A surprisingly uncontroversial exposé with an egocentric aftertaste.
Insider’s guide to independent filmmaking from a passionate 20-year industry veteran.
Hoping to usher in the next generation of entrepreneurs, Vachon follows up her how-to guide for first-time film producers (Shooting to Kill, not reviewed) with one about the inner workings of Killer Films, the indie production company she runs with partner, Pam Koffler. The author has come a long way since her humble beginnings as Todd Haynes’s assistant on his 1987 thesis project, Superstar. Raised by an errant father and a cancer-stricken mother, Vachon grew up poor in New York City in the mid-’80s. She loved American cinema, and it wasn’t long before she earned her wings at the independent filmmaker’s paradise, Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute, where she eventually became a film-festival judge. Soon came the grueling fundraisers, tough shooting schedules and MPAA ratings battles over films like Kids, Boys Don’t Cry and Hedwig and the Angry Inch. Encounters with a detached Julia Roberts and a double-talking Kirsten Dunst weren’t much fun either. In 2002, Vachon achieved breakout triumphs with One Hour Photo (starring Robin Williams) and Todd Haynes’s slickly produced masterpiece Far From Heaven, about which she warned her crew, “We have more ambition than money.” The author writes of these ups and downs with good humor. Among her ten rules for surviving Cannes Film Festival: “You will look like shit by the end. Embrace it.” She supplements her text with mini-commentaries from other producers and diary segments that spotlight hourly, on-set action. While conceding that modern filmmaking has become a “commodity business,” Vachon still glows when über-producer Jerry Bruckheimer admits he’s a “big admirer.” Fans of Hollywood’s mighty, ever-grinding celluloid machine will be rapt and sated by her straightforward, at times dispassionately dry dissection of a cutthroat industry. Others will resort to paging through for random points of interest.
A surprisingly uncontroversial exposé with an egocentric aftertaste.Pub Date: Sept. 19, 2006
ISBN: 0-7432-5630-1
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2006
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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