TELL ME HOW YOU LOVE THE PICTURE

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?