A surprisingly uncontroversial exposé with an egocentric aftertaste.
Insider’s guide to independent filmmaking from a passionate 20-year industry veteran.
Hoping to usher in the next generation of entrepreneurs, Vachon follows up her how-to guide for first-time film producers (Shooting to Kill, not reviewed) with one about the inner workings of Killer Films, the indie production company she runs with partner, Pam Koffler. The author has come a long way since her humble beginnings as Todd Haynes’s assistant on his 1987 thesis project, Superstar. Raised by an errant father and a cancer-stricken mother, Vachon grew up poor in New York City in the mid-’80s. She loved American cinema, and it wasn’t long before she earned her wings at the independent filmmaker’s paradise, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where she eventually became a film-festival judge. Soon came the grueling fundraisers, tough shooting schedules and MPAA ratings battles over films like Kids, Boys Don’t Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Encounters with a detached Julia Roberts and a double-talking Kirsten Dunst weren’t much fun either. In 2002, Vachon achieved breakout triumphs with One Hour Photo (starring Robin Williams) and Todd Haynes’s slickly produced masterpiece Far From Heaven, about which she warned her crew, “We have more ambition than money.” The author writes of these ups and downs with good humor. Among her ten rules for surviving Cannes Film Festival: “You will look like shit by the end. Embrace it.” She supplements her text with mini-commentaries from other producers and diary segments that spotlight hourly, on-set action. While conceding that modern filmmaking has become a “commodity business,” Vachon still glows when über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer admits he’s a “big admirer.” Fans of Hollywood’s mighty, ever-grinding celluloid machine will be rapt and sated by her straightforward, at times dispassionately dry dissection of a cutthroat industry. Others will resort to paging through for random points of interest.
A surprisingly uncontroversial exposé with an egocentric aftertaste.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5630-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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