Created by Matt Zoller Seitz
Directed by Judith Carter
“If you only read the books that everyone else is reading, you can only think what everyone else is thinking.”
Haruki Murakami
A spectacular and comprehensive authorized retrospective of Oscar-winning visual effects master Phil Tippett, founder and namesake of iconic Tippett Studio
From Star Wars to Jurassic Park and RoboCop to Starship Troopers, special effects master Phil Tippett has brought his magic to some of the most iconic films of all time. His unparalleled career in visual effects spans more than 40 years, with two Academy Awards, one BAFTA, and two Emmys. This stunning book by Gilles Penso, published in a beautiful slipcase, celebrates Tippett’s career, from early Super 8 explorations through his groundbreaking work with Industrial Light & Magic, DreamWorks, and beyond. While Tippett’s first love remains the stop-motion animation that made him a Hollywood legend, he was present at the birth of big-screen digital effects, and his genius has evolved with the times. In 1984 he founded Tippett Studio, which has come to specialize in digital effects.
Packed with over a thousand behind-the-scenes photographs, Mad Dreams and Monsters includes never-before-published stories from the master himself and a veritable who’s who of visual effects luminaries—a must-have for movie fans, film students, and anyone who’s ever been captivated by movie magic.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Gilles Penso has worked on more than a dozen film and television projects in English as well as his native French, including Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan (2011); Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex(2015); and Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters (2019), created with coauthor Alexandre Poncet. Alexandre Poncet is a composer, producer, and director based in France. He has created the music for six films and worked with Penso on the special-effects documentaries Ray Harryhausen: Special Effects Titan; Creature Designers: The Frankenstein Complex; and Phil Tippett: Mad Dreams and Monsters. Paul Verhoeven is a noted director of films such as RoboCop, Starship Troopers, Basic Instinct, and Total Recall, among others, and credits Tippett with an invaluable on-the-fly education in practical effects on the set of RoboCop. Dennis Muren is a nine-time Academy Award–winning visual effects artist. He has worked on blockbusters such as the Star Wars saga, E.T., Indiana Jones, and Terminator 2: Judgment Day.
MZS.Press is the online arts bookstore founded by author, critic, and filmmaker Matt Zoller Seitz and directed by Judith Carter. It offers new, used, signed, collectible, and rare books on film, TV, music, photography, and the visual arts. The store was launched in 2019 on a different platform and has expanded to incorporate arts books published by MZSPress's private imprint: titles currently include Seitz's The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon and Dreams of Deadwood, about the HBO Western, and Walter Chaw's A Walter Hill Film.
Our deepest wish is to promote, encourage, and distribute work by small presses, academic presses, and individuals. Extraordinary work tends to get swallowed up on giant platforms like Amazon and Barnes & Noble. The store's inventory of nearly 1000 volumes is currently in the process of being reconstructed after its relocation from Cincinnati, Ohio, to Dallas, Texas. The titles featured here are personally selected by a group of curators and advisors, including Seitz, Carter, and an array of critics, artists, journalists, educators, publishers, and arts mavens who are known for their ability to suss out what Seitz's jazz musician dad liked to call "the good sh*t."
"I feel comfortable using legal jargon in everyday life... I object!" Alicia Silverstone as Cher Horowitz in Legally Blonde, 2001
Matt Zoller Seitz
Critic, Author, Filmmaker, MZS Press Creator
Matt Zoller Seitz is the Editor at Large and film critic of RogerEbert.com; Features Writer for New York Magazine and Vulture.com, Contributing Writer for D Magazine and Texas Highways as well as finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in criticism. His writing on film and TV has appeared in Sight and Sound, The New York Times, Salon.com, The New Republic and Rolling Stone. Seitz is the founder and original editor of the influential film blog The House Next Door, now a part of Slant Magazine.
Seitz has written, narrated, edited or produced over a hundred hours’ worth of video essays about cinema history and style for The Museum of the Moving Image, Salon.com and Vulture, among other outlets such as Texas Highways and AARP. His five-part 2009 video essay Wes Anderson: The Substance of Style was spun off into the hardcover book The Wes Anderson Collection. This book and its follow-up, The Wes Anderson Collection: Grand Budapest Hotel were New York Times bestsellers.
Other Seitz books include the New York Times bestsellers The Sopranos Sessions and Mad Men Carousel; TV (The Book), The Deadwood Bible: A Lie Agreed Upon, and The Wes Anderson Collection: The French Dispatch. He is also an interviewer, moderator, and film programmer who has curated and hosted film and TV presentations for the Museum of the Moving Image, IFC Center, San Francisco's Roxie Cinema, and other venues. He has launched a Dallas extension of his MZS Film Series at the historic Texas Theater. On October 3-6, 2024 he brought the legendary filmmaker Oliver Stone back to Dallas for a historic return to the city and the Texas Theatre!
Judith is quoted as saying "his hobbies include exotic dancing, moonwalking, and affixing masking tape labels to every food item in the refrigerator, including eggs. Oh and he has the attention span of a gnat." MZS agreed to it all except the moonwalking.