Wise observations from a filmmaker who made smart crowd-pleasers.
Sydney Pollack lives on as a gruff but caring lawyer in Michael Clayton (2007), which one cannot see too many times. Here, he opens up about his life and line of work.
Pollack (1934-2008) was that rare Hollywood figure who was gifted at directing, acting, and producing. In this incisive collection of interviews, film scholars McGilligan and Cronin convincingly argue that “for forty years, from his first picture to his last, Pollack sustained a busier, longer, more fruitful, and more consistent career than many in his peer generation.” The interviews, which ran in publications around the world, range from 1970 to 2007. Readers learn of his youth in Indiana; Casablanca, he says, “gave my life meaning. I’m sure my entire style comes from the fact that I found nothing in the Midwest to sustain me.” After a couple years in the Army, he got his start acting in TV shows in New York City. A job as the dialogue coach for John Frankenheimer’s The Young Savages, starring Burt Lancaster, prompted his move to Los Angeles in 1960. “At the end of the picture,” he recounts, “I was packing my bags when I got a call from Lancaster’s secretary. ‘Mr. Lancaster would like to see you.’ I went over to his offices, and he said, ‘Listen, stop screwing around. You should become a director.’” It was good advice. Pollack’s movies include such successes as They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? (1969), Three Days of the Condor (1975), Tootsie (1982), Out of Africa (1985), and The Firm (1993). As McGilligan and Cronin write, “He reliably gave motion picture fans…major stars in superbly crafted entertainment, undergirded by serious themes.” Film buffs will enjoy Pollack getting into the technical details of directing: “Panavision is the only medium you can work in where you never lose the sense of environment.” And his frank take on Hollywood has aged well: “I am part of this institutionalization now in the film business.” One once had “the satisfaction of yelling” at someone who owned a studio, but corporations took over—and “you can’t argue with an institution.”
Wise observations from a filmmaker who made smart crowd-pleasers.Pub Date: May 26, 2026
ISBN: 9781985904187
Page Count: 304
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: April 15, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2026
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.
The veteran actor, comedian, and banjo player teams up with the acclaimed illustrator to create a unique book of cartoons that communicates their personalities.
Martin, also a prolific author, has always been intrigued by the cartoons strewn throughout the pages of the New Yorker. So when he was presented with the opportunity to work with Bliss, who has been a staff cartoonist at the magazine since 1997, he seized the moment. “The idea of a one-panel image with or without a caption mystified me,” he writes. “I felt like, yeah, sometimes I’m funny, but there are these other weird freaks who are actually funny.” Once the duo agreed to work together, they established their creative process, which consisted of working forward and backward: “Forwards was me conceiving of several cartoon images and captions, and Harry would select his favorites; backwards was Harry sending me sketched or fully drawn cartoons for dialogue or banners.” Sometimes, he writes, “the perfect joke occurs two seconds before deadline.” There are several cartoons depicting this method, including a humorous multipanel piece highlighting their first meeting called “They Meet,” in which Martin thinks to himself, “He’ll never be able to translate my delicate and finely honed droll notions.” In the next panel, Bliss thinks, “I’m sure he won’t understand that the comic art form is way more subtle than his blunt-force humor.” The team collaborated for a year and created 150 cartoons featuring an array of topics, “from dogs and cats to outer space and art museums.” A witty creation of a bovine family sitting down to a gourmet meal and one of Dumbo getting his comeuppance highlight the duo’s comedic talent. What also makes this project successful is the team’s keen understanding of human behavior as viewed through their unconventional comedic minds.
A virtuoso performance and an ode to an undervalued medium created by two talented artists.Pub Date: Nov. 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-26289-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Celadon Books
Review Posted Online: Aug. 30, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 15, 2020
PERSPECTIVES
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.
A potent series of “notes” paints a multidimensional picture of Blackness in America.
Throughout the book, which mixes memoir, history, literary theory, and art, Sharpe—the chair of Black studies at York University in Toronto and author of the acclaimed book In the Wake: On Blackness and Being—writes about everything from her family history to the everyday trauma of American racism. Although most of the notes feature the author’s original writing, she also includes materials like photographs, copies of letters she received, responses to a Twitter-based crowdsourcing request, and definitions of terms collected from colleagues and friends (“preliminary entries toward a dictionary of untranslatable blackness”). These diverse pieces coalesce into a multifaceted examination of the ways in which the White gaze distorts Blackness and perpetuates racist violence. Sharpe’s critique is not limited to White individuals, however. She includes, for example, a disappointing encounter with a fellow Black female scholar as well as critical analysis of Barack Obama’s choice to sing “Amazing Grace” at the funeral of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, who was killed in a hate crime at the Mother Emmanuel AME Church in Charleston, South Carolina. With distinct lyricism and a firm but tender tone, Sharpe executes every element of this book flawlessly. Most impressive is the collagelike structure, which seamlessly moves among an extraordinary variety of forms and topics. For example, a photograph of the author’s mother in a Halloween costume transitions easily into an introduction to Roland Barthes’ work Camera Lucida, which then connects just as smoothly to a memory of watching a White visitor struggle with the reality presented by the Legacy Museum in Montgomery, Alabama. “Something about this encounter, something about seeing her struggle…feels appropriate to the weight of this history,” writes the author. It is a testament to Sharpe’s artistry that this incredibly complex text flows so naturally.
An exquisitely original celebration of American Blackness.Pub Date: April 25, 2023
ISBN: 9780374604486
Page Count: 392
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Review Posted Online: Jan. 18, 2023
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2023
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