TURNAROUND

Warmblooded memoir by Americanized Czech filmmaker Forman, whose world went into turnaround when he decided to leave Communist Prague for capitalist Hollywood. Forman's childhood in wartime Czechoslovakia was spent not upsetting the adults who cared for him once his parents had been killed by the Nazis. His young manhood among drunken filmmakers and humorless state-controlled film czars, as he rose from writer to director, is drawn skillfully here, as are his first two marriages, the impossibility of finding an apartment, and the need for the new couple to live for three years in his office. Stories of deranged Czech life take up half the book, focusing on the making of Forman's first two documentary-styled films, Loves of a Blonde (1965) and The Fireman's Ball, which feature nonactors working with real actors. This mix became essential to Forman's spirit, and when he later filmed such Hollywood works as Hair and Ragtime, he filled them largely with unknowns. Even when Forman landed Jack Nicholson for One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, he filled the film's mental wards with unknowns and nonactors to help him keep a grip on the real world. As time passed, he found that he was locked into making historical films (Amadeus, Valmont, Ragtime) and that even Cuckoo's Nest was a psychoanalytic period piece based on outmoded lobotomies. What's more, these enclosed worlds, with free spirits and geniuses drowning amid mediocrities, mirrored his earliest experiences under the Nazis and then the Communists. The book's highlight is Forman's return to Prague as an Oscar-winning capitalist to film Amadeus amid the bugs and informers of state security. And the winner is...Milos Forman—and his coauthor, Prague novelist Jan Novak. (B&w photo insert—not seen)