If a camel is a horse designed by a committee, successful TV shows, on the evidence of the cautionary tale at hand, almost have to be accidents of nature. In 1990, Paisner (The Imperfect Mirror, 1989, etc.) was invited by TV impresario Bruce Paltrow (producer of St. Elsewhere and The White Shadow) to observe the filming of E.O.B., a sitcom Paltrow was producing in N.Y.C. The nascent program, starring Mary Beth Hurt and Rich Hall, focused on the antics of presidential speech-writers. Though a rough pilot was eventually taped, E.O.B. (slated for a six-episode run on the CBS prime-time summer schedule) never made it to the starting gate for reasons both within and beyond the control of its originators—e.g., Iraq's invasion of Kuwait, tardy casting, an uninspired director, script problems, a wildcat strike by technicians. Paltrow (who's married to actress Blythe Danner) and his colleagues tried again in 1991, this time on the West Coast. Despite a fresh cast (including William Daniels and singer Gladys Knight), the born-again project also sank without a trace. Thanks to Paisner, who has made the most of the unlimited access granted him by Paltrow, the abortive project (a collaborative failure if ever there was one) has achieved immortality of sorts here as a show-biz might-have-been. Without patronizing either the program's principals (a serious and dues-paying, albeit laid-back, lot) or the straitlaced networks that have the commercial equivalent of life-and-death powers, the author provides a riveting, revelatory account of the economic, creative, and pop-cultural forces shaping the entertainment fare available on home screens. One of the better inside-appreciations of the chancy, high- stakes game of broadcast TV since Merle Miller's Only You, Dick Daring (1964). (Eight pages of photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Oct. 1, 1992
ISBN: 1-55972-148-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: Birch Lane Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1992
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
An extraordinary true tale of torment, retribution, and loyalty that's irresistibly readable in spite of its intrusively melodramatic prose. Starting out with calculated, movie-ready anecdotes about his boyhood gang, Carcaterra's memoir takes a hairpin turn into horror and then changes tack once more to relate grippingly what must be one of the most outrageous confidence schemes ever perpetrated. Growing up in New York's Hell's Kitchen in the 1960s, former New York Daily News reporter Carcaterra (A Safe Place, 1993) had three close friends with whom he played stickball, bedeviled nuns, and ran errands for the neighborhood Mob boss. All this is recalled through a dripping mist of nostalgia; the streetcorner banter is as stilted and coy as a late Bowery Boys film. But a third of the way in, the story suddenly takes off: In 1967 the four friends seriously injured a man when they more or less unintentionally rolled a hot-dog cart down the steps of a subway entrance. The boys, aged 11 to 14, were packed off to an upstate New York reformatory so brutal it makes Sing Sing sound like Sunnybrook Farm. The guards continually raped and beat them, at one point tossing all of them into solitary confinement, where rats gnawed at their wounds and the menu consisted of oatmeal soaked in urine. Two of Carcaterra's friends were dehumanized by their year upstate, eventually becoming prominent gangsters. In 1980, they happened upon the former guard who had been their principal torturer and shot him dead. The book's stunning denouement concerns the successful plot devised by the author and his third friend, now a Manhattan assistant DA, to free the two killers and to exact revenge against the remaining ex-guards who had scarred their lives so irrevocably. Carcaterra has run a moral and emotional gauntlet, and the resulting book, despite its flaws, is disturbing and hard to forget. (Film rights to Propaganda; author tour)
Pub Date: July 10, 1995
ISBN: 0-345-39606-5
Page Count: 432
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
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