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
When Louis B. Mayer saw Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard, he exploded, “How dare this young man, Wilder, bite the hand that feeds him?” (Wilder, who was present, replied, “I am Wilder and go fuck yourself.”) As Joan Crawford in the much-ridiculed Mommie Dearest, Faye Dunaway doesn’t so much bite the hand that feeds her Read More
Kate Remembered , by A. Scott Berg. Putnam, 370 pages, $25.95.
There’s a scene in David Lean’s Summertime that has always seemed to me to capture the essence of its star.
Katharine Hepburn plays an executive secretary from Ohio who has come to Venice for the first time. Dazed by sensory overload, she’s Read More
Get Happy: The Life of Judy Garland , by Gerald Clarke. Random House, 510 pages, $29.95.
Somewhere over the rainbow Judy Garland is plaintively asking the bluebirds why then, oh why yet another biography? Didn’t the job get done in 1975, the year of Anne Edwards’ less-than-accurate biography, and Gerold Frank’s exhaustive study, and Read More
