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 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
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