Any film buff would love to join Winkler for a long conversation over drinks and dinner. At their best, his recollections...
A candid, revealing memoir from the acclaimed film producer and director.
Throughout the book, Winkler explores the exigencies of conceiving, financing, casting, and shooting a movie as well as the incessant troubleshooting, placating of the intemperate or churlish, cajoling, pleading, negotiating, and always thinking fast on one's feet—not to mention promotion, securing distribution, and other responsibilities. Beginning his career as a talent agent and manager, the author, with longtime partner Bob Chartoff, produced such Academy Award–winning films as Rocky, Raging Bull, Goodfellas and The Right Stuff while also directing other films. At 87, he's still at it. His diary is the chief wellspring of a highly detailed account of 50 years on the hot seat. Winkler chronicles the development of many well-regarded movies as well as the aborted attempts and misfires both accountable and unaccountable. Because the author moves in linear fashion from film to film, a certain sameness begins to creep into the telling. But this is more than compensated for by the diversity of the films discussed, Winkler’s palpable love of the industry, his insider's knowledge, and the generosity he extends to colleagues—not to say that the author doesn’t call out the occasional lout. Winkler also celebrates many longtime friends and associates, none more affectionately than (the late) Chartoff, Martin Scorsese, and Robert De Niro. Winkler’s writing style is breezy, consistently modest, and amiable. Like many in the business with an emotional investment, he occasionally overrates a film or a performance. However, as a screenwriter himself, Winkler knows a clunker when he sees it. You don’t win so many awards if you don't know what you're doing.
Any film buff would love to join Winkler for a long conversation over drinks and dinner. At their best, his recollections are as rich as his films are memorable.Pub Date: May 7, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-4197-3452-6
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Abrams
Review Posted Online: Feb. 2, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2019
PROFILES
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
SEEN & HEARD
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