Much fun. Four Stars and an Irving Thalberg Award.
Generational Hollywood business saga and first outing by Cort, a producer whose 52 film credits include Runaway Bride and Mr. Holland’s Opus.
Cort gives his real-life Hollywood figures a strong rounding-out with famous quirks and punchy dialogue. Focusing on the Jastrow family, he opens with attorney Harry Jastrow’s 1948 effort in the Supreme Court to overturn a lower court’s ruling against the distribution monopoly of Paramount, RKO, Twentieth Century-Fox, Warner Bros., and M-G-M, who own the theater chains that show their films. Harry loses, and, once divested of their chains, the studios face the rising threat of TV. The studios bury their heads in the sand about selling product to this medium, but Harry, seeing ahead, suggests making fresh programming for TV. A first-generation Ukrainian Jewish immigrant, Harry is married to former film star Maggie Nolin (Margaret Rose Kimmel), niece of Hollywood founding father Adolph Zukor. Too decent for an indecent business, Harry finds himself being bounced from Paramount for his far-reaching ideas and has a heart attack at his son AJ’s bar mitzvah. Ten years later, in a Bing Crosby celebrity golf tournament, AJ partners showman Mike Todd, who is taken with him and offers him a job on Don Quixote, his follow-up to Around the World in Eighty Days. Then AJ falls in with Steve McQueen and represents him at William Morris for McQueen’s first big TV western series, and after that through a series of five films, McQueen being no easy client. Like McQueen, AJ turns rebel, quitting the Morris agency when his mild antiwar activity upsets his bosses. When Charlie Bludhorn takes over Paramount and names Bob Evans president, AJ’s star rises as a producer. When his own company, J2 (J-squared) goes into the red, only a massive first-week opening of The Coney Island Maniac can save it. Then his son Ricky wants into the business and already has a great script to shuck—about AJ’s infidelity.
Much fun. Four Stars and an Irving Thalberg Award.Pub Date: June 1, 2003
ISBN: 0-679-45232-X
Page Count: 402
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2003
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.
Sisters work together to solve a child-abandonment case.
Ellie and Julia Cates have never been close. Julia is shy and brainy; Ellie gets by on charm and looks. Their differences must be tossed aside when a traumatized young girl wanders in from the forest into their hometown in Washington. The sisters’ professional skills are put to the test. Julia is a world-renowned child psychologist who has lost her edge. She is reeling from a case that went publicly sour. Though she was cleared of all wrongdoing, Julia’s name was tarnished, forcing her to shutter her Beverly Hills practice. Ellie Barton is the local police chief in Rain Valley, who’s never faced a tougher case. This is her chance to prove she is more than just a fading homecoming queen, but a scarcity of clues and a reluctant victim make locating the girl’s parents nearly impossible. Ellie places an SOS call to her sister; she needs an expert to rehabilitate this wild-child who has been living outside of civilization for years. Confronted with her professional demons, Julia once again has the opportunity to display her talents and salvage her reputation. Hannah (The Things We Do for Love, 2004, etc.) is at her best when writing from the girl’s perspective. The feral wolf-child keeps the reader interested long after the other, transparent characters have grown tiresome. Hannah’s torturously over-written romance passages are stale, but there are surprises in store as the sisters set about unearthing Alice’s past and creating a home for her.
Wacky plot keeps the pages turning and enduring schmaltzy romantic sequences.Pub Date: March 1, 2006
ISBN: 0-345-46752-3
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2005
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.
A violent surfacing of adolescence (which has little in common with Tarkington's earlier, broadly comic, Seventeen) has a compulsive impact.
"Nobody big except me" is the dream world of Holden Caulfield and his first person story is down to the basic, drab English of the pre-collegiate. For Holden is now being bounced from fancy prep, and, after a vicious evening with hall- and roommates, heads for New York to try to keep his latest failure from his parents. He tries to have a wild evening (all he does is pay the check), is terrorized by the hotel elevator man and his on-call whore, has a date with a girl he likes—and hates, sees his 10 year old sister, Phoebe. He also visits a sympathetic English teacher after trying on a drunken session, and when he keeps his date with Phoebe, who turns up with her suitcase to join him on his flight, he heads home to a hospital siege. This is tender and true, and impossible, in its picture of the old hells of young boys, the lonesomeness and tentative attempts to be mature and secure, the awful block between youth and being grown-up, the fright and sickness that humans and their behavior cause the challenging, the dramatization of the big bang. It is a sorry little worm's view of the off-beat of adult pressure, of contemporary strictures and conformity, of sentiment….
A strict report, worthy of sympathy.Pub Date: June 15, 1951
ISBN: 0316769177
Page Count: -
Publisher: Little, Brown
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1951
BOOK REVIEW
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