by Norman Jewison ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 12, 2005
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
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by Elie Wiesel & translated by Marion Wiesel ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 16, 2006
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
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by Chris Gardner with Quincy Troupe ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 2006
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
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