Shoot Out: Surviving the Fame and (Mis) Fortune of Hollywood - Hardcover

Peter Bart, editor-in-chief of Variety and Daily Variety, has been a reporter for The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal. He has played key roles in developing and supervising such films as Rosemary's Baby, True Grit, The Godfather, Paper Moon, and Harold and Maude. He served as vice president for production at Paramount, senior vice president at MGM, and president of Lorimar Films. He is the author of several books, including Who Killed Hollywood? and Fade Out.
Peter Guber, the founder and head of Mandalay Entertainment, has served in a variety of key executive posts, ranging from head of production at Columbia Pictures to president of Sony Entertainment. He has been associated with many award-winning and successful films, including The Deep, Midnight Express, Rain Man, Batman, and Enemy at the Gates. He has been a faculty member at the UCLA School of Theater, Film, and Television for more than twenty years, where he established and teaches, with Peter Bart, a graduate course in the Independent Film and Television Producers program.

Writing in a direct, refreshing and honest style, Bart (Variety's editor-in-chief and a former v-p for production at Paramount) and Guber (the founder and head of Mandalay Entertainment and one-time production head at Columbia Pictures) offer an intimate view of the film industry and its unending economic, political and artistic clashes. While a reliable guide to the mechanics of movie making, the book is best at telling fascinating illustrative anecdotes that range from the scary (e.g., Frank Sinatra sending "one of his goons" to ensure that Roman Polanski would ask Sinatra's wife, Mia Farrow, to do only two takes of each scene on the set of Rosemary's Baby) to the charming (as when Guber is thrilled that Jimmy Stewart asks his opinion of a scene, only to realize that the star is interested in everyone's opinion, even the cleaning man's). This isn't a tell-all expos‚, ... la Julia Phillips's You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again, but rather an informal, highly entertaining step-by-step survey of how all the parts of filmmaking fit together. From a succinct history of how TV spots and trailers have been developed to the problem of casting and managing megastars (e.g., Bruce Willis ended up in the huge hit The Sixth Sense because he needed an $18 million loan to get out of an independent film), the authors convey with irony and good humor the reality that "[t]he so-called `creative industries' are big business," but despite the huge economic stakes involved, "the vision keepers will win in the end."
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.