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
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
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
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