Category Archives: Book Review

Novel Review: Scarface by Armitage Trail

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1930, Scarface tells the story of Tony Guarino.  Tony was an 18 year-old hoodlum, working his way through the Chicago rackets.  Unfortunately, for Tony, he started to draw too much attention from the cops and his gangster boss told Tony to stop hanging around so much.  Miffed, Tony decided to join the Army.

Tony served with a valor in World War I.  He was natural leader and had no hesitation when it came to killing people.  He was “a good soldier,” as the novel puts it.  When he’s wounded in battle, he’s left with a facial scar that changes his appearance to the extent that even his own family doesn’t recognize him when he returns to Chicago.  Of course, due to a clerical mistake, they also think that Tony’s dead.  After killing his former mistress and her new lover, Tony somewhat randomly decides to change his name to Tony Camonte and take over the Chicago underworld.

He gets a job working for Johnny Love.  Scarface Tony, as he is called now, works his way up.  Soon, Tony is in charge of the Lovo mob and he even has a girlfriend, a former “gun girl” named Jane.  Unfortunately, Tony also has a lot of enemies.  Captain Flanagan may take Tony’s money but he still wants to put Tony behind bars.  The DA may take Tony’s money but he still wants to put Tony behind bars.  The cops way take Tony’s money but …. well, okay, you get the idea.  Tony can’t trust anyone.  Complicating things is that his older brother is moving his way up in the police force and his younger sister has been hanging out with Tony’s main gunman.  And there’s a new gang boss in town.  His nickname is Schemer.  You know he has to be bad with a nickname like that!

I read Scarface yesterday.  It’s only 181 pages long and it’s a quick read.  It’s also not a particularly well-written book.  The prose is often clunky.  The dialogue is awkward.  Tony really doesn’t have any motivation beyond the fact that he’s a jerk.  We’re continually told that Tony has become one of the most powerful gangsters in the country but we don’t really see any evidence of it.  One of the basic rules is that it’s better to show than to tell and this novel is all about telling instead of showing.  What there is of a plot feels like it was made up on the spot.  For instance, with the exception of an off-hand mention of her in the first chapter, the character of Tony’s sister doesn’t even figure into the story until it is nearly done and, yet, the story’s conclusion pretty much hinges on her existence.  Though not as well-written, Scarface is still a bit like The Epic of Gilgamesh.  Writer Armitage Trail just kept coming up with complications until he finally ran out of tablets and had no choice but to abruptly end things.

That said, the book is notable in that it served as the inspiration for Howard Hawks’s 1932 film, Scarface.  The Hawks film, which only loosely follows the plot of Trail’s book and which wisely abandons some of the less credible plot points, would later be remade by Brian De Palma, with Al Pacino stepping into the role of Tony.

And the rest, as they say, is history.

Novel Review: 1988 by Richard D. Lamm and Arnold Grossman

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

From my aunt’s paperback collection, comes 1988!

1988 is a novel about the 1988 Presidential election. It was published in 1986 so, when it first came out, it was meant to be a look at a possible future. But read today, it’s more like a work of alternate history. What if, the book asks, the 1988 election had been disrupted by a third party candidate?

That candidate is Stephen Wendell, who is the governor of Texas. You can tell that this book was written a long time ago because Wendell is described as being a Democratic governor of Texas. There hasn’t been a Democrat elected statewide in Texas for a while and that’s probably not going to change anytime soon. (Sorry, Beto, but it’s true.) Wendell is also a conservative Democrat, which is yet another reminder that we’re dealing with an old book. With neither the Republican nor the Democratic candidate exciting the country, Wendell sees an opening for his populist, anti-immigration message.

Jerry Bloom is a former 60s radical who now works as a campaign consultant. At first, he resists Wendell’s attempts to hire him but Bloom finally gives in. Some of it is because Wendell seems to be more reasonable than Bloom originally assumed. A lot of it is because Bloom wants the challenge. As a result of Bloom’s hard-hitting and frequently viscous commercials, Wendell starts to rise up in the polls.

Bloom’s conscience is bothered, however. He used to believe in stuff but now he finds himself as just a political mercenary, turning the country against itself. Plus, Bloom comes across evidence that there’s a secret conspiracy behind Wendell’s campaign, one that could put the future of the Republic at stake!

1988 is an okay political thriller. The plot isn’t particularly surprising and you’ll figure out what’s going on long before Bloom does but, for the most part, it’s a well-written book and Jerry Bloom is an interesting character. I do think that the book overestimates that power of Bloom’s commercials. For the most part, they sound like the type of stuff that The Lincoln Project posted throughout 2020, commercials that would speak to the already converted while turning off the undecided voters. Bloom’s commercials sound like they would be popular with Wendell’s base but they don’t sound like the sort of thing that would make him a potential president.

The book also makes the mistake of including a character named Harrison Chase, who I guess is supposed to be some sort of Edward R. Murrow type. He gives commentaries on the evening news and 1988 devotes page after page to Harrison Chase bitching about the election. Most of the commentaries come across as being pompous and self-important, which might be the most realistic part of the book. But it still doesn’t make them particularly interesting to read. They slow down the action and they also contribute to the book ending on an annoying ambiguous note.

Political junkies will enjoy counting up all of the real-life politicians who are mentioned in the book. (Joe Biden gets a shout-out because he’s been around forever.) Some may also find it interesting that one of the book’s co-authors was governor of Colorado at the time that he wrote the book. One has to wonder how much of that experience contributed to the book’s portrait of the electorate as being easily led and intellectually vapid.

1988 is okay. It goes a little heavy on the “political consultants are bad” angle. It’s not a bad message but it’s hardly a revolutionary. Still, it’s always interesting to read older political books and see how much things have changed and also how much they’ve remained the same.

Book Review: Alright, Alright, Alright: The Oral History Of Richard Linklater’s Dazed and Confused by Melissa Maerz

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

There are a lot of different ways that I could praise this 2020 book about the 1993 high school film, Dazed and Confused.

I could point out that it is the definitive history about the making of one of my favorite films, told by the people who were there.

I could point out that it’s a book that captures a very important time in the development of modern independent film.

I could point out that anyone who is a fan of Richard Linklater should read this book to discover the struggles that Linklater went through while directing his second feature film.  Linklater learned a lot during the filming.  He’s also an endlessly fascinating interview subject, a filmmaker who has figured out how to balance the needs of art with the needs of commerce.

If you’re a Texan, you definitely have to read this book because Dazed and Confused is a part of our culture.

I would also point out that this book is about more than just went on while the movie was being shot.  It’s also about how the movie effected and continued to effect the lives of the people who were in it and who have seen it..  Some cast members, like Matthew McConaughey, Ben Affleck, Parker Posey, and Renee Zellweger (even though she’s only visible for a second and isn’t actually credited in the film), became big stars.  Others, like Anthony Rapp and Adam Goldberg and Nick Katt, have emerged as strong characer actors, the type of people who you love to see in any movie.  Others had a bit less success and most of them do not hold back on discussing why stardom did or did not come calling.

Featuring interviews with just about everyone who was involved in the film, Alright Alright Alright begins with Richard Linklater finding arthouse success with Slacker and then moving on to Dazed and Confused.  As many people in the book point out, Linklater’s first few films helped to define both Austin and the entire Texas film scene.  At a time when most Texas films were about cowboys and oilman, Linklater revealed that there was a lot more going on.  And yet, when Linklater went on to find his own quirky brand of mainstream success, many of his former colleagues in Austin felt left behind.  Linklater acknowledges their feelings while also making no apologies for not spending the rest of his life remaking Slacker.

The full production of Dazed and Confused, from casting to the film’s release, is covered.  We learn about some of the people who tried out for the film but, ultimately, weren’t cast.  (Linklater seems to feel almost guilty for not casting Vince Vaughn in a role.)  We learn how Matthew McConaughey almost randomly found his way into the cast and then subsequently transformed Wooderson from being a minor character into being the heart of the film.  We follow Wiley Wiggins as he comes of age on the film set.  Just about everyone is interviewed and no one holds back.  It was a frequently wild set, with a young cast who, to a certain extent, recreated high school while the film was being shot.  I was sad to learn that Michelle Burke did not get along with Parker Posey and Joey Lauren Adams.  I was happier to read that Jason London was apparently as cool off-camera as he was when he was playing Randall “Pink” Floyd.  And, considering the way that his character just vanished from the film, I have to say that I wasn’t surprised to discover that no one seemed to get along with Shawn Andrews.

Shawn Andrews, of course, played Kevin Pickford.  Pickford was originally meant to be an almost shamanistic character, though the concept of the character started to change once filming actually started.  (“There’s a reason we called him Prickford,” Rory Cochrane says, at one point.)  Two chapters are devoted to everyone in the cast taking about how much they disliked working with Shawn Andrews.  No one really seems to hold back, which I have to admit almost made me feel sorry for the guy.  Like many young actors, he went a bit too far trying to be method.  Nick Katt compared him to Jared Leto at his worst.  The otherwise easy-going Jason London talks about nearly getting into a fistfight with him.  Linklater attempts to be diplomatic while discussing what happened but even he admits that Andrews didn’t gel with his vision for the film.  Pickford was originally meant to be a major character.  He was meant to be on the football field with Randall and Dawson.  He was also originally meant to be the one heading out to get Aerosmith tickets.  However, with more and more actors basically refusing to deal with the actor who was playing him, Pickford was replaced in scene after scene by Matthew McConaughey’s Wooderson.  (Andrews, apparently, felt that Pickford should die in a dramatic car accident towards the end of the film.)  Perhaps not surprisingly, Andrews was one of the few actors to decline to be interviewed for the book.

The final few chapters of the book are a bit sad, as some members of the cast discuss their careers after Dazed and Confused.  We read about a cast reunion that occurred in Austin that turned a bit awkward when the actors who had become big stars reunited with the actors who hadn’t.  Jason London, who dealt with a great personal tragedy shortly after the filming of Dazed and Confused, talks about the experience with a wistfulness sadness that is actually a bit heart-breaking.  One gets the feeling that London’s mixed feeling weren’t so much about not becoming a Matthew McConaughey or Ben Affleck-style star as much as they were an acknowledgement that the past is the past.  The unstated theme running through the book is that, as good a time as everyone had while making Dazed and Confused, everyone’s older now and that moment can never be recaptured.

(Kind of like high school!)

The book does end with some speculation about a Dazed and Confused sequel.  Linklater seems to have given it some thought, though he also says that it will never happen.  Personally, I think that’s the right decision.  Dazed and Confused is perfect as it is.  Alright, Alright, Alright is the book that helps us to understand why that is.

Novel Review: The Prodigal Daughter by Jeffrey Archer

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1982, Jeffrey Archer’s The Prodigal Daughter is one of the many paperback novels that I recently inherited from my aunt.  It’s 485 pages long but, as I discovered earlier this week, it’s a quick read.  I got through it in a day and a half.

It tells the story of Floratyna Rosnovski, the daughter of Abel Rosnovski, a Polish immigrant who worked his way up from poverty and now owns a chain of luxury hotels.  Abel is enemies with William Kane, a WASP banker from a wealthy family.  Why are Kane and Abel enemies?  Well, it probably has something to do with the fact that they have ironic names.  Obviously, if your name is Abel, you’re going to mistrust anyone named Kane.  Beyond that, The Prodigal Daughter is a sequel to an earlier Archer novel called Kane and Abel.  I assume that Kane and Abel goes into more detail about the rivalry between the two men but all that really needs to be known, as far as The Prodigal Daughter is concerned, is that they hate each other.

Unfortunately for Abel, Floratyna grows up to fall in love with Richard Kane, the son of William.  Rejected by her father, Floratyna marries Richard and together, they make their own fortune by opening up a chain of stores.  Along the way, Floratyna is approached by a childhood friend named Edward.  Edward, who is obviously in love with Floratyna, recruits her to run for the U.S. House of Representatives.  At first, Floratyna struggles in Washington but soon, she wins the respect of her colleauges and learns to stop being such a leftist.  Eventually, she becomes a Senator and starts to look towards the White House.  But will a personal tragedy keep Floratyna from becoming the first woman to serve as President?

Reading The Prodigal Daughter, I found myself thinking about how Floratyna Kane lived an almost ludicrously charmed life.  Yes, there were some conflicts.  When she was a child, a group of her classmates made fun of her for being Polish.  She dated one jerk before she ended up with Richard.  Her wealthy father hates her husband but he still secretly helps them set up their chain of stores.  She deals with one great tragedy but she recovers from it after seeing a group of homeless veterans and realizing that at least she has a place to live.  Floratyna is a frustratingly passive character.  Her friend Edward finds her a safe congressional district to run in and essentially guides her political career.  Her subsequent success as a politician is largely the result of luck and coincidence.  The book even ends on a note of deus ex machina.  The book’s seems to suggest that the best way for a woman to become president is to passively wait for it to happen.  That’s not particularly empowering.

The Prodigal Daughter was written by Jeffrey Archer, a best-selling British author who was also a member of Parliament and who has a reputation for being a bit of a shady and disreputable character.  Archer’s prose is simple and rarely sings but, at times, his straight-forward approach to storytelling does pay off.  It makes for a quick read.  If nothing else, the book would seem to indicate that, early in his writing career, Archer understood that people with money are more fun to read about than people without.

Book Review: The War For Late Night by Bill Carter

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Remember when Conan O’Brien was the host of The Tonight Show?

It occurred back in 2009, back when the Shattered Lens was just starting out.  After hosting the show for 17 years, Jay Leno stepped down as host of The Tonight Show.  Though he was never popular with critics and I don’t think I’ve ever met anyone who actually made it a point to watch him, The Tonight Show with Jay Leno was the number one in the late night ratings.  David Letterman may have had more cultural cachet but Jay Leno was the host that most late night viewers were watching.  Other comedians may have mocked Leno for his safe and non-controversial hosting but, obviously, it worked.

When Leno first left The Tonight Show, no one was surprised by Leno’s retirement because he had announced it five years earlier.  In 2004, NBC renewed Leno’s contract as host with the condition that Leno would step down in 2009 and that Conan O’Brien would become the new host of the Tonight Show.  The fear was that, otherwise, Conan would switch to another network and compete directly against Leno.  At the time, Leno privately complained that he felt he was being fired but, publicly, he announced that he was happy to hand the show over to Conan in 2009.  In words that would come back to haunt him, Leno announced, “It’s yours, buddy!”

In 2009, Conan took over last night while Jay Leno got his own primetime talk show, which aired every weeknight.  It was an odd arrangement, one that was undertaken to keep Leno from going to another network.  (NBC was apparently very paranoid about its talent hopping to to other networks.)  Not only did NBC have to rearrange its schedule to make room for 5 days of Leno but many observers suspected that the whole thing was essentially some Machiavellian network scheme to eventually once again make Leno host of The Tonight Show while destroying Conan’s viability as a potential competitor.  Regardless of why NBC did what they did, it didn’t work out.  Leno’s primetime ratings quickly tanked.  So did that ratings for The Tonight Show with Conan O’Brien.  O’Brien’s supporters said that Conan’s bad ratings were due to Jay being a bad lead-in.  Jay’s supporters said that Conan just wasn’t ready for the 11:30 slot and that Conan’s ratings had been going down for a while.  And while most television critics sided with Conan, NBC obviously sided with Jay, who had always been viewed as being a good and loyal company man.

NBC’s solution to the problem made about as much sense as any of their other actions.  It was announced that Jay would have a new late night show, a thirty-minute variety show that would air before The Tonight Show.  The Tonight Show would be bumped back by half-an-hour.  O’Brien objected to getting stuck with a later start time but it turned out that his contract gave NBC the right to move the show back by 30 minutes.  O’Brien resigned, writing an open letter to “the people of Earth,” in which he said that he would not take part in the “destruction” of The Tonight Show.  Depending on which side you were on, Conan was either being heroic or overdramatic.

How big was this story?  It was so big that even I knew about it, despite the fact that I didn’t watch any of the late night shows.  It was one of the first big cultural conflicts that I can remember blowing up on Twitter.  Twitter was almost 100% pro-Conan.  Meanwhile, Leno’s supporters tended to be older, they tended to not have much use for social media, and they tended to be a bit more pragmatic.  Jerry Seinfeld sided with Jay, saying that the only problem was that Conan wasn’t getting the ratings.  Jimmy Kimmel very publicly sided with Conan.  David Letterman let everyone know that they were now seeing the Jay Leno that he had always known.

It was a mess and no one came out of it untouched.  Leno returned to hosting The Tonight Show but his reputation with now irreversibly tarnished.  Conan moved to TBS and, while the critics respected him and his fans continued to love him, he never quite regained the cultural prominence that he had before The Tonight Show debacle.  Most of all, NBC came out of it looking worse than ever.  The entire reason for Jay’s early retirement announcement was to avoid conflict and controversy.  Needless to say, that didn’t work out.

Looking over it all, one can’t help but wonder how a group of industry professionals, people with television experience who were paid to know what they were doing, could have so dramatically screwed everything up.

Bill Carter’s The War For Late Night is probably the best place to look for the answer.  Published in 2010, mere months after Leno replaced Conan as the host of The Tonight Show, The War For Late Night provides an insider’s look at what went down in the corporate offices of NBC as well as what was happening in both the O’Brien and the Leno camps.  Carter also examines what was going on with the other late night hosts while O’Brien and Leno was battling for the future of Late Night.  The book deals with the unsuccessful attempt to blackmail Letterman (remember that?) and also provides an interesting reminder of how likable Jimmy Kimmel was before he got all self-important.

Though Carter appears to be Team Coco, the book itself is relatively even-handed.  Leno is not portrayed a monster and Conan is not transformed into a saint.  (Indeed, the books makes clear that the real villains were the NBC executives, who first screwed Leno by forcing him out when he was at the top of the ratings and then screwed Conan by refusing to give his version of The Tonight Show time to grow.)  Instead, the book suggests that the main reason for the conflict between the two hosts was that Leno and Conan had two very differing ways of looking at their job as host of The Tonight Show.  Jay viewed it as a job.  Conan viewed it as almost a holy calling.  In the end, Jay was incapable of understanding why Conan was so upset about what was happening while Conan couldn’t understand how anyone couldn’t be upset.  After reading Carter’s book, it seems like a foregone conclusion that NBC would side with Jay.  Management always prefers an employee who doesn’t make waves compared to one who does.

Towards the end of the book, when David Letterman tries to arrange for Conan to appear in a Super Bowl commercial with him and Jay, Conan snaps that Letterman doesn’t understand how upset Conan still is over what happened.  Conan says that he will never be ready to laugh about it and, having read The War For Late Night, you don’t doubt it.  The book succeeds at both explaining what happened and also revealing the human beings behind the conflict.  In the end, even if you understand Jay’s position, your heart breaks for Conan.

Novel Review: The Power Exchange by Alan R. Erwin

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

The Northern states are hit by a harsh and deadly winter, one that leads to a nation-wide blackout.  The residents of a Buffalo nursing home die while waiting for help that never comes.  Panics sets in across the nation as citizen realize that the federal government can’t solve all of their problems.  The President, a craven politician, puts the blame on the state of Texas, saying that the state has been hoarding its energy resources and not contributing their fair share to keep the rest of the country running.

With the President determined to make Texas into a scapegoat and proposing a series of new regulations designed to take control of the state’s natural resources, the people of Texas rebel.  The newly elected governor fights back, announcing that Texas is prepared to take advantage of the controversial clause in the article of annexation that he says gives the state the right to secede.  China and OPEC are quick to offer aide to the new Republic of Texas.  While the courts and Congress debate whether or not Texas has the right to leave the union, the CIA decides to take action into their own hands….

That may sound like a particularly paranoid take on today’s headlines but it’s actually the plot of a 1979 novel called The Power Exchange.  As a Texan, what can I say?  The idea of seceding from the Union has always been a popular one down here, even if it’s not something that we necessarily take seriously.  After all, we know that the rest of the States don’t really like us and, for the most part, we don’t like them either.  (Not me, though!  I love every state in the Union.)  So, why not secede and close the northern border and basically kick out anyone who complains about the weather or demands to know why we don’t have a Waa Waa on every street corner?  It’s an enjoyable little fantasy, even if it’s probably for the best that it will never happen.  For one thing, if Texas actually did secede, Austin would probably then want to secede from the Lone Star Republic and form the People’s Collective of Travis.  And if Austin seceded, Dallas would definitely follow, just so we could brag about how much better The Free Republic of Dallas was when compared to all of the other new nations on the North American continent.  Things would get messy.

The whole point of The Power Exchange is that it would be very difficult for Texas to secede.  Not only would there by legal issues but there would also be military conflict.  The new nation would have to make some deals with some less than savory characters.  In the book, it may be Governor Jack Green who masterminds the secession but it falls to Lt. Gov. Margaret Coursey to actually pull it off and she quickly learns that there is no easy way to declare your independence.  The book was written by political journalist so, needless to say, the sections about how secession actually works tend to get a bit overly technical.  Fortunately, there are also secret agents, assassins, and one out of nowhere sex scene that is tossed in to keep things from getting too dry.  One thing I’ve learned from reading old paperbacks is that every novel, regardless of the subject matter, had to have at least one sex scene randomly tossed in.  It’s kind of like when a character in a movie suddenly curses just to make sure that the movie gets at least a P-13 rating.

The Power Exchange was among the many paperbacks that I inherited from my aunt.  I read it the week after Christmas.  It was a quick read and fun little “what if?” scenario.

Book Review: Things I’ve Said But Probably Shouldn’t Have by Bruce Dern, with Christopher Fryer and Robert Crane

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

Bruce Dern is an interesting person.

He’s an actor, of course.  He spent a lot of his early career playing bad guys.  He was in a lot of biker films.  He killed John Wayne in a western.  Even Dern’s heroes were often unhinged in some way.  As he aged, he made the transition to becoming a character actor.  He still often plays characters who have their own individual way of looking at the world but now a Dern character is just as likely to be seen dispensing wisdom as he is to be seen killing people.

In real life, Bruce Dern was born into a socially prominent family.  (When Dern was born, his grandfather was serving as Secretary of War in FDR’s presidential cabinet.)  His godfather was Adlai Stevenson, who ran for president a handful of times.  Dern was a championship runner in high school.  When he was 20, he tried out for the Olympics.  In Hollywood, he appeared in both studio productions and independent films.  He was friends with everyone from Jack Nicholson and Dennis Hopper to John Wayne.  He worked for both Robert Evans and Roger Corman.  At the same time that Dern was playing drug-crazed bikers in Roger Corman movies, he was perhaps unique for being one of the few young actors in Hollywood who didn’t do drugs.  As he has commented in several interviews, he played Peter Fonda’s acid guru in The Trip despite the fact that he had never so much as even held a joint.

Bruce Dern is one of those actors who tends to show up in a lot of documentaries about Hollywood in the 60s and 70s.  If you read a book about that era, you can be sure that you’ll come across a lot of quotes from Dern.  Usually, Dern comes across as being both witty and straight-forward.  He’s an opinionated guy and he doesn’t hold much back.  It’s not surprising that he would be someone who many would want to interview.

Things I’ve Said, But Probably Shouldn’t Have is Bruce Dern’s memoir and it’s just as quirky as you would expect it to be.  Now, I should make cleat that the book was published in 2007, which was a a few years before Bruce Dern made his comeback with the Oscar-nominated Nebraska.  It was also written before Dern became a member of the Quentin Tarantino stock company and was introduced to an entirely new generation of filmgoers.  At the time this memoir was published, Dern was a part of the Big Love cast and his last “big” movie was Monster, in which he had a small but memorable role.  Things I’ve Said…. was written before the “resurgence” of Dern’s career and, as such, there are certain parts of the book that almost feel like an elegy.  At times, it’s almost as if Dern is saying, “Okay, I was never as big as I should have been but I still had fun.”  Fortunately, films like Nebraska and others reminded people of just how good an actor Bruce Dern actually is and, even in his mid-80s, he’s a busy character actor.

As you would probably expect, Things I’ve Said is a bit of a quirky book.  If anything, it reads as if Dern just sat down beside you and started talking about his career.  It skips back and forth through time.  Just because a chapter begins by discussing one subject, there’s no guarantee that it’ll stick with that topic.  A chapter about his Oscar-nominated turn in Coming Home also contains his thoughts on Florence Henderson (“A Cloris Leachman type dame …. a real fox”) and the Lord of the Rings trilogy.  Some of his best-known films are mentioned only in passing while others, like The The Incredible Two-Headed Transplant, get an entire chapter’s worth.  He writes about how he came up with the perfect final line for Walter Hill’s The Driver and how he created his most memorable movie psycho, the blimp pilot in Black Sunday.  He writes about turning down roles that were offered by everyone from Woody Allen to Francis Ford Coppola to Bernardo Bertolucci.  (Coppola, Dern writes, offered him the role of Tom Hagen in The Godfather but just as a bargaining tactic to get Robert Duvall to reduce his salary demands.)  Dern writes about his friendship with Jack Nicholson and the other members of the Hollywood counter culture and how he always found himself competing with people like Nicholson and Scott Wilson for roles.  He also discusses how killing John Wayne in The Cowboys led to him receiving death threats and getting typecast as a villain.  Dern seems to be more annoyed by the typecasting than the threats.

It’s an enjoyable read.  Dern comes across as being a genuine eccentric but he’s the good type of eccentric as opposed to the type of eccentric who keeps dead animals in his basement.  He also comes across as being very confident.  He has no fear of saying that his performance saved certain movies.  But you know what?  Bruce Dern has saved a lot of movies.  So, if he’s a little bit overly sure of himself …. well, he’s the earned the right.

I’ve read a lot of bad actor memoirs and a lot of good actor memoirs.  Bruce Dern’s memoir is definitely one of the good ones.

Novel Review: The Power of the Dog by Thomas Savage

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

If I may be allowed to open with a cliché: “You’ve seen the movie, now read the book!”

I ordered a copy of and read Thomas Savage’s 1967 novel, The Power of the Dog, before the release of Jane Campion’s film adaptation.  Hence, when I watched Campion’s film, I already knew about the Burbank Brothers, Bronco Henry, Rose, and Peter Gordon.  Neither the film’s big twist nor the diabolically clever ending were quite as much of a shock to me as they apparently were for others, though both were still undeniably effective in both the book and the movie.  Campion’s film sticks close to the plot of the book and visually, it captures Thomas Savage’s simple but effective prose.

In case you’ve yet to see the film or read the book, The Power of the Dog takes place in Montana in the 1920s.  Phil and George Burbank are brothers.  Ever since their parents retired, Phil and George have owned and managed the family ranch.  The gentle and kind-natured George has spent almost his entire life allowing himself to be led around by Phil.  Phil, meanwhile, has fully embraced the identity of being a tough cowboy and all of the myths that go along with it.  He rarely bathes.  He makes it a point to castrate all of the cattle personally.  He seldom wears gloves, believing the all work should be done bare-handed.  He’s dismissive of anyone who he believes has shown any sign of weakness.  He’s a bully and a sadist but he’s also an Ivy League graduate who takes pride in his ability to quote Ovid in the original Latin.  Phil is brutally dismissive of almost everyone.  He only seems to truly care about his brother and the memory of his mentor, the mysterious Bronco Henry.  When George meets and marries a widow named Rose, Phil can’t handle it.  George is breaking free of Phil’s influence and Phil seeks revenge against Rose, psychologically tormenting her and driving her to drink.  When Rose’s son, Peter, arrives at the ranch, Phil initially dismisses Peter as being weak.  But, to Rose’s horror, Phil soon starts to take an interest in Peter….

Author Thomas Savage was born in Montana and grew up on his stepfather’s ranch.  Savage later said that, much like Peter, he always felt like a misfit on the ranch.  His stepfather was a man who was much like Phil Burbank while Savage felt a lot like Peter Gordon.  Despite never feeling like he belonged, Savage was still able to use his early experiences as a ranch hand as the inspiration for his first published short stories.  Savage went on to write several western novels, many of which dealt with dysfunctional ranch families.  Though well-reviewed, The Power of the Dog was not a best seller when it was originally published and even the positive reviews often seemed to wilfully miss the subtext behind Phil’s homophobia and his devotion to the memory of Bronco Henry.  In 1967, The Power of the Dog was ahead of its time.

Hopefully, with the release of Campion’s adaptation, the original novel will be read by an entirely new audience.  As I mentioned earlier, Campion remains faithful to the book’s plot but there are a few elements in the original novel that will add to one’s understanding of the film.  For instance, the book goes into more detail about the history and the culture of the town and it also goes into more details about  the ranch’s dealings with the local Native tribes.  Whereas both the film and the book present Phil as being a wilfully malicious agent of chaos, the book makes clear that Phil is also a creation of the culture in which he was raised.  The book makes clear that, for all of his overt macho energy, Phil still feels like an outsider among even the ranch hands who worship him and that adds an element to his relationship with Peter that is only suggested at in the film.

Perhaps most importantly, the book devotes a chapter to the life of Rose’s first husband and the circumstances that led to his suicide.  Rose’s first husband is a doctor who comes to Montana to try to help people but who is slowly destroyed by the town’s apathy.  We learn of the argument that led to his suicide and, again, it adds an entirely new element to Phil and Peter’s relationship.

So, if you’ve seen the movie, read the book.  Or read the book and then see the movie.  They’re both excellent deconstructions of the mythology of the American west.

Book Review: Monster: Living Off The Big Screen by John Gregory Dunne

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

First published in 1997, Monster is a memoir about working in Hollywood.  It follows eight years in the life of John Gregory Dunne (who wrote the book) and his wife, Joan Didion.  While Dunne (who passed in 2003) and Didion (who passed away a few weeks ago) were best-known as essayists and novelists, they also had a hand in writing a number of films.  As such, it shouldn’t be surprising that, along with being a portrait of Hollywood, Monster is also the story of the making of one particular film.

That said, Monster is not the story of the making of a great film.

It’s also not the story of the making of a terrible film.

Instead, it’s the story of the making of a thoroughly mediocre and forgettable film.  The film in question is Up Close and Personal, which still pops up on HBO occasionally.  Up Close and Personal tells the story of a self-righteous news producer — a gentleman with the laughable name of of Warren Justice — who finds and grooms an aspiring reporter named Tally (Michelle Pfeiffer).  While Warren (played by Robert Redford) teaches her how to work the camera and deliver the news, they fall in love.  Then Tally’s career skyrockets, Warren’s career goes downhill, and eventually Warren ends up dying.  Boo hoo.

Monster tells the story of how Dunne and Didion were originally hired to adapt a biography of Jessica Savitch, a real-life anchorwoman who eventually got hooked on cocaine, who was physically abused by her mentor, and who eventually ended up dying in a car crash.  Realizing that real life might be too depressing to generate a hit film, the executives at Disney instead decided that they wanted Dunne and Didion to turn Savitch’s Hellish life story into a sentimental romance.  The drug abuse was dropped.  Savitch’s death was abandoned.  Her abusive boyfriend was transformed into the saintly character of — snicker — Warren Justice.

(Dunne actually devotes a good deal of space to explaining why they named the character Warren Justice.  Warren was a good “everyman” name and Dunne was apparently under the belief that Justice was a common surname in the South because he knew someone from Florida whose last name was Justice.  The logic is understandable, if flawed.  I’ve lived in the South almost my entire life and I’ve never met anyone named Justice.  Still, writers of Dunne and Didion’s caliber should have known better than to try to get away with such an easily mocked name.)

For eight years, Dunne and Didion write and rewrite Up Close and Personal and, along the way, a large number of Hollywood figures are attached to the film.  Ultimately, it’s directed by a fellow named Jon Avent, who were told has a strong ego.  Actually, the entire book is full of people who have strong egos.  Scott Rudin, for example, is in the book, demanding that that Dunne and Didion focus on appealing to as wide an audience as possible.  “It’s about two movie stars,” Rudin explains when Dunne worries that the film doesn’t actually have anything to say.

While Up Close and Personal is going through the pains of production, Dunne and Didion work on a number of other studio films, few of which come to production and none of which sound like they would have been particularly good had they been produced.  Ultimatum is a thriller about a terrorist plot.  Dunne and Didion correctly realize that the title needs to be changed to something less generic but their proposed replacement, Ploot, sounds like the title for a film about a flatulent goblin.  A bit more intriguing is their attempt to write a serious movie about aliens for the infamous producer Don Simpson.  Simpson comes across as being savvy but unfocused, which is actually a pretty good description of just about everyone in the book.  The Hollywood of Monster is a town and an industry controlled by former outsiders who are determined to reinvent themselves as tough guys.

And Dunne did a pretty good job of capturing the town.  The book is written with a dry wit and, as acidic as many of the passages are, Dunne doesn’t let himself off the hook.  He’s as open about his role in the making of a thoroughly forgettable film as he is about everyone else’s role.  There’s little concern for art or higher truth to be found in Dunne’s Hollywood.  Instead, the entire town is a monster.

It’s a good book and a memorable portrait of the American film industry in the 1990s.

Novel Review: The Books of Rachel and The Lives of Rachel by Joel Gross

Posted on by Lisa Marie Bowman

My aunt has always been a prodigious reader and, when I was growing up, I always enjoyed looking through the stacks of books that she had sitting in the closets of her room. A few years ago, for medical reasons, my aunt had to move out of her house.  Because she wouldn’t have room for all of her books in her new place, she gave the majority of them to me.  So far, I’ve only read a few but this year, I plan to read all of them and review the ones that I like.  That’s one of my resolutions for 2022.

When I first got my aunt’s collection, one of the first books that I came across was a paperback called The Books of Rachel.  The cover featured a beautiful woman with a lovely necklace, a man fencing, and a couple kissing.  The blurb promised that Joel Gross’s The Books of Rachel was “exciting, tragic, colorful!”  That’s all I needed to see!  I read the book and I liked it so much that I went on Amazon to see what else Joel Gross had written.  That’s when I came across the prequel to The Books of Rachel, The Lives of Rachel.  Of course, I immediately ordered a copy of that book and read it as well.

The Books of Rachel was first published in 1979.  The Lives of Rachel was published in 1984.  Taken together, these two books tell the epic story of one family, following them from ancient Judea all the way to 1980s New York.  Though the family is frequently forced to relocate and each section of the book takes place in a different country and in a different century, a few things remain the same.  There is always a Rachel.  Whenever a Rachel passes, the first daughter to be born after her is given the name and becomes the heiress to centuries of strength, faith, and struggle.  They also, eventually, become the owner of a flawless, 60-carat diamond, the Cuheno Diamond.  The other thing that remains true is that, no matter where or when the individual Rachels may live, they do so under the shadow of the oldest of all prejudices and evils. From the ancient Romans to the Spanish Inquisition to the fascists and Nazis of post-World War I Europe, anti-Semitism is the one constant that every evil in the world tends to share.

There are many different Rachels.  Some are kind.  Some are innocent.  Some are less kind and some are definitely not innocent.  But what they all have in common is that they’re willing to fight, for themselves, for their family, and ultimately for their people.  For all of the sex and the melodrama (and, make no mistake, there is quite a bit and that’s definitely a good thing), The Books of Rachel and The Lives of Rachel are a tribute to survival, inner strength, and the faith and legacy of a people who would not allow themselves to be defeated.  With everything going on in the world today and so many prominent people openly embracing anti-Semitic conspiracy mongering, the lessons of these books are even more needed than ever.

Finally, another reason why I loved these books is because, as I’ve mentioned many times on the site, I am a total history nerd and these books are historical fiction at their finest.  The books are obviously very well-researched and the attention to detail makes them a wonderful read for those us who are interested in how life was once lived.

They’re good books.  I recommend them.  We can all learn from the Rachels.