Anyone else curious why a known writer in the business can’t pen his own memoir?
An enthusiastic, colloquially slapdash memoir about navigating Hollywood egos by longtime PR man and producer Feldman that traces his career from the early 1950s (The World of Suzie Wong) to today (The Truman Show, 101 Dalmations).
Bronx native Feldman was known as the “go-to” guy, finding his first jobs in the New York press department of 20th Century Fox under legends Charles Einfeld and Spyros Skouras—the latter never actually knew who the guy was during the nine years he worked for him. (The book’s title, incidentally, comes from Skouras’s self-congratulatory query at the screening of All About Eve.) He moved to Paramount and worked under smart-alecky Ray Stark, aka the Electric Rabbit, also Fanny Brice’s son-in-law and the producer of Funny Girl starring Barbra Streisand (“particularly unpleasant . . . but a real trouper,” notes Feldman). From Seven Arts, where an ad campaign for Stanley Kubrick’s Lolita required a delicate maneuvering around the Catholic Legion of Decency, Feldman switched to Embassy Pictures under the relentless self-promoter Joseph E. Levine. Feldman later moved to L.A., where he actually made movies by the late 1960s, dazzled by the talent of John Wayne, Sam Peckinpah, Peter Sellars and Bette Davis, whose What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (with Joan Crawford) Feldman championed despite its rejection by other studios. Later he worked on incongruous, nonetheless successful projects, from Witness to Hot Dog…The Movie to The Truman Show. By the 1990s, he excelled at making bigger, noisier films shot in faraway places. Feldman’s anecdotes about the use of 300 Dalmation puppies for that Disney film are cute, and his push to make a movie of John Belushi’s life, Wired, is valiant in the face of Michael Ovitz’s threats. Feldman’s memoir is engaging, especially his “Rules of Producing,” though the bibliography is shamefully scant, and the writing sloppily dictated, e.g., tense-switching mid-paragraph and erratic ruptures in chronology.
Anyone else curious why a known writer in the business can’t pen his own memoir?Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-312-34801-0
Page Count: 256
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2005
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
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
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