A worthy exploration of an enduring cinematic favorite.
Klamm offers a love letter to filmmaking that leaves no aspect of the production process unexamined.
The author says that he’s long been fascinated by John Hughes’ 1986 film Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. As an undergraduate at Columbia College Chicago, he visited various locations shown in the film. His eagerness to understand how it was made led him first to film school and, ultimately, to interviewing much of the cast (including stars Matthew Broderick and Alan Ruck) and crew. The resulting book presents the most comprehensive and thorough examination of the film yet written, one that is less interested in film trivia than it is in the rigors of production and the mystery of how a piece of commercial entertainment becomes a classic work of art. Readers learn how, early in his career, Hughes and his fiancée rented a converted boxcar for $110 a month; how he penned the piece that would become the basis for the film National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983) while stranded at home during a blizzard; and of the numerous changes made to Ferris between scripting and the final film (an early draft would have had Broderick smoking). Klamm reveals that Molly Ringwald initially hoped to play Ferris’ girlfriend, Sloane Peterson; that Polly Noonan, who played the Gummy Bear Girl, later graced a classic album cover; and that a scene set in a strip club was nixed by the studio. The book provides invaluable insights into Hughes’ philosophy of writing (“Character comes first,” he said, “because I think people are more interesting than plot”). Klamm’s love for the film is palpable, and his film-school background makes him ideally positioned to discuss costuming, line delivery, location scouting, and the logistics of pretending to drive a car through a “mid-century, glass-and-steel structure.” As anecdote piles on anecdote, even readers with little knowledge of the movie industry may find themselves pondering dolly shots and wardrobe tests while developing a deeper respect for the hundreds of small decisions involved in making even a single minute of film.
A worthy exploration of an enduring cinematic favorite.Pub Date: June 16, 2026
ISBN: 9781948221986
Page Count: 372
Publisher: 1984 Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 6, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2026
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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
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