Review by New York Times Review
TELL ME SOMETHING NEW. Or tell me something funny. Or tell me something smart. Those are my very reasonable demands when approaching any new book about movies and movie stars. I already know that the director Stanley Kubrick was a perfectionist. I know that Meryl Streep can do accents, that "Deep Throat" is an American porn classic and that, for all his saintlike labors on "Two and a Half Men" for 12 long television seasons, Jon Cryer will forever be known to a self-refreshing population of cultists as Duckie Dale from the echt '80s romcom "Pretty in Pink." Tell me something I don't know or let me get back to rereading William Goldman's "Adventures in the Screen Trade," where nobody pretends to know anything. Smug in the breadth of my Hollywood education, I approached STANLEY KUBRICK AND ME (Arcade, $27.99) with some trepidation. The subtitle, "Thirty Years at His Side," only made me antsier. Assuming the author is not James Boswell at the side of Samuel Johnson, I am not a fan of memoirs by lower-downs cashing in on their time spent shadowing higher-ups. My motto is, Get your own life - even if your boss is a devil who wears Prada. In this case, the author, Emilio D'Alessandro, was an Italian racecar pro turned London minicab chauffeur in the 1960s, who, through random fate, became a driver for Kubrick's London production company and a do-anything-at-all-hours right-hand man to the director for three decades. Oh no, I thought, not Little Guy Gives Lifts to Mr. Big. More dubious still, D'Alessandro (who moved back to Italy with his wife after Kubrick's death in 1999) readily admits that he is not a writer. So he sought out Filippo Ulivieri, a younger teacher of film theory and Italy's leading Kubrick expert, to develop a viable "Emilio" voice and turn his stories into a coherent book. Then that Italian voice was given an English translation by Simon Marsh. (The Italian edition was published in 2012; a 2015 Italian-British documentary, "S Is for Stanley," makes use of the same material.) Oh no, I thought, not Little Guy Feeds Big Guy's Kittens, translated from the Italian. Yet here I am, embodying Goldman's famous "Screen Trade" dictum, not knowing anything. Because "Stanley Kubrick and Me" turns out to be a weird, revealing delight. Yes, D'Alessandro did, at times, see to the welfare of his boss's welter of coddled cats. He also drove Kubrick's cars, counseled his children and, one late night, fended off a plea to return to his boss's house to empty out a vacuum cleaner bag because Mr. Big could not find his wedding ring. But the accretion of details about this seemingly salt-of-the-earth working stiff and the eccentric artistic genius who paid him creates an irresistible picture of friendship, loyalty and artistic temperament. The stuff D'Alessandro was asked to do was sometimes really nuts, and maybe the employee was nuts for putting up with his employer's whims. (There is no hiding his wife's displeasure at her husband's absences when their own two children were young, or at his willingness to leap, at all hours, at Kubrick's call.) And heaven knows the crazy stuff Kubrick demanded of Emilio - and of the entire staff - was the product of world-class self-absorption and a maddening obliviousness to the lives of others. Well, all of that is here. And I enjoyed every word, along with Kubrick's bonus advice about haberdashery. "Stanley had been very clear about shirts: I was to use only shirts with two breast pockets.... The pockets had to be button-down so that nothing would fall out if I bent over." Tsk, people! People who need people! I already know that Barbra Streisand resisted any pressure to alter her distinctive (and, may I say, gorgeous) nose when she was starting out as a performer. But Neal Gabler says something fresh when he describes her look as "a kind of exoticism - half Afghan hound, half Jewess." Gabler, the estimable journalist, pop-cultural historian and author of "An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood," returns to his interest in the intersection of Jews, gentiles and Hollywood in BARBRA STREISAND: Redefining Beauty, Femininity, and Power (Yale University, $25). The book is a new addition to the press's Jewish Lives series of interpretive biographies, where the Jewess joins Semitic sisters including Sarah Bernhardt, Lillian Heilman and Emma Goldman. Gabler's organizing principle is that Streisand's outsider roots - as a Jewish-looking, Jewish-sounding, Brooklyn-toughened woman who pushed past rejection and (gentile) Hollywood standards of female beauty and desirability to brilliant stardom - are the defining, revolutionary characteristic of her life. The observation isn't itself revolutionary; who would disagree? But the author does a neat job of weaving every thread he can pull into the cloth. In her otherness, "she was the Joe Louis of Jews and gays, their knockout puncher, not only the one performer with whom they could identify but the performer whose triumph became their triumph." He sees Jewishness in her liberal politics, and in her feminism, which, he muses, may be "another part of her Jewish heritage where women were often characterized as tough and domineering." He even reads code into her romance with the hairdresser-turned-producer Jon Peters, noting, "The man-killing Streisand of the Jewish Woman syndrome had ... become positively kittenish with Peters." Gabler squeezes a lot of best-yeshiva-student scholarly references and citations into his assignment. And the editorial decision to title each chapter with a Yiddishism goes a shtick too far. But at least this brief biography looks at a well-documented star in a new way. Whereas in A GIRL'S GOT TO BREATHE: The Life of Teresa Wright (University Press of Mississippi, $35), Donald Spoto looks at the Hollywood actress - who starred in Alfred Hitchcock's "Shadow of a Doubt," won an Oscar as a supporting actress for "Mrs. Miniver" and died in 2005 at the age of 86 - in an old way. Spoto, the prolific biographer of movie greats including Dietrich, Olivier, Hitchcock and Monroe, was Wright's friend, and her family authorized this genteel, protective, admiring telling: Teresa Wright was a fine actress, a lovely, modest person and a good mother. Both her husbands were difficult, but she did the best she could. She held her own against Samuel Goldwyn early on in business negotiations. Oh dear, she was sometimes messy and disorganized. Shocking. Underwhelmed by this knowledge, I move on to HER AGAIN: Becoming Meryl Streep (Harper/HarperCollins, $26.99), by the New Yorker contributor Michael Schulman. The title turns out to be a key to the book's slippery shape and tone. In context, the phrase is Streep's own, something she said in disarming self-deprecation as she accepted her third Oscar, in 2012, for her role as Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher in "The Iron Lady." With no context, though, the title comes off as a complaint on the part of the author, who seems to dislike his subject for reasons unintelligible to his readers beyond the fact that she is Meryl Streep, and she is generally considered to be one of the most illustrious American actors of her generation: still working, still transforming herself physically, still winning prizes. Irked, the author sets out to discover why she's still here. But, as he is an unauthorized biographer, Schulman's direct access to those who know Streep best is spotty. And as a result, the reminiscences of a former high school boyfriend receive an inordinate amount of weight, and the author leans heavily on published interviews and articles by others to come up with a leapfrogging "explanation" of how the New Jersey high school cheerleader Mary Louise Streep became the award-laden actor she is. The path Schulman charts hops from Vassar to the Yale School of Drama to the Public Theater to Streep's romance with the actor John Cazale to "The Deer Hunter" to "Kramer vs. Kramer." And there the book ends, although not before a long, juicy, publicity-generating telling of on-set strife between Streep and Dustin Hoffman at a time when Streep was still grieving over Cazale's death. "She had never believed that actors had to suffer," Schulman says. "With almost alien precision, she could simulate any emotion she needed to. But if Meryl was now an emotional wreck playing an emotional wreck, could anyone (including her) really say whether she was faking it? Could she be 'real' and a simulacrum at the exact same time?" This is an odd, peevish book - but certainly not an uninteresting one. In truth, peevishness has its own irritating charm in books about Hollywood. But spunk is another story. I'm with Lou Grant on "The Mary Tyler Moore Show" when it comes to spunk: anti. Which makes me exactly not the reader Hadley Freeman aims to please with LIFE MOVES PRETTY FAST: The Lessons We Learned From Eighties Movies (and Why We Don't Learn Them From Movies Anymore) (Simon & Schuster, paper, $16). This may be Freeman's cue to smack me down with an Ally Sheedy quote from "The Breakfast Club": "When you grow up, your heart dies." Fair enough! Now in her late 30s, Freeman is New York-bred but long based in London, where she writes a lively column for The Guardian and contributes bright pieces to British Vogue; she won me over some years ago with "The Meaning of Sunglasses," her cheeky book about style and fashion, and she followed that with "Be Awesome: Modern Life for Modern Ladies." She specializes in wry, bouncy, lady-to-lady declarations for Gen Y-ers on down, a rhetorical swagger spawned by the swell feminist website Jezebel that assumes readers understand the jokey appropriation of the fuddy-duddy word "lady" in the first place. In "Life Moves Pretty Fast," Freeman declares, with effervescent intensity, that she loves, loves, loves "Ferris Bueller's Day Off." (An observation by Matthew Broderick as Bueller lends the book its title.) She is gaga for "Dirty Dancing," "The Princess Bride," "Top Gun," "Pretty in Pink" - and all those other fun, shiny, happy-sexy movies from the Decade of Big Shoulder Pads that no one would argue weren't fun and shiny in the first place. The author revels in her happy movie geekery. She swoons, with exaggerated sincerity, over the thespian greatness - or is it faux greatness, or faux sincerity, or faux exaggeration? - of the '80s star Steve Guttenberg, and includes, among the many lists that pad out the book, a list of top five Guttenberg moments. (Other lists include 10 best power ballads, top five British bad guys and top five montages.) Freeman does that thing that I, wounded, personally hate, when she writes, "Yet snooty critics aside, '80s movies have maintained an astonishing level of popularity among actual audiences, now, it feels, more than ever." Ouch. Personally, I don't think snooty critics are fighting the author as hard as she thinks, even those who prefer to dwell on the '80s as the era of "Blade Runner," "Raging Bull" and "Blue Velvet" rather than "Sixteen Candles." And if Freeman would like to squeal about the greatness of "When Harry Met Sally" or "Ghostbusters," I doubt any of my fellow snoots would disagree. (We do, however, rise up as one and take issue with her cri de coeur that "few movies have been as underrated and misunderstood as 1987's 'Dirty Dancing.'") Still, mixed in with the slumber-party gush, Freeman makes many smart observations worth saving up and revisiting for a project less giggly than this: She notes that "girls in '80s teen movies love sex, and suffer few consequences for it." Her comments on male friendships in "Ghostbusters" are astute. And in her riff on "Steel Magnolias" - into which she loops "Nine to Five," "Terms of Endearment" and "Beaches" - she touches on an idea about which this snooty critic would like to read more. "What I love about classic women's movies," Freeman writes with ease and clarity, "is that they tell women that their daily lives are interesting." It is just such clarity, combined with scholarly authority and a graceful narrative style, that makes Jeremy Geltzer's DIRTY WORDS AND FILTHY PICTURES: Film and the First Amendment (University of Texas, cloth, $85; paper, $29.95) so compelling: The book is valuable both as a specialized movie-history text and a meditation on morality, freedom of expression, changing notions of what constitutes the scandalous, and how, well, nothing ever stays the same. Geltzer, an entertainment lawyer, begins with the shocked public reaction to "The Kiss," a 47-second featurette produced by the Edison Manufacturing Company in 1896 that caused one contemporary snooty critic to declare, "The spectacle of the prolonged pasturing on each other's lips was hard to bear." Thorough and low-key in his handling of hot stuff as varied as boxing movies, Jane Russell's breasts, nudie flicks, "I Am Curious (Yellow)," "Carnal Knowledge," "Boys in the Sand," "Debbie Does Dallas" and the number of times a particular four-letter word is spoken in "The Wolf of Wall Street" (for those counting at home, it's 506 times over 180 minutes, or one every 21 seconds), the author is also crisp in his explanation of changing legal boundaries over the decades. And not without an eye for attention-getting citations from primary sources. Best of all, thanks to Geltzer, readers can savor the otherwise forgotten disapproving review of a Baltimore judge who didn't care for Howard Hughes's baroque 1943 western "The Outlaw": "Jane Russell's breasts hung over the picture like a summer thunderstorm spread out over a landscape." Those again. LISA SCHWARZBAUM, a former critic at Entertainment Weekly, is a freelance journalist.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [June 5, 2016]
Review by Booklist Review
With more than 19 Academy Award nominations to her credit (more than any other actor in history) and three Oscar wins, Streep is unmistakably the most celebrated actor of her generation. Her screen performances are legendary, from Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady to Julia Child in Julie and Julia. Her range of talents is enviable. They include a veritable UN of pitch-perfect dialects and the capabilities for show-stopping Broadway tunes, campy comedies, and period dramas. Is such talent born or developed with care and precision? Beginning with her suburban high-school plays to her challenging graduate studies at the Yale School of Drama and culminating in her breakout performance as Joanna Kramer in Kramer vs. Kramer, Schulman's biography is an elaborate if far from exhaustive look at an aspiring artist and blossoming young woman coming into her own through the roles she perfected, the risks she took, and the relationships she fostered. Schulman's balanced portrait of Streep's unwavering dedication and demanding work ethic makes this a must-read for fans and aspiring actors.--Haggas, Carol Copyright 2016 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Schulman, a first-time author and frequent New Yorker contributor, draws heavily on interviews and archival materials to present an insightful portrait of the acclaimed actor at the dawn of her career. The book begins in 2012 with Streep winning her third Oscar, for The Iron Lady, and then backtracks to her early life, following Streep from her New Jersey upbringing to her time at the Yale School of Drama. Streep is lauded as one of her generation's finest acting talents, and her development of her art dominates the narrative, but the author's informal approach allows us to see a more down-to-earth and relatable side of the actor. We get to know Streep through her brief and impassioned relationship with character actor John Cazale, cut short by his death from lung cancer in 1978, and watch as she grapples with the shifting roles of women in the 1970s and develops her own identity as a feminist. Schulman concludes his book in 1980 with Streep accepting her first Oscar, for Kramer vs. Kramer, and appreciative readers will undoubtedly hope that a follow-up volume is in the works. Agent: Becky Sweren, Kuhn Projects. (May) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Award-winning actress Meryl Streep earned the respect of both colleagues and audiences early on for the quality and variety of her performances. Schulman (arts editor, the New Yorker) focuses on her formative years throughout the 1970s, from youthful beginnings in New Jersey to Vassar and Yale School of Drama, to local and repertory theater, to acclaimed appearances in Joseph Papp's Shakespeare in the Park, on Broadway, and in such films as Manhattan and Kramer vs. Kramer. The author honestly and engagingly examines each component of Streep's professional development. Her personal life is woven into the narrative: a relationship with the late actor John -Cazale; friendships in and out of the theater; struggles to define herself; marriage to talented sculptor Don Gummer. Schulman's research is thorough on all counts, including in-depth biographical material, vivid behind-the-scenes accounts of productions, and contextual background on the theatrical and social culture of the times. He describes people and events with a cinematic flair, providing deeper insights into Streep as a woman as well as a consummate professional. VERDICT This absorbing portrait of an iconic actress's early years is essential for Streep fans. It will also find a wide readership among those who enjoy theater and film.-Carol J. Binkowski, Bloomfield, NJ © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
