A brisk, breezy look at the turbulent world of moviemaking.
A biography about a powerful former studio head.
By the time she was 35, at the helm of Fox Productions, Sherry Lansing was the highest-paid and highest-ranking woman in the American film industry. In his debut biography, entertainment journalist Galloway, executive features editor for the Hollywood Reporter, follows Lansing’s career from her unsuccessful stab at acting to a more satisfying job as a script reader and finally to the positions at Columbia Pictures, Fox, and Paramount that put her in a glaring spotlight. The author acknowledges “hundreds of hours of interviews” with his subject, from which he quotes so liberally that at times he seems more of a ghostwriter than biographer. Nevertheless, he tells an energetic and entertaining story, filled with divas, tantrums, and abundant Hollywood gossip. Besides Lansing, Galloway interviewed scores of actors, directors, producers, and screenwriters, including Michael Douglas, who shared candid recollections about the trials involved in producing Fatal Attraction; Glenn Close, who nearly did not land a role in that film; the demanding Jane Fonda; Titanic director James Cameron; the irascible Sumner Redstone; Steven Spielberg; and Meryl Streep, relatively unknown when she won the part playing opposite Dustin Hoffman in Kramer v. Kramer. Hoffman created “a host of difficulties” on the set, including a horrible relationship with Streep: “at one point,” Galloway divulges, “just before they shot a dramatic scene, out of the blue he hit her, perhaps believing her performance would be more authentic.” The two never acted together after that. Among Lansing’s memorable movies were Forrest Gump, Braveheart, a host of action films, and The Hours. In 2005, Lansing decided to leave movies and, as she put it, “recreate my life.” She established the Sherry Lansing Foundation, a charitable organization focused on cancer research and education, to which she brought the same determination and hands-on management style that had defined her throughout her career.
A brisk, breezy look at the turbulent world of moviemaking.Pub Date: April 25, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-307-40593-7
Page Count: 416
Publisher: Crown Archetype
Review Posted Online: Feb. 4, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK REVIEW
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”
The powerful story of a father’s past and a son’s future.
Atlantic senior writer Coates (The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons, and an Unlikely Road to Manhood, 2008) offers this eloquent memoir as a letter to his teenage son, bearing witness to his own experiences and conveying passionate hopes for his son’s life. “I am wounded,” he writes. “I am marked by old codes, which shielded me in one world and then chained me in the next.” Coates grew up in the tough neighborhood of West Baltimore, beaten into obedience by his father. “I was a capable boy, intelligent and well-liked,” he remembers, “but powerfully afraid.” His life changed dramatically at Howard University, where his father taught and from which several siblings graduated. Howard, he writes, “had always been one of the most critical gathering posts for black people.” He calls it The Mecca, and its faculty and his fellow students expanded his horizons, helping him to understand “that the black world was its own thing, more than a photo-negative of the people who believe they are white.” Coates refers repeatedly to whites’ insistence on their exclusive racial identity; he realizes now “that nothing so essentialist as race” divides people, but rather “the actual injury done by people intent on naming us, intent on believing that what they have named matters more than anything we could ever actually do.” After he married, the author’s world widened again in New York, and later in Paris, where he finally felt extricated from white America’s exploitative, consumerist dreams. He came to understand that “race” does not fully explain “the breach between the world and me,” yet race exerts a crucial force, and young blacks like his son are vulnerable and endangered by “majoritarian bandits.” Coates desperately wants his son to be able to live “apart from fear—even apart from me.”
This moving, potent testament might have been titled “Black Lives Matter.” Or: “An American Tragedy.”Pub Date: July 8, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-8129-9354-7
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Spiegel & Grau
Review Posted Online: May 5, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
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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