The Notebook Primer introduces readers to some of the most important figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.As Debra Winger has told it, when she was fourteen and expressed interest in acting, her father had her meet George Cukor, whose alarm system he had previously installed. Unimpressed, the lauded classical Hollywood director dismissed her, saying she had “no class” and that her voice and her walk were all wrong. Much changed between then and when she broke through in Urban Cowboy (1980)—change in the industry as well as in Winger herself—but you can imagine the potential there, hard to recognize as she was never quite polished the way most actresses are, a quality that is likely what made her so beguiling in the early 1980s.The origin story of Debra Winger is that several years after that Cukor meeting she got into an accident that left her blinded for months,...