NOT THE GIRL NEXT DOOR: JOAN CRAWFORD, A PERSONAL BIOGRAPHY
By Charlotte Chandler
Simon & Schuster, 336 pages, $26
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, Read More
THE STAR MACHINE
By Jeanine Basinger
Alfred A. Knopf, 586 pages, $35
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 Read More
OTTO PREMINGER: THE MAN WHO WOULD BE KING
By Foster Hirsch
Alfred A. Knopf, 573 pages, $35
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 Read More
WHAT HAPPENS NEXT: A HISTORY OF AMERICAN SCREENWRITING
By 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, Read More
MERE ANARCHY
By Woody Allen
Random House, 160 pages, $21.95
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, Read More
SHOOT THE WIDOW: ADVENTURES OF A BIOGRAPHER IN SEARCH OF HER SUBJECT
By Meryle Secrest
Alfred A. Knopf, 242 pages, $25.95
Biography is the perfect occupation for the scholar-squirrel, assiduously storing lists of the guests at every dinner party, the word count of every rough draft. But it’s also tailor-made for Read More
Let’s be blunt, as befits our author.
David Mamet has directed more than a dozen movies, none of which suggest he has much of an affinity for the job. Things Change (1988), Homicide (1991), The Spanish Prisoner (1997), State and Main (2000) and the rest are all pleasant or even mildly diverting, but how many Read More
Among silent stars, Louise Brooks had the shortest career and the longest afterlife. Actually, it was a tiny career. From evocative, charming supporting parts in 1926, she became a strange sort of star in 1928, and was practically out of the movie business by 1930, rendered unemployable by either her stubborn integrity (according to Brooks) Read More
Among silent stars, Louise Brooks had the shortest career and the longest afterlife. Actually, it was a tiny career. From evocative, charming supporting parts in 1926, she became a strange sort of star in 1928, and was practically out of the movie business by 1930, rendered unemployable by either her stubborn integrity (according to Brooks) Read More
My favorite still from a movie made in New York is not in this book. I first saw it as a child of 11 or 12—I could have been leafing though Daniel Blum’s A Pictorial History of the Silent Screen (1953). (My future was all mapped out for me even then.) The still showed two Read More
