Alan Greenberg

Robert Johnson was undoubtedly the most outstanding of the Mississippi Delta blues musicians and also one of the first inductees into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, but his short life remains steeped in mystery and wrapped in some of the most enduring legends of modern music. Love in Vain is Alan Greenberg’s remarkable, highly acclaimed, and genre-defying screenplay and is widely considered to be one of the foremost books on Robert Johnson’s life and legacy and an extraordinary exercise in American mythmaking. Newly revised and complete with extensive historical notes on Johnson’s life and the culture of the Mississippi Delta and blues music during the 1930s, Love in Vain is at once a classic of music writing and a screenplay whose reputation lies firmly in the realm of great American literature.

When Alan Greenberg first showed up at Werner Herzog s Munich home at age twenty-four, he was, according to the director, the first outsider to seek him and recognize his greatness. At the end of their first evening together, Herzog urged Greenberg to work with him on his film "Heart of Glass" and everything thereafter. He clinched his plea by assuring the young American, On the outside we ll look like gangsters, but on the inside we ll wear the gowns of priests. "Every Night the Trees Disappear" is an intimate chronicle of how this visionary filmmaker directed a masterwork. Greenberg s observations, interwoven with Herzog s original screenplay, elucidate just how unusual Herzog s filmmaking methods could be. By hypnotizing his actors before shooting each scene, Herzog led his crew into a veritable cinematic netherworld, resulting in one of the most haunting movies ever made. Rather than a conventional, journalistic account of how a director makes a movie, "Every Night the Trees Disappear" instead presents a unique vision with the feel of a novel intimate, penetrating, and filled with mystery."