Fascinating for entertainment industry buffs, and nicely revealing of an entrepreneur with a great heart as well as a golden...
Prolific film, TV, and entertainment producer Wolper tours his life, helped by veteran coauthor Fisher (Hard Evidence, 1995, etc.).
In the late 1940s, Wolper quit college to join buddy Jimmy Harris in forming Flamingo Films, a distribution company that sold product to all the new television stations opening around the country and clamoring for time fillers. There were no networks yet, and Hollywood, fearing TV’s takeover, would sell the stations no movies. However, Wolper and Harris did manage to buy the TV rights to an independently made film, The Adventures of Martin Eden starring Glen Ford and Evelyn Keyes, which they sold to countless stations; it became the first feature film ever broadcast on TV. Lack of product soon forced Flamingo to create original programming. In 1951, the company signed a $30-million, 31-year deal with National Comics for the TV rights to Superman, filmed 104 episodes at $20,000 each with George Reeves as the wrinkly-costumed Man of Steel, got Kellogg’s cereals to sponsor and sell the show everywhere outside the majors. Superman is still running. Older readers will have a nostalgia feast as Flamingo buys the rights from Universal for the Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers, and Don Winslow serials. Wolper’s interests grew, and he moved into producing, buying some rare Russian space footage for his first documentary, The Race for Space. Yet he always remained the visionary entrepreneur who has the ideas and assembles the talents but is himself not an artist. Among his colossal successes: Roots and The Thorn Birds on TV, staging the opening and closing ceremonies of the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics, the films Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory and L.A. Confidential, and the creation of the template for what would became A&E’s Biography series. Even so, declares Wolper, art collecting brings him his greatest rewards.
Fascinating for entertainment industry buffs, and nicely revealing of an entrepreneur with a great heart as well as a golden touch.Pub Date: March 11, 2003
ISBN: 0-7432-3687-4
Page Count: 384
Publisher: Scribner
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2002
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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