Paul Fischer

An Amazon Best of The Year Nonfiction SelectionLibrary Journal Top Ten Book of the Year!The Extraordinary True Story of Kim Jong-Il’s kidnapping of the golden couple of South Korean Cinema, The Movies They Were Forced to Make, and Their Daring Escape.Before becoming the world’s most notorious dictator, Kim Jong-Il ran North Korea’s Ministry for Propaganda and all its film studios. Underwhelmed by the pool of talent available to him he took drastic steps, ordering the kidnap of Choi Eun-Hee (Madame Choi) – South Korea’s most famous actress – and her ex-husband Shin Sang-Ok, the country’s most famous filmmaker. But as Madame Choi and Shin Shang-Ok begin to make North Korea’s greatest films, they hatch a plan of escape worthy of a blockbuster Hollywood ending. A Kim Jong-Il Production is that rarest of a wildly entertaining, cunningly told story that offers a rare glimpse into a nation still wrapped in mystery.“Gripping… A Kim Jong-Il Production tells the absurd, harrowing, and true story of Choi and Shin's ordeal, which reveals the importance of film as propaganda to the North Korean regime.” ― Esquire.com“The 1978 abductions of the South Korean actress Choi-Eun-He and her ex-husband, the director Shin Sang-Ok, in Hong Kong is the true crime at the center of Paul Fischer's gripping and surprisingly timely new book.” ― The New York Times“An entertaining new book…details how [Shin and Choi] finally seized their chance to seek asylum…A stupefying, novelistic read.” ― The Boston Globe“Fischer's entertaining narrative paints an arresting portrait of a North Korean "theater state," forced to enact the demented script of a sociopathic tyrant.” ― Publishers Weekly“Paul Fischer's book A Kim Jong-Il Production is a highly illuminating deep dive on the middle Kim's cinematic obsessions and the film arms race between the two Koreas.” ― The Washington Post“Exhaustively researched, highly engrossing chronicle of the outrageous abduction of a pair of well-known South Korean filmmakers by the nefarious network of North Korea's Kim Jong-Il.”― Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

One of the New York Times Best True Crime of 2022A “spellbinding, thriller-like” ( Shelf Awareness ) history about the invention of the motion picture and the mysterious, forgotten man behind it—detailing his life, work, disappearance, and legacy.The year is 1888, and Louis Le Prince is finally testing his “taker” or “receiver” device for his family on the front lawn. The device is meant to capture ten to twelve images per second on film, creating a reproduction of reality that can be replayed as many times as desired. In an otherwise separate and detached world, occurrences from one end of the globe could now be viewable with only a few days delay on the other side of the world. No human experience—from the most mundane to the most momentous—would need to be lost to history.In 1890, Le Prince was granted patents in four countries ahead of other inventors who were rushing to accomplish the same task. But just weeks before unveiling his invention to the world, he mysteriously disappeared and was never seen or heard from again. Three and half years later, Thomas Edison, Le Prince’s rival, made the device public, claiming to have invented it himself. And the man who had dedicated his life to preserving memories was himself lost to history—until now.The Man Who Invented Motion Pictures pulls back the curtain and presents a “passionate, detailed defense of Louis Le Prince…unfurled with all the cliffhangers and red herrings of a scripted melodrama” ( The New York Times Book Review ). This “fascinating, informative, skillfully articulated narrative” ( Kirkus Reviews , starred review) presents the never-before-told history of the motion picture and sheds light on the unsolved mystery of Le Prince’s disappearance.

The untold, intimate story of how three young visionaries―Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas, and Steven Spielberg―revolutionized American cinema, creating the most iconic films in history while risking everything, redefining friendship, and shaping Hollywood as we know it.In the summer of 1967, as the old Hollywood studio system was dying, an intense, uncompromising young film school graduate named George Lucas walked onto the Warner Bros backlot for his first day working as an assistant to another up-and-coming, largely-unknown filmmaker, a boisterous father of two called Francis Ford Coppola. At the exact same time, across town on the Universal Studios lot, a film-obsessed twenty-year-old from a peripatetic Jewish family, Steven Spielberg, longed to break free from his apprenticeship for the struggling studio and become a film director in his own right.Within a year, the three men would become friends. Spielberg, prioritizing security, got his seven-year contract directing television. Lucas and Coppola, hungry for independence, left Hollywood for San Francisco to found an alternative studio, American Zoetrope, and make films without answering to corporate capitalism.Based on extensive research and hundreds of original interviews with the inner circle of these Hollywood icons, The Last Kings of Hollywood tells the thrilling, dramatic inside story of how, over the next fifteen years, the three filmmakers rivalled and supported each other, fell out and reconciled, and struggled to reinvent popular American cinema. Along the way, Coppola directed The Godfather, then the highest-grossing film of all-time, until Spielberg surpassed it with Jaws ― whose record Lucas broke with Star Wars, which Spielberg surpassed again with E.T. By the early 1980s, they were the richest, best-known filmmakers in the world, each with an empire of their own. The Last Kings of Hollywood is an unprecedented chronicle of their rise, their dreams and demons, their triumphs and their failures ― intimate, extraordinary, and supremely entertaining.