There are two kinds of personalities prone to getting lost in the movies:
1. Those for whom movies are an escape from life.
2. Those for whom movies are a lens through which to examine life—from a safe Read More
Joe Kennedy comes down to us as a peculiarly modern figure, a man who formed the mold so comfortably inhabited by Ken Lay and Bernie Madoff. Old Joe was a cold-blooded capitalist carnivore who cared for nobody outside his family, Read More
Once upon a time, movie directors had lives before they went into the movies. They fought in wars, they shot down enemy aircraft, they rode with Pancho Villa. They could field-strip a rifle, an engine or a woman, in any order that was necessary.
Once upon Read More
In 1972, Robert Vaughn wrote a book about the blacklist era called Only Victims. It’s basically his Ph.D. thesis—well structured, even-handed, a bit pedantic, but still invaluable, and I’ve always recommended it to people interested in that period.
It’s taken Mr. Vaughn 36 years to write another book—and Read More
You know you’re in trouble when the author of a book on a popular artist drags in lofty literary references to justify what he clearly regards as his own intellectual slumming. In this case, Joseph Epstein, the author of Snobbery (2002) and the former editor of The Read More
Imagine a country where the president uses the full faith and credit of the government to put people to work in hard times. Imagine a country where artists are not regarded as expendable Read More
LEWIS BLACK IS AN INDIGNANT Paddy Chayefsky character come to screaming, sputtering life, but he has a sneaking admiration for a truly audacious con artist. Jimmy Swaggart won Mr. Black’s heart when the evangelist leaned against his own mother’s tombstone and asked for money, because "I know Read More
David Price unerringly puts his finger on the primary problem with The Pixar Touch in his acknowledgments, where he thanks his editor for "taking a chance on a book about business and technology and filmmaking."
It sounds suspiciously as though the Read More
Why are journalists’ memoirs dull?
Could it be they’re so studiously trained to keep their own personalities out of their writing that when the time for self-expression comes, they have nothing of their own Read More
My favorite moment in Julie Andrews’ memoir comes after the first New Haven preview of My Fair Lady. Rex Harrison had a pre-performance panic attack, the show ran to an endless three and a half hours, but Julie Andrews was feeling Read More
It’s easy to feel superior to Joan Crawford. There are her Great Lady affectations, that pissy upper-crust speech reeking of noblesse oblige. “My audience always deserves the best I have to give, and I Read More
For all of posterity’s gaping wonder, Hollywood’s star system was a legendarily inexact science. For every Garbo or Dietrich successfully snatched from obscurity by someone with a discerning eye for languid pain (in the case of the former) or sexual insolence (in the case Read More
Otto Preminger’s primary problem was that every self-aggrandizing publicity campaign, every outlandishly elongated two-and-a-half-hour movie, implied he was a genius when in fact he only possessed talent.
The backlash was considerable.
It was Preminger’s additional misfortune to Read More
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SCREENWRITINGBy Marc Norman. Harmony, 560 pages, $27
There have been thousand of books about actors and hundreds about directors, but you can practically count the number of books about screenwriters on two hands.
This latest is the best—by far.
In What Happens Next, Marc Norman organizes the Read More
THE INSANITY DEFENSE: THE COMPLETE PROSE By Woody Allen Random House, 342 pages, $15.95
Like every other kind of writer, humorists go in and out of fashion. Nobody seems to read Stephen Leacock anymore, and I wonder about Read More
