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 horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.
“The Mongols swept across the globe as conquerors,” writes the appreciative pop anthropologist-historian Weatherford (The History of Money, 1997, etc.), “but also as civilization’s unrivaled cultural carriers.”
No business-secrets fluffery here, though Weatherford does credit Genghis Khan and company for seeking “not merely to conquer the world but to impose a global order based on free trade, a single international law, and a universal alphabet with which to write all the languages of the world.” Not that the world was necessarily appreciative: the Mongols were renowned for, well, intemperance in war and peace, even if Weatherford does go rather lightly on the atrocities-and-butchery front. Instead, he accentuates the positive changes the Mongols, led by a visionary Genghis Khan, brought to the vast territories they conquered, if ever so briefly: the use of carpets, noodles, tea, playing cards, lemons, carrots, fabrics, and even a few words, including the cheer hurray. (Oh, yes, and flame throwers, too.) Why, then, has history remembered Genghis and his comrades so ungenerously? Whereas Geoffrey Chaucer considered him “so excellent a lord in all things,” Genghis is a byword for all that is savage and terrible; the word “Mongol” figures, thanks to the pseudoscientific racism of the 19th century, as the root of “mongoloid,” a condition attributed to genetic throwbacks to seed sown by Mongol invaders during their decades of ravaging Europe. (Bad science, that, but Dr. Down’s son himself argued that imbeciles “derived from an earlier form of the Mongol stock and should be considered more ‘pre-human, rather than human.’ ”) Weatherford’s lively analysis restores the Mongols’ reputation, and it takes some wonderful learned detours—into, for instance, the history of the so-called Secret History of the Mongols, which the Nazis raced to translate in the hope that it would help them conquer Russia, as only the Mongols had succeeded in doing.
A horde-pleaser, well-written and full of surprises.Pub Date: March 2, 2004
ISBN: 0-609-61062-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Crown
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2003
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