A fond look at the genesis and growing pains of the world’s foremost film organization.
A history of the world’s most famous movie awards and the organization that controls them.
The Oscar is “the single best-known work of twentieth-century sculpture,” yet “the organization that dispenses those awards—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—has never been well understood,” writes Davis, who was the Academy’s executive director for more than 20 years. He aims to improve that understanding with this book. The author focuses on the Academy’s first 30 years, from its founding in 1927 at the instigation of Louis B. Mayer, who saw the nascent Academy “as a means of elevating the public perception of film to the level of long-acknowledged art forms,” through the mid-1950s, when Academy governors worried about the threat from “the just-stirring young giant of television.” Davis covers a variety of significant events in the organization’s history, including battles with unions and guilds, the appointment of Postmaster General Will Hays to bring “wholesomeness” to the industry after its 1920s scandals, and the period in 1933 when the Academy “was essentially broke.” Technical and financial details will seem dry to anyone uninterested in dues and expenses, bylaws, building refurbishments, and the like. The best sections are those pertaining to celebrities and the Oscar itself. Davis cites competing stories of how the Oscar got its name, the most entertaining of which is Bette Davis’ claim (no relation) that she gave it her husband’s middle name because the statuette and her husband had similar backsides. Many stories are satisfyingly ribald, as when Davis notes the irony of Hays being set up in a building that had “pointedly erotic postures and the full-frontal nudity of both sexes” on the fire-escape frieze, with figures that are clearly making a film. “There is no way,” writes the author, “for a modern viewer to avoid the impression that the subject is a porn shoot in the Valley.”
A fond look at the genesis and growing pains of the world’s foremost film organization.Pub Date: Oct. 11, 2022
ISBN: 978-1-68458-119-1
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Brandeis Univ.
Review Posted Online: July 4, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 2022
BOOK REVIEW
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.
Smith returns with a photo-heavy book of days, celebrating births, deaths, and the quotidian, all anchored by her distinctive style.
In 2018, the musician and National Book Award–winning author began posting on Instagram, and the account quickly took off. Inspired by the captioned photo format, this book provides an image for every day of the year and descriptions that are by turns intimate, humorous, and insightful, and each bit of text adds human depth to the image. Smith, who writes and takes pictures every day, is clearly comfortable with the social media platform—which “has served as a way to share old and new discoveries, celebrate birthdays, remember the departed, and salute our youth”—and the material translates well to the page. The book, which is both visually impactful and lyrically moving, uses Instagram as a point of departure, but it goes well beyond to plumb Smith’s extensive archives. The deeply personal collection of photos includes old Polaroid images, recent cellphone snapshots, and much-thumbed film prints, spanning across decades to bring readers from the counterculture movement of the 1960s to the present. Many pages are taken up with the graves and birthdays of writers and artists, many of whom the author knew personally. We also meet her cat, “Cairo, my Abyssinian. A sweet little thing the color of the pyramids, with a loyal and peaceful disposition.” Part calendar, part memoir, and part cultural record, the book serves as a rich exploration of the author’s fascinating mind. “Offered in gratitude, as a place to be heartened, even in the basest of times,” it reminds us that “each day is precious, for we are yet breathing, moved by the way light falls on a high branch, or a morning worktable, or the sculpted headstone of a beloved poet.”
A powerful melding of image and text inspired by Instagram yet original in its execution.Pub Date: Nov. 15, 2022
ISBN: 978-0-593-44854-0
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 5, 2022
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2022
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
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