The only compass readers will ever need to navigate the treacherous waters of filmmaking.
A hilarious and helpful insider’s guide to launching a successful writing career in Hollywood.
The co-creators of the TV series Reno 911 and such films as Night at the Museum Garant and Lennon take a gut-busting stab at the published world in their first book. Unapologetically designed as “a guide to writing hit movies that make you and the studio piles of money,” the authors offer invaluable advice that much of Hollywood would shudder to reveal. And they would know—the pair has grossed “$1,467,015,501.00 and counting at the box office.” Garant and Lennon take on the Goliath-like task of explaining the entire screenwriting process from pitching to selling, studio development to a practical guide to writing with a partner (which they swear will have “you writ[ing] twice as fast as you would without”). They emphasize the importance of both humor and practicality, both of which are imperative tools to a successful career working in “the Dream Machine.” The authors demystify the secretive world of screenwriting in Hollywood by offering tips on everything from sequels (“Never discuss the sequel before the movie comes out!”) to, arguably, the biggest question of all: “Why does almost every studio movie suck donkey balls?” Their answer: “Development Hell.” They even provide helpful hints on how to discern one’s importance to the studio, suggesting that “the easy way to tell what the studio’s opinion of you is where…they let you park.”
The only compass readers will ever need to navigate the treacherous waters of filmmaking.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8675-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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