Making Movies

Award-winning director Lumet (Dog Day Afternoon; The Verdict) serves as an unpretentious, anecdotal and sometimes irascible gide to the knotty process of getting a story on the screen. Brushing aside the auteur theory, he insists that filmmaking is a collaborative art involving technicians, actors and writers. Drawing upon almost 40 years' experience, the author lucidly explains the technical and aesthetic considerations in set design, cinematography and editing. As Lumet's movies are ample testimony to his love of language and actors, he unsurprisingly singles out such hyperbolic talents as screenwriter Paddy Chayefsky and actors Al Pacino and Katharine Hepburn, from whom he coaxed one of her bravest performances--as the crumbling matriarch in O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. But Lumet is not star-struck: ``If my movie has two stars in it, I always know it really has three. The third star is the camera.'' Remarkably informative and engrossing, even if film is not your bag. It's all here: lights, camera, action. (Mar.)