An absorbing and harrowing look at a cutthroat industry culture that runs on raw ambition and hidden shame.
A Hollywood consultant’s scathing report on what he sees as Tinseltown’s race problem.
Racism has always pervaded American life, but as Johnson recounts in his first book, it has adopted new and insidious forms in recent years, particularly in Hollywood, where he worked from the early 1990s until quite recently. He describes an industry in which black actors are chastised for turning in performances that read as “too refined,” in which a TV network executive won’t hire a black musician because “he scares me, and I’ll deny I ever said that if I have to,” and in which, regardless of race, all participants “seemed to get off on degrading anyone below them.” Johnson tells these anecdotes as asides to his own story: that of an aspiring writer in Los Angeles who can’t catch a break. After arriving there from the Midwest, Johnson discovered that “Blacks had their areas, and so did whites, much like Chicago.” The movie business is segregated, he charges. White executives guard their turf through employment intimidation, he writes, and the search for “like-minded people” often means further marginalizing the already marginalized. Johnson explains that young black filmmakers do get opportunities to work, but if those projects fail to live up to expectations, their creators aren't provided with second chances. Johnson writes with grace and intelligence. At times, he seems to set down harsh facts against his own instincts: his temperament is somewhat conservative, and had the episodes he recounts been less egregious, he may not have felt the need to record them. The reader curious to know how an idea becomes a script and then a property and then a movie or a television show will find a step-by-step insider account of the process here, one chronicled with unhappy wisdom but without bitterness. “They played the game dirty and used undetectable discrimination tactics to beat me and other blacks right [off the playing] field,” Johnson writes toward the end. His engrossing story should make readers sorry they did: Hollywood would be a better place if he was still a part of it.
An absorbing and harrowing look at a cutthroat industry culture that runs on raw ambition and hidden shame.Pub Date: Oct. 2, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-9969046-0-5
Page Count: 338
Publisher: My Day in Court Publishing
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2020
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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