Like Pakula’s films, Brown’s biography is specific, carefully assembled and straightforward, but also sometimes tepid and...
A workmanlike study of a workmanlike filmmaker.
As producer, screenwriter and director, Alan J. Pakula created an inconsistent body of work. He helmed outright flops (Rollover), middling thrillers (The Devil’s Own) and some mostly successful hits (Sophie’s Choice, All the President’s Men). An admirer of Pakula’s work, Brown (Zero Mostel: A Biography, 1989) surveys Pakula’s career with a clear eye, acknowledging Pakula’s uneven record, while suggesting that as time passes, some of his films (Klute and The Parallax View) are gaining in stature. With a keen sense of detail that Pakula would have admired, Brown traces his subject’s journey from first efforts as a Broadway producer to major success in Hollywood as producer of To Kill a Mockingbird. Brown rather briskly passes over Pakula’s subsequent misfires, though not without pinpointing why they failed. Pakula’s successes as a director receive more expansive treatment as Brown details Pakula’s meticulous recreation of the Washington Post newsroom for All the President’s Men and his sensitive adaptation of William Styron’s novel Sophie’s Choice. But as Pakula felt a film should serve its story in a clear, direct way, and as he worked in severe genres, he never became a major auteur, leaving the author in sometimes shallow water. Pakula did encourage his actors to improvise, take risks, ask questions and try various approaches to their roles, a receptive attitude that won devotion from the likes of Jane Fonda, Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline. Brown sketches out the details of Pakula’s personal life, which ended in 1998 when the filmmaker was killed in a car crash on Long Island. Pakula, friends and family repeat, was a mensch.
Like Pakula’s films, Brown’s biography is specific, carefully assembled and straightforward, but also sometimes tepid and flatly written.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-8230-8799-9
Page Count: 400
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2005
BOOK REVIEW
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.
Musician, poet and visual artist Smith (Trois, 2008, etc.) chronicles her intense life with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe during the 1960s and ’70s, when both artists came of age in downtown New York.
Both born in 1946, Smith and Mapplethorpe would become widely celebrated—she for merging poetry with rock ’n’ roll in her punk-rock performances, he as the photographer who brought pornography into the realm of art. Upon meeting in the summer of 1967, they were hungry, lonely and gifted youths struggling to find their way and their art. Smith, a gangly loser and college dropout, had attended Bible school in New Jersey where she took solace in the poetry of Rimbaud. Mapplethorpe, a former altar boy turned LSD user, had grown up in middle-class Long Island. Writing with wonderful immediacy, Smith tells the affecting story of their entwined young lives as lovers, friends and muses to one another. Eating day-old bread and stew in dumpy East Village apartments, they forged fierce bonds as soul mates who were at their happiest when working together. To make money Smith clerked in bookstores, and Mapplethorpe hustled on 42nd Street. The author colorfully evokes their days at the shabbily elegant Hotel Chelsea, late nights at Max’s Kansas City and their growth and early celebrity as artists, with Smith winning initial serious attention at a St. Mark’s Poetry Project reading and Mapplethorpe attracting lovers and patrons who catapulted him into the arms of high society. The book abounds with stories about friends, including Allen Ginsberg, Janis Joplin, William Burroughs, Sam Shepard, Gregory Corso and other luminaries, and it reveals Smith’s affection for the city—the “gritty innocence” of the couple’s beloved Coney Island, the “open atmosphere” and “simple freedom” of Washington Square. Despite separations, the duo remained friends until Mapplethorpe’s death in 1989. “Nobody sees as we do, Patti,” he once told her.
Riveting and exquisitely crafted.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-06-621131-2
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Ecco/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
PERSPECTIVES
SEEN & HEARD
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.
Maya Angelou is a natural writer with an inordinate sense of life and she has written an exceptional autobiographical narrative which retrieves her first sixteen years from "the general darkness just beyond the great blinkers of childhood."
Her story is told in scenes, ineluctably moving scenes, from the time when she and her brother were sent by her fancy living parents to Stamps, Arkansas, and a grandmother who had the local Store. Displaced they were and "If growing up is painful for the Southern Black girl, being aware of her displacement is the rust on the razor that threatens the throat." But alternating with all the pain and terror (her rape at the age of eight when in St. Louis With her mother) and humiliation (a brief spell in the kitchen of a white woman who refused to remember her name) and fear (of a lynching—and the time they buried afflicted Uncle Willie under a blanket of vegetables) as well as all the unanswered and unanswerable questions, there are affirmative memories and moments: her charming brother Bailey; her own "unshakable God"; a revival meeting in a tent; her 8th grade graduation; and at the end, when she's sixteen, the birth of a baby. Times When as she says "It seemed that the peace of a day's ending was an assurance that the covenant God made with children, Negroes and the crippled was still in effect."
However charily one should apply the word, a beautiful book, an unconditionally involving memoir for our time or any time.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 1969
ISBN: 0375507892
Page Count: 235
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: May 14, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1969
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SEEN & HEARD
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