The only compass readers will ever need to navigate the treacherous waters of filmmaking.
A hilarious and helpful insider’s guide to launching a successful writing career in Hollywood.
The co-creators of the TV series Reno 911 and such films as Night at the Museum Garant and Lennon take a gut-busting stab at the published world in their first book. Unapologetically designed as “a guide to writing hit movies that make you and the studio piles of money,” the authors offer invaluable advice that much of Hollywood would shudder to reveal. And they would know—the pair has grossed “$1,467,015,501.00 and counting at the box office.” Garant and Lennon take on the Goliath-like task of explaining the entire screenwriting process from pitching to selling, studio development to a practical guide to writing with a partner (which they swear will have “you writ[ing] twice as fast as you would without”). They emphasize the importance of both humor and practicality, both of which are imperative tools to a successful career working in “the Dream Machine.” The authors demystify the secretive world of screenwriting in Hollywood by offering tips on everything from sequels (“Never discuss the sequel before the movie comes out!”) to, arguably, the biggest question of all: “Why does almost every studio movie suck donkey balls?” Their answer: “Development Hell.” They even provide helpful hints on how to discern one’s importance to the studio, suggesting that “the easy way to tell what the studio’s opinion of you is where…they let you park.”
The only compass readers will ever need to navigate the treacherous waters of filmmaking.Pub Date: July 5, 2011
ISBN: 978-1-4391-8675-6
Page Count: 336
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: June 6, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 15, 2011
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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