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
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her...
Another middle-aged mom in a muddle.
After years of false starts and big hopes, Elizabeth’s ruggedly handsome husband Jack, a former football star, just landed a spot as a sportscaster on national news. He still loves her, even though much younger women are giving him come-hither looks. Heck, he doesn’t want to betray the love of his life after she helped him kick drugs and stuck by him even when he was a struggling has-been. And won’t it seem hypocritical if he fools around with his sexy assistant while he does in-depth reporting on a rape case involving a famous basketball center? Well, he fools around anyway. Elizabeth, nicknamed Birdie, knows nothing of this, but she withdraws from Jack when her hard-drinking, salt-of-the-earth father has a stroke and dies. Now no one will call her “sugar beet” ever again. Time to return home to Tennessee and contend with Anita, the sort-of-evil stepmother so trashy she wears pink puffy slippers all day long. Naturally, it turns out that Anita actually has a heart of gold and knows a few things about Birdie’s dead mother that were hushed up for years. Mom was an artist, just like Birdie, and an old scandal comes to light as Anita unrolls a vibrant canvas that portrays her secret lover. Perhaps, Birdie muses, her mother died of heartbreak, never having followed her true love or developed her talent. Has she, too, compromised everything she holds dear? Hoping to find out, Birdie joins a support group that promises to reconnect confused women with their passion. She and Jack separate, prompting a how-dare-you fit from their grown daughters. Will Birdie fly her empty nest? Will she go back to college for a degree in art? Will her brooding watercolors ever sell?
Soft-focus story moves right along with few surprises. This time around, Hannah avoids the soap-opera complications of her previous tales (Summer Island, 2001, etc.).Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 0-345-45071-X
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.
Pub Date: July 11, 1960
ISBN: 0060935464
Page Count: 323
Publisher: Lippincott
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
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