The inflated title of this readable narrative nicely captures the bloated egos everywhere on a display in the Hollywood of the 1980s. It's a saga of art and commerce that Lewis illustrates with the rise and fall of Francis Coppola's moviemaking career. Lewis (English/Oregon State Univ.), of course, sides with Coppola as a brilliant auteur constantly in battle with capitalist vulgarians and dim-witted critics. After the successes of the Godfather films and Apocalypse Now—which is where this book begins—Coppola held most of the marbles. And his ambition led him to create Zoetrope Studios, a means for controlling the production and distribution of his future movies. But Lewis fails to see that Coppola's grandiose remarks, his creative hubris, his contempt for mass audiences, all backed him into the overpriced exercises that he directed in the '80s, most notoriously One From the Heart. Relying on industry publications (and no new primary research), Lewis documents the elaborate efforts to finance Coppola's films. But the heart of the drama is the failure of Zoetrope, which Lewis blames on the collusion of the big six studios who felt threatened by the feisty newcomer. The arrogant Coppola hocked the house on One From the Heart, a self-indulgent bit of whimsy that Lewis considers ``terrific...because of all its confusion.'' He faults Hollywood for its understandable later efforts to reign in the once-bankable genius. Coppola's spotty record from the late '80s (Rumble Fish, The Cotton Club, etc.) resulted, in Lewis's view, from his humiliating need to compromise with the moneymen. Lewis only hints at the more intriguing story here—that the prerelease hype on movies is increasingly more important than the films themselves. Not a hard-hitting investigation, Lewis's academic study isn't too strong on critical insight, either. But it's a compelling tale, nonetheless, told jargon-free.
Pub Date: July 1, 1995
ISBN: 0-8223-1602-1
Page Count: 185
Publisher: Duke Univ.
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1995
Well-told and admonitory.
Young-rags-to-mature-riches memoir by broker and motivational speaker Gardner.
Born and raised in the Milwaukee ghetto, the author pulled himself up from considerable disadvantage. He was fatherless, and his adored mother wasn’t always around; once, as a child, he spied her at a family funeral accompanied by a prison guard. When beautiful, evanescent Moms was there, Chris also had to deal with Freddie “I ain’t your goddamn daddy!” Triplett, one of the meanest stepfathers in recent literature. Chris did “the dozens” with the homies, boosted a bit and in the course of youthful adventure was raped. His heroes were Miles Davis, James Brown and Muhammad Ali. Meanwhile, at the behest of Moms, he developed a fondness for reading. He joined the Navy and became a medic (preparing badass Marines for proctology), and a proficient lab technician. Moving up in San Francisco, married and then divorced, he sold medical supplies. He was recruited as a trainee at Dean Witter just around the time he became a homeless single father. All his belongings in a shopping cart, Gardner sometimes slept with his young son at the office (apparently undiscovered by the night cleaning crew). The two also frequently bedded down in a public restroom. After Gardner’s talents were finally appreciated by the firm of Bear Stearns, his American Dream became real. He got the cool duds, hot car and fine ladies so coveted from afar back in the day. He even had a meeting with Nelson Mandela. Through it all, he remained a prideful parent. His own no-daddy blues are gone now.
Well-told and admonitory.Pub Date: June 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-06-074486-3
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Amistad/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 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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