. . .
Another entertaining hybrid of memoir and screenwriting advice from the two-time Academy Award-winning writer of Butch
Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. This sequel to Goldman's Adventures in the Screen Trade (1983) picks up where the original left off, detailing his Hollywood experiences since the early 1980s and offering new insights into the screenwriter's art. The autobiographical first section ("More Adventures") begins with his "leper" period (1980—85), when the "phone stopped ringing" and no studio would hire him, and goes on to describe his work on seven subsequent films, including both turkeys and hits, from Memoirs of an Invisible Man to The Princess Bride to Absolute Power. In the sections that follow, he turns screenwriting coach, analyzing favorite scenes from such films as Fargo and There's Something About Mary; weighing the merits of various unused story ideas (culled from newspapers, history, and his imagination); and offering an unfinished comedy-adventure script with ruthless critiques by several colleagues. Goldman derides cinematic sequels as "whores' movies" that never compare well to the original, and there is some reason to apply the same principle to this book. It doesn't offer the systematic guide to Hollywood madness that the original did, nor does it have new industry aphorisms on the level of the original's "Nobody knows anything." The writing is flabbier, more prone to profanity and hyperbole. But the updating is valuable, and Goldman remains a virtuoso storyteller, expertly spinning yarns about movies that should never have been made, innocently egotistical stars, careers on the line (including his), and scripts miraculously salvaged. There are anecdotes about his early life, gossipy tidbits about celebrities (did you know Sylvester Stallone is only five-foot-seven?), and plenty of good advice for the would-be scenarist. A fun, instructive look into a veteran screenwriter's workshop.
. . .Pub Date: March 13, 2000
ISBN: 0-375-40349-3
Page Count: 480
Publisher: Pantheon
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2000
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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