|
||||||||||
|
Subscribe to the Absolute Write Newsletter and get the Agents! Agents! Agents! report free! Click here.
|
Win a 1-year subscription to Writer's Digest by subscribing to Absolute Markets-- all paying markets for your writing. Click here. |
|
| |||||||||||||
|
|
Inside
the Cover Book Reviews Shoot Out - Surviving Fame and (Mis)Fortune in
Hollywood Shoot Out aptly casts Hollywood as an industry town
that manufactures stories similar to the way Detroit assembles cars… only with
more backstabbing. What makes
Hollywood so interesting, as Peter Bart and Peter Guber tell it, is that you
never know who will be unable to bounce back from career oblivion, and who will
rise to the heights of filmic majesty with an unpredicted blockbuster.
The true mavericks are the rare individuals who are one day vilified for
their audacity and then revered for their brilliant delusions of grandeur. Shoot Out precisely, and unfortunately, mirrors
Hollywood’s current lackluster ability to dazzle an audience with any degree
of novelty. The book attempts to
slip the reader top-secret tittle-tattle but fails to elaborate upon the
interesting and insightful. Stories
intended to read as: “You’re not supposed to know this but…” instead,
appear on the page as: “I fouled up this-or-that, but came out smelling like a
rose!” Bart and Guber have been major parts of The Hollywood
Machine, and have not only observed the industry and its revolutions, but have
influenced and educated the power brokers of tomorrow.
From as early on as their acknowledgements, Bart and Guber assert that
their book will be a casual, quasi tell-all about the business of Hollywood.
They affirm that a number of west-coast bigwigs went running in the
opposite direction when asked to impart their tales on the written page. Why then does the slim 288-page book that Bart and Guber have
written not include the stories that their audiences really want to hear? Each chapter has a dramatic heading and a certain industry
focus (The Alchemists to describe
feature directors, The Zookeepers to
describe agents). When Bart and
Guber are elucidating The Godfather in
the chapter about writers, The Holy Grail,
they concentrate on how novelist Mario Puzo merely outlined the epic Corleone
saga and sold it to Paramount Pictures in order to feed his growing family while
writing the novel version of the story. Enter
Francis Ford Coppola as the young, perfectionist writer/director and the drama
to bring the future Oscar-winner to the screen multiplies tenfold! Drawing on his experiences as the executive in charge of
production for the picture, Peter Bart loosely sketches a version of the legend
of The Godfather rather than
elaborating on what went on behind the scenes. By touching the surface of events without any shrewd detail,
nothing new is revealed about The
Godfather. Entire books could
be written about Brando’s professional inflexibility, or Pacino’s lack of
film experience. The question here
is why do Bart and Guber hold back so much of the juice that their readers are
thirsting for? It is clear that the authors have a great deal of contempt
for agents’ practice of feeding off of the riches and talents of their
clients. The most intuitive chapter
of the book, The Zookeepers, sustains
a wonderful sense of tension natural to the studio/management relationship.
By lobbing some real dirty zingers at the representation world, Guber and
Bart actually get the reader to root against those dastardly villains, The
Agents. They structure their
dissection of the silly hyperbole and lack of talent inherent in managers and
agents with well-balanced drama and acumen.
Guber and Bart take off their gloves and write bare-knuckled for one
chapter, getting to the heart of what they believe it means to be an agent.
It’s unfortunate, however, that their success in this chapter serves to
exemplify the book’s other major problems, namely the lack of risk-taking and
novelty of information on the rest of their pages. Even the book’s jacket design is pure Hollywood seduction, foreshadowing the superficial prescience about to be doled out by the two authors. Set against mirrored black, it depicts a glowing title above jumbled 35mm film frames, replete with the silhouette of a slender woman’s figure cast in smoked light. The authors know how to sell their product, regardless of content, because they’ve been doing it for so long. Let’s not forget that Peter Guber believed that a truncation of Tom Wolfe’s classic Bonfire of the Vanities would translate well to the screen and that Caddyshack, with all of its unfinished business, needed a sequel. A five-year veteran of the motion picture industry,
Graham Reed splits his time between New York and Los Angeles.
A freelance writer, Graham’s first piece of short fiction will be
published in the Winter 2005 issue of Sweet
Fancy Moses. His original
written work has also appeared as a part of the 2004 SPARK Performance Series at
the Powerhouse Theatre in Los Angeles. A lifelong lover of movies, Graham earned a BFA in film
and television production, with a minor in English literature, from NYU’s
Tisch School of the Arts in 1996. He
is currently completing a novella set in Hollywood, which will serve as his
creative thesis project for Dartmouth College’s Masters in Liberal Studies
program. Graham is set to graduate
in 2005. Graham can be reached at graham@grahamreed.com. |
Sponsored links 
Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer! How to find a book publisher |
Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007
Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
|
