John Freeman

"Bambi vs. Godzilla: On the Nature, Purpose, and Practice of the Movie Business"

By David Mamet

Pantheon, $22, 272 pages

David Mamet has become one of Hollywood's most visible (and intelligent) chroniclers from the inside. He has written and directed films, produced his own plays and appeared in cameo roles. He also has periodically retreated to his desk to write some ten books of essays on filmmaking over the past two decades.

Unfortunately, the well has run dry in this uneven collection of essays, "Bambi vs. Godzilla," a grab-bag book full of observations, tips on the trade and tales from the crypt. Here is Mamet riffing on producers, directors, actors, stars, screenwriting, the bureaucrats of the studios, Hollywood's caste system and the way it grinds art into gruel. "The middlemen in Hollywood are bureaucrats, and they have a natural foe, and this foe is the script."

Many of Mamet's observations have this kind of warmed-over quality, which is a shame, because sometimes he proves he can do so much better. He has a columnist's knack for one-sentence grabbers ("Here's how they got so bad."), an L.A. veteran's sour realism ("Religious films have as much of a chance of increasing humane behavior as `Porgy and Bess' had of ending segregation.") and a filmmaker's aggrieved sense of always being wronged ("Must all conglomerations become corrupt?").

But it's hard not to wonder why Mamet, whose plays "Glengarry, Glen Ross" and "Oleana" demonstrated such a meticulous love of language, can be so careless with it here. He backs into his points, often using the passive voice, and sloppily reaches sideways into allusions to Lenny Bruce or one of his own works.

Mamet keeps reiterating that Hollywood is a business. Fine. But essay writing is an art--not practiced well here.

"Catching the Big Fish:

Meditation, Consciousness, and Creativity"

By David Lynch

Tarcher/Penguin, $19.95, 177 pages

If David Mamet is one of Hollywood's links to its theatrical past, David Lynch is one of its unholy gurus. With films like "Blue Velvet" and "Mulholland Drive," Lynch framed the disturbing dream-life of America at the end of the millennium.

"Catching the Big Fish" describes just how he accomplished this, and it's a curious mixture of practical trivia and tripped-out descriptions of how thirty-three years of Transcendental Meditation helped tune his antennae.

Lynch's first experience at meditation made him feel as if he "were in an elevator and the cable had been cut. Boom! I fell into bliss--pure bliss." Since then, he has kept at it, as he says, trying to shrug off the "Suffocating Rubber Clown Suit of Negativity."

The practice appears to have honed his writing, too. Minus a few too many light-bulb metaphors and the occasional wallow in hippy-dippy language, he proves exceptionally good at describing his consciousness and what turns it on. The symmetry between Lynch's visual and written imagery is fascinating. "When I was making `Eraserhead,'" he writes, "which took five years to complete, I thought I was dead."

Death and destruction are clearly inspirations--states of being he feels need and deserve understanding and our unflinching regard. In this book, he gives them a written language as alive as his own dark films.

"I don't necessarily love rotting bodies," he writes, "but there's a texture to a rotting body that is unbelievable. Have you ever seen a little rotted animal?"

"Ten Days in the Hills"

By Jane Smiley

Knopf, $26, 445 pages

Jane Smiley has looked at the U.S. through the lenses of its various power centers, from real estate to academia. Now she's gone to Hollywood. Unfolding during the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, "Ten Days in the Hills" charts the vicissitudes of a group of Tinseltown insiders holed up in mansions in the hills. A director, a how-to writer, their children and their ex-lovers all come into play in a novel about the gulf between reality and fantasy.

Smiley is an expert writer of dialogue and one of the keenest plot-makers around, so the book hums along on a river of smarts, sass and cheeky references to actual Hollywood figures until it crashes into long, if eloquent speeches about the war. It's the only false step in this intensely current novel about the erotic, but tragic remove of a society which--as Smiley sees it--has grown all too used to viewing everything as a show.

(2007-02-20)

Also by John Freeman

Nonfiction Review
With James Frey facing Oprah's wrath, Harvard novelist Kaayva Viswanathan disgraced and nearly one-third of American college students cheating, many claimed we had an epidemic of plagiarism on our hands. Not so fast, says Richard Posner, a judge on the U.S. Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals
(2007-01-23)

Mumbai on the Make
I know what you're thinking. You took one look at that page count and thought: "Do we really need another epic novel about India? What about Salman Rushdie's `Midnight's Children' or Rohinton Mistry's `A Fine Balance?'" Great books create their necessity, though, and if you can lift this tremendous story into your shopping cart, bring it home and read it, you'll probably wonder how you got by so long without it
(2007-01-02)

Strange Feelings
The novel tells the story of a 27-year-old man who emerges from a car crash with a rare disorder called Capgras Syndrome. The man can recognize his loved ones but doesn't believe they are who they claim to be
(2006-12-22)

Palenstinian Consideration
"When I was president I was working day and night to bring peace to Israel," says Jimmy Carter, 82, sitting in a hotel suite in New York. "When I went out of office I thought I had succeeded."

Almost thirty years later, the lasting peace Carter thought the 1978 Camp David Accords would lead to remains elusive. But the thirty-ninth president hasn't given up
(2006-12-19)

Thought Full Gifts
(2006-11-28)

Sky's the Limit
(2006-11-20)

POETRY REVIEW
(2006-10-24)

Without a Home
(2006-10-17)

NONFICTION REVIEW
(2006-10-10)

NONFICTION REVIEW
(2006-09-19)

FICTION REVIEW
(2006-08-29)

FICTION REVIEW
(2006-08-22)

about Newcitychicago | about Newcity magazine | advertising | privacy policy | FAQ | employment