The veteran character actor looks back on his first 10 years in Hollywood as a time of magical dreams and sobering realities.
Guttenberg has made more than 50 films since first striking out for Hollywood as a brash teen in the late 1970s. Here he ably captures that 18-year-old’s sense of awe and excitement as he began his career. First, he managed to sneak onto the Paramount lot where he promptly set up a private office and began engineering his own auditions. From there, he was soon enjoying a shvitz with Michael Landon and trading lines on set with Richard Widmark. Guttenberg has a fine ear for dialogue, and depictions of his regular calls back home to his salt-of-the-earth mom and dad are amusing and heartwarming. The fun and excitement slows a bit as his career begins to sputter. He eventually realized that no matter how much success he achieved, he would always be a hired hand, never quite sure where the next job would be. Meanwhile, multiple liaisons with assorted starlets and stalkers throughout the years get scant attention. Guttenberg isn’t interested in naming names. Explaining just how tough it’s been keeping his mug on the silver screen for all these years seems to be enough for him. The career gymnastics he has displayed adroitly leapfrogging from films like Cocoon to Three Men and a Baby are wholly entertaining on their own. Aspiring actors will surely gain keen insight into the challenges that may await them (if they’re lucky), while movie fans will be pleasantly assured that their faith in the dream factory’s ability to inspire is still warranted. An insider’s charming look at what it’s really like to be a Hollywood star.
Pub Date: May 8, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-312-38345-9
Page Count: 336
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: March 18, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2012
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
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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