Southampton Arts Center.

Her interlocutor, Alex Kuczynski of Southampton, is a contributor to The New York Times and the author of “Beauty Junkies.” The talk, which starts at 5:30 p.m., is part of a series she is hosting at the center, which is in the old Parrish Art Museum on Job’s Lane. The cost is $18. Also of note? There’ll be wine.

“Out of Line: The Art

Of Jules Feiffer”

Martha Fay

Abrams, $40

One of the most incisive Jules Feiffer quotes Martha Fay uses in this generously illustrated biography gets to the core of the artist’s culture-shaking genius:

“I wanted to put the essence of my reader on the page . . . to move him out of his genteel, benign, suburban WASP landscape. I wanted to circumcise the sucker and transplant him from the Jazz Age from whence he came to the Age of Anxiety, from Babbittry and Dale Carnegie to Sigmund Freud. . . .”

Mr. Feiffer was talking specifically about the ’60s and his strip “Sick, Sick, Sick” in The Village Voice, but the combination of societal insight and creative aggression reflected in his remark has been the booster rocket of all his work and why, for more than 50 years, we have hung on the fence of his deconstruction site watching the work of this nervy kid who can say the things we wouldn’t dare and probably couldn’t think of in any case.

The hard cover underneath the dust jacket of “Out of Line” is a facsimile reproduction of Mr. Feiffer’s art class binder. It is an endearingly clunky lettering job spelling out JULES FEIFFER ART 330 SEC. 5.14 along with a determined drawing of a palette and brush. In faint pencil lines all over the cover are Jules’s doodles of superheroes, boxers, and math computations. In the drawings’ obvious fervor in which the young Jules proclaims himself an artist and its establishment of two of Mr. Feiffer’s main themes (minus the math), the cover sets up the charming and witty tone of the whole book.

The first chapters show drawings Jules’s mother saved from his childhood and the family photographs from the same period. The drawings, youthful as they are, establish an attitude, vigorous and pugnacious, that we can recognize in Mr. Feiffer’s early comics, the breakthrough strips in The Village Voice, and even the plots of his plays and movies that followed. That’s one of the things the many illustrations in the book establish, that with all of the false starts, the moving into new territory, the experiments with style, there is a core confidence in Mr. Feiffer that never really wavers.

Ms. Fay’s fluid and urbane writing gives the sociological context that the story needs given how much Mr. Feiffer was reacting to the times, and she uses quotes from Mike Nichols, Hugh Hefner, Ed Koren, and this one from Art Spiegelman to reflect Mr. Feiffer’s relationship to his peers: “That’s what made Jules so significant and a real role model. He had to reinvent comics to take advantage of his subjectivity, his . . . intellectual side.”

In revisiting the many Village Voice strips reproduced in the book I was struck by how time-defyingly brilliant they are. The characters he invented seem like friends from my youth whose anxieties and pretensions are forever current — the modern dancer celebrating spring and her personal angst; Bernard, the nebbish, agonizing over the meaning of manhood and his failure with women; Huey, the cad, who succeeds where Bernard fails.

Then, of course, the parade of politicians whose words Mr. Feiffer unmasks for the manipulative dissimulations they are. The strip in which President Kennedy checks in with his press secretary for polling on his popularity, for instance, reveals the hungry ego behind the heroic facade. Mr. Feiffer lets Nixon, sitting, stolidly staring out at us, speak for himself in strip after devastating strip. Mr. Feiffer’s satirical provocations probably had the same impact on the young in the ’60s and ’70s as Jon Stewart and “The Daily Show” has had in our time.

Intermittently, during these years of writing and drawing “Sick, Sick, Sick,” Mr. Feiffer had been writing plays, “Little Murders” and “Knock, Knock,” among others, and screenplays, “Munro,” “Carnal Knowledge,” “Popeye,” and “VD Blues.” The stories that Ms. Fay tells of the writing and producing of these plays and films are the most celebrity-filled parts of the book and, along with the popular triumphs of these productions, describe Mr. Feiffer’s difficulties with some of his collaborators and with the critics of the work. Walter Kerr, for instance, first put down “Little Murders” as being “the funniest of Mr. Feiffer’s jaundiced visions,” before seeing it again and giving it his big thumbs-up.

Ms. Fay’s story of Mr. Feiffer’s experience writing the script for the movie “Popeye” is the classic literary writer’s story of being chewed up in the maw of a big Hollywood production, but Mr. Feiffer’s candidness in revealing his interaction with and his feelings about the director Robert Altman give the tale a vividness you don’t usually get in these movie recollections.

Although Mr. Feiffer had illustrated Norton Juster’s “The Phantom Tollbooth,” the real beginning of his children’s book period began with the creation of “The Man in the Ceiling” in 1993. It started as a failed collaboration with his longtime friend Edward Sorel, Mr. Feiffer to write the story and Mr. Sorel to illustrate it. When Mr. Sorel backed out, feeling the gist of the tale wasn’t right for him, Mr. Feiffer decided to proceed and illustrate it himself. The picture book form released a different kind of fictional writing in him that was immensely pleasurable, led to his doing 10 more books for children, and, in a way, prepared him to embark on the most significant book of his current career.

“Kill My Mother,” a graphic novel, to which Ms. Fay devotes the last 11 pages of the book, is an extraordinary achievement and, as Ms. Fay writes, “might be said to bring [Mr. Feiffer’s] long run full circle.” The novel is a complex story involving all Mr. Feiffer’s favorite noir set pieces from 1940s movies: the tough detective, the mysterious dame, meetings under lamp light, and even a scene in the World War II Pacific jungles with a transgender soldier (Jules, you got ahead of the zeitgeist, again!).

As ingenious as the story is and as satisfying the zing of the dialogue, the art, it seems to me, is an even more astonishing accomplishment. Sixty-three years after the young Jules Feiffer struggled unsuccessfully to match the smooth complexity of Will Eisner’s style in “The Spirit,” the 84-year-old Feiffer broke through to his own way of drawing and painting a much more complex story than he had ever tackled. The rapid, impatient Feiffer line still gets to the essence quickly, but now the artist can use it to describe extremely nuanced body language and the interaction of many figures in a scene. Where once color in his work was a secondary handmaiden to the line, it now becomes a major element, evoking light, atmosphere, and psychology. Whole scenes are dominated by the mood of what the color washes and intricacies set up. I can only imagine the bliss he felt while working on this book.

“Out of Line” is a fascinating visual and literary journey through the multifaceted life and work of a creative icon of our times. The book couldn’t have had a more satisfying ending than to document Jules Feiffer stepping up to the plate once again and, with “Kill My Mother,” hitting an artistic home run.

James McMullan, formerly of Sag Harbor, has painted scores of posters for Lincoln Center Theater and illustrated many children’s books with his wife, the writer Kate McMullan. His latest book is “Leaving China: An Artist Paints His World War II Childhood.”

Jules Feiffer lives in East Hampton.