Inspiring true stories about once-common folk who made their career dreams reality.
Candid, captivating interviews reveal how various filmmakers seized success.
Aspiring director Jarecki, a recent NYU Film School grad, gained access to 20 artists who run the gamut from mainstream Amy Heckerling (“I’m the world’s biggest Mean Streets fan, but because I did Look Who’s Talking, I have this house and my daughters go to a good school”) to quirky Abel Ferrara, creator of the violent exploitation flick Ms.45. As Jarecki and his animated subjects reveal, among the few ways to become a director are writing a script, making low-budget independent films, and working for a production company. After enduring a torturous interview at a stock brokerage house, Ben Younger took a job as a waiter so he’d have time to write Boiler Room, a film about Wall Street. When Younger served lunch to a studio executive, he had a screenplay ready to sell. To raise $25,000 for the production of In the Company of Men, Neil LaBute contacted car-accident survivors who had won large insurance settlements. Peter Farrelly delights with his tale of jumping into the industry with a marvelous script but no experience. Misleading New Line studio executives into believing that he could direct Dumb and Dumber, Farrelly suffered a panic attack on the first day of shooting when the truth came out. Although Jarecki asks each person the same routine questions, he reaps surprising answers every time. Kim Pierce, director of Boys Don't Cry (1999), was denied a college scholarship because her uneducated parents refused to sign admission forms. Pierce’s intimate account of filming the story of “sexual misfit” Teena Brandon reveals how some directors are driven to express their own personalities through their characters. We also gain insights into the talents of John Carpenter (Halloween, 1978), Brett Ratner (Rush Hour, 1998), John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy, 1969), and many others.
Inspiring true stories about once-common folk who made their career dreams reality.Pub Date: Jan. 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-7679-0674-8
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Broadway
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2001
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 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1992
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.
A light-speed tour of (mostly) Western poetry, from the 4,000-year-old Gilgamesh to the work of Australian poet Les Murray, who died in 2019.
In the latest entry in the publisher’s Little Histories series, Carey, an emeritus professor at Oxford whose books include What Good Are the Arts? and The Unexpected Professor: An Oxford Life in Books, offers a quick definition of poetry—“relates to language as music relates to noise. It is language made special”—before diving in to poetry’s vast history. In most chapters, the author deals with only a few writers, but as the narrative progresses, he finds himself forced to deal with far more than a handful. In his chapter on 20th-century political poets, for example, he talks about 14 writers in seven pages. Carey displays a determination to inform us about who the best poets were—and what their best poems were. The word “greatest” appears continually; Chaucer was “the greatest medieval English poet,” and Langston Hughes was “the greatest male poet” of the Harlem Renaissance. For readers who need a refresher—or suggestions for the nightstand—Carey provides the best-known names and the most celebrated poems, including Paradise Lost (about which the author has written extensively), “Kubla Khan,” “Ozymandias,” “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” Wordsworth and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads, which “changed the course of English poetry.” Carey explains some poetic technique (Hopkins’ “sprung rhythm”) and pauses occasionally to provide autobiographical tidbits—e.g., John Masefield, who wrote the famous “Sea Fever,” “hated the sea.” We learn, as well, about the sexuality of some poets (Auden was bisexual), and, especially later on, Carey discusses the demons that drove some of them, Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath among them. Refreshingly, he includes many women in the volume—all the way back to Sappho—and has especially kind words for Marianne Moore and Elizabeth Bishop, who share a chapter.
Necessarily swift and adumbrative as well as inclusive, focused, and graceful.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-23222-6
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Feb. 8, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2020
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