Instructive, engaging, entertaining—enough to make a reader believe filmmaking really isn’t a terrible business.
Film director/producer Jewison recalls what went into the making of his films.
Looking back over a career spent directing and sometimes producing films, Jewison writes with an unassuming, good-humored, yet often forceful voice. Those same qualities may explain Jewison’s strong track record—he helmed such award-winners as Moonstruck, Fiddler on the Roof and In the Heat of the Night. Jewison took to directing when he wrote and staged college musicals at the University of Toronto. In the late ’50s and early ’60s, he went on to call the shots for several Canadian, then US, television variety shows. A Judy Garland special gave him entrée to Hollywood, where he cut his teeth on Doris Day comedies, eventually getting a shot at something serious, with The Cincinnati Kid. Jewison’s extended account of directing that film is a primer on the collaborative art of filmmaking. He details drawing out a taciturn Steve McQueen, designing a color palette with cinematographer Philip Lathrop, spending long editing sessions with Hal Ashby and getting the kind of musical score he needed from Lalo Schifrin. Equally valuable accounts of work on The Russians Are Coming! The Russians Are Coming!, The Thomas Crown Affair, A Soldier’s Story, etc., follow. Throughout his career, it appears, Jewison was straight up, though not arrogant, about going for what he wanted; he could handle difficult talent (with the possible exception of Sylvester Stallone on F.I.S.T.); and he went after a film only if it was about something that mattered—rights for blacks, the American legal system, the union movement. In the wake of his concerns came skirmishes with the F.B.I., an uneasy dinner party with John Wayne—and a roster of worthy films.
Instructive, engaging, entertaining—enough to make a reader believe filmmaking really isn’t a terrible business.Pub Date: Sept. 12, 2005
ISBN: 0-312-32868-0
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Dunne/St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2005
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
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
