What became of The Other Side of the Wind, that crazy movie that took up the last 15 years of the life of Orson Welles (1915-1985)?
Karp (A Futile and Stupid Gesture: How Doug Kenney and National Lampoon Changed Comedy Forever, 2006, etc.) puts that question to rest with this hilarious and sobering saga of one of the greatest films never finished. Almost from its official start in 1970, the last project by Welles was a shape-shifting obsession, rumored as much for its alleged uniqueness as for its constant and (so far) permanent delay. On the surface, it sounds exciting: an 8½ -style story of a troubled director (played by John Huston) trying to finish a movie; a neo–Godard-ian narrative, shot in a variety of formats; a seemingly Cubist editing style, “reducing each take into little bits of film and then creating a new continuity within each scene.” It was meant to be both spontaneously brilliant and efficient, proof that the famously “troublesome” director could deliver a film on time and under budget. Instead, shooting ballooned from weeks to years upon years, during which it was cast and recast, shot and reshot, edited and re-edited; people were routinely hired, fired and rehired as they watched their careers consumed in the process. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the incomplete film—partly financed by the shah of Iran’s brother-in-law—officially entered purgatory. Ever since then, family, heirs and financiers have been fighting for control.
Luckily, there’s nothing unfinished in Karp’s retelling. He follows every story, dollar and last legal battle in full detail. Whether the film sees a 2015 release on the anniversary of Welles’ birth, as was speculated as of late last year, we at least have Karp to thank for the next best thing.Pub Date: April 21, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-250-00708-7
Page Count: 352
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 15, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2015
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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This early reader is an excellent introduction to the March on Washington in 1963 and the important role in the march played by Martin Luther King Jr. Ruffin gives the book a good, dramatic start: “August 28, 1963. It is a hot summer day in Washington, D.C. More than 250,00 people are pouring into the city.” They have come to protest the treatment of African-Americans here in the US. With stirring original artwork mixed with photographs of the events (and the segregationist policies in the South, such as separate drinking fountains and entrances to public buildings), Ruffin writes of how an end to slavery didn’t mark true equality and that these rights had to be fought for—through marches and sit-ins and words, particularly those of Dr. King, and particularly on that fateful day in Washington. Within a year the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had been passed: “It does not change everything. But it is a beginning.” Lots of visual cues will help new readers through the fairly simple text, but it is the power of the story that will keep them turning the pages. (Easy reader. 6-8)
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2001
ISBN: 0-448-42421-5
Page Count: 48
Publisher: Grosset & Dunlap
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2000
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION
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From the national correspondent for PBS's MacNeil-Lehrer Newshour: a moving memoir of her youth in the Deep South and her role in desegregating the Univ. of Georgia. The eldest daughter of an army chaplain, Hunter-Gault was born in what she calls the ``first of many places that I would call `my place' ''—the small village of Due West, tucked away in a remote little corner of South Carolina. While her father served in Korea, Hunter-Gault and her mother moved first to Covington, Georgia, and then to Atlanta. In ``L.A.'' (lovely Atlanta), surrounded by her loving family and a close-knit black community, the author enjoyed a happy childhood participating in activities at church and at school, where her intellectual and leadership abilities soon were noticed by both faculty and peers. In high school, Hunter-Gault found herself studying the ``comic-strip character Brenda Starr as I might have studied a journalism textbook, had there been one.'' Determined to be a journalist, she applied to several colleges—all outside of Georgia, for ``to discourage the possibility that a black student would even think of applying to one of those white schools, the state provided money for black students'' to study out of state. Accepted at Michigan's Wayne State, the author was encouraged by local civil-rights leaders to apply, along with another classmate, to the Univ. of Georgia as well. Her application became a test of changing racial attitudes, as well as of the growing strength of the civil-rights movement in the South, and Gault became a national figure as she braved an onslaught of hostilities and harassment to become the first black woman to attend the university. A remarkably generous, fair-minded account of overcoming some of the biggest, and most intractable, obstacles ever deployed by southern racists. (Photographs—not seen.)
Pub Date: Nov. 1, 1992
ISBN: 0-374-17563-2
Page Count: 192
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: May 20, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Categories: GENERAL NONFICTION | BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR
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