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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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