Unflinching story of the making of a huge budget Hollywood movie by Director Brian de Palma and the enormous crowd of specialists involved in creating a movie. Julie Salamon had a very unusual degree of open access plus complete cooperation from De Palma and the crew and this is reflected in the book’s unique insider portrayal of how a movie gets made. ( )

I was hoping for some technical details and some explanation of Hollywood accounting, instead it's mostly what you'd normally read in gossip mags, except well researched. Can't help but be annoyed by the reverence to the subject. You're making a movie. You're not building a plane, repairing a car, uncovering mysteries of the universe or saving lives. You're making entertainment. I wish the book kept some perspective on it. ( )

To her credit, Salamon's reporting doesn't leave much room for a thesis; she presents the details (entertaining but not so salacious or revelatory) in a fashion that allows the production to be considered on its own terms, not as a symptom of blockbuster thinking gone wrong, over-producing, egos in conflict, or the cannibalizing of a great novel. But the sudden dismissal of the project by the press in the book's final chapter is its most surprising and infuriating detail: how the junket infected the newsroom and armchair box office projections became criticism, until a flawed project could no longer be given a fair shot.

I did a paper in college on the theme of "reception studies", analyzing reviews of a particular movie. I picked The Long Gray Line, a favorite John Ford movie that wasn't considered one of his major works at the time. The assumptions made by the writers were astonishingly arrogant, amounting to "here's another Ford life-and-times picture, ho-hum", especially telling as some of their reviews ran in the same space as reviews of Clouzot's Wages of Fear, a foreign thriller by an edgy, hip French talent. It seemed that the writers were rushing through coverage of Ford to have more space to gush about Clouzot.
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An excellent book overall, about how bad decisions snowballed into a terrible movie. Salamon writes in a third-person omniscient style, and notes in the afterword that she only presumes to talk about what people are thinking when they told her what they were thinking at the time in a later interview. Perhaps the last time a large-budget motion picture will have its sausage-making laid bare for the public; they won't make that mistake again. Recommended. ( )

When movie-making goes horribly wrong....if you've seen the film Bonfire of the Vanities, then you understand just what a fiasco it was. At the time it was one of my favorite novels, and I hated that movie so much. ( )