For aspiring directors, a glimpse into the school of hard knocks, but there’s plenty of good stuff, lean and well-written,...
The Oscar-winning director of The French Connection and The Exorcist looks back at his life and work.
Friedkin writes that his career began accidentally, interviewing for the wrong job but landing a spot in the mail room at WGN in Chicago (“By the way, kid, are you stupid?” his interviewer asked), and from there working his way from one job to the other, learning the crafts necessary to make a show—and then a film—through trial and error: “Will the floor manager please keep away from the camera?” he was once asked. Lessons learned, he moved west to Los Angeles, where he fell into friendly competition with his contemporaries, foremost among them Francis Ford Coppola, and steadily built a résumé as a reliable filmmaker able to coax the best performances out of actors. There’s plenty of inside baseball here, but Friedkin is more interested in discussing the technical details of his films; we learn, for instance, that “there was not a lot of dialogue looping” in The French Connection, for all the noise on the New York streets, and that Max von Sydow was so tall that he “had to develop a slouch and arthritic movement” for the character he played in The Exorcist. A surprise, given Hollywood’s secular nature, may be the revelation of the depth of Friedkin’s religious faith—even though William Peter Blatty, who wrote the story of that spooky flick, accused him of “having undercut the film’s moral center.”
For aspiring directors, a glimpse into the school of hard knocks, but there’s plenty of good stuff, lean and well-written, for civilian film fans, too.Pub Date: April 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-0-06-177512-3
Page Count: 512
Publisher: Harper/HarperCollins
Review Posted Online: March 10, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 1, 2013
This autobiography might almost be said to supply the roots to Wright's famous novel, Native Son.
It is a grim record, disturbing, the story of how — in one boy's life — the seeds of hate and distrust and race riots were planted. Wright was born to poverty and hardship in the deep south; his father deserted his mother, and circumstances and illness drove the little family from place to place, from degradation to degradation. And always, there was the thread of fear and hate and suspicion and discrimination — of white set against black — of black set against Jew — of intolerance. Driven to deceit, to dishonesty, ambition thwarted, motives impugned, Wright struggled against the tide, put by a tiny sum to move on, finally got to Chicago, and there — still against odds — pulled himself up, acquired some education through reading, allied himself with the Communists — only to be thrust out for non-conformity — and wrote continually. The whole tragedy of a race seems dramatized in this record; it is virtually unrelieved by any vestige of human tenderness, or humor; there are no bright spots. And yet it rings true. It is an unfinished story of a problem that has still to be met.
Perhaps this will force home unpalatable facts of a submerged minority, a problem far from being faced.
Pub Date: Feb. 28, 1945
ISBN: 0061130249
Page Count: 450
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 1945
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.
Rootin’-tootin’ history of the dry-gulchers, horn-swogglers, and outright killers who populated the Wild West’s wildest city in the late 19th century.
The stories of Wyatt Earp and company, the shootout at the O.K. Corral, and Geronimo and the Apache Wars are all well known. Clavin, who has written books on Dodge City and Wild Bill Hickok, delivers a solid narrative that usefully links significant events—making allies of white enemies, for instance, in facing down the Apache threat, rustling from Mexico, and other ethnically charged circumstances. The author is a touch revisionist, in the modern fashion, in noting that the Earps and Clantons weren’t as bloodthirsty as popular culture has made them out to be. For example, Wyatt and Bat Masterson “took the ‘peace’ in peace officer literally and knew that the way to tame the notorious town was not to outkill the bad guys but to intimidate them, sometimes with the help of a gun barrel to the skull.” Indeed, while some of the Clantons and some of the Earps died violently, most—Wyatt, Bat, Doc Holliday—died of cancer and other ailments, if only a few of old age. Clavin complicates the story by reminding readers that the Earps weren’t really the law in Tombstone and sometimes fell on the other side of the line and that the ordinary citizens of Tombstone and other famed Western venues valued order and peace and weren’t particularly keen on gunfighters and their mischief. Still, updating the old notion that the Earp myth is the American Iliad, the author is at his best when he delineates those fraught spasms of violence. “It is never a good sign for law-abiding citizens,” he writes at one high point, “to see Johnny Ringo rush into town, both him and his horse all in a lather.” Indeed not, even if Ringo wound up killing himself and law-abiding Tombstone faded into obscurity when the silver played out.
Buffs of the Old West will enjoy Clavin’s careful research and vivid writing.Pub Date: April 21, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-250-21458-4
Page Count: 400
Publisher: St. Martin's
Review Posted Online: Jan. 19, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2020
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