Hollywood reminiscences, and more, from the quintessential studio system director. When Sherman began his directing career in the 1930s, directors were almost as low on the Hollywood totem pole as writers, just one more component of a vast hierarchy where real power and creative vision tended to belong to executive producers and studio moguls. At the heart of the system was its audacious application of the mass production techniques of the Industrial Revolution to movies. Good or bad, films had to be cranked out on a regular schedule to help cover the studios' huge overheads. Jack Warner's appeal to Sherman was typical: ``I know it's not a great story, but I've got six actors sitting around doing nothing but picking up their checks . . . do me a favor: Make the picture and do the best you can.'' Much of Sherman's career consisted of doing precisely this, reluctantly taking on films he didn't like and then trying to improve them as much as tight schedules and budgets allowed. Over the course of 30 features, he sometimes succeeded— Mr. Skeffington, The Hard Way—and sometimes failed. Along the way he worked with some of the greatest of the greats: Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart, Paul Newman. He also enjoyed a reputation as a ``woman's director,'' working with Joan Crawford, Rita Hayworth, and the notoriously difficult Bette Davis (he had extramarital affairs with all three). Despite his current semi-obscurity, his films are certainly worth a second look. Those seeking a portrait of Hollywood's seedy underbelly won't find it here. What Sherman has written is far more unusual: a frank, detailed, eminently clear record of the exhausting, exhilarating business of making films. The life, times, and techniques of a director from Hollywood's so-called ``Golden Age'' have rarely been so illuminatingly and insightfully detailed. (30 b&w illustrations, not seen)
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-8131-1975-8
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Univ. Press of Kentucky
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 1996
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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