Film Flam: Essays on Hollywood
- Book Review,
by Larry McMurtry
From Publishers Weekly
Perhaps timed to piggyback on acclaim for McMurtry's latest novel Texasville, this stale collection of magazine pieces is a scam, all right, but it falls short of its titular pun only because the author demonstrates little of the delight in his art expected from the true con artist. McMurtry takes his self-effacing tone to an irritating extreme, claiming that he can't remember writing these pieces (most of which he churned out during a stint as a columnist at American Film in the mid-'70s) and that he would have forgotten them entirely if someone hadn't had the idea of putting them into a book. No wonderthere is little memorable here, other than the few efforts that actually live up to the subtitle, in which McMurtry observes the peculiar role of the writer in an industry that values images more than words. McMurtry's novels have served as the basis for some of Hollywood's finest films of the last decades, including Hud (based on his first novel, Horseman, Pass By The Last Picture Show (whose screenplay he co-wrote with director Peter Bogdanovich) and Terms of Endearment, so he is in a choice position to examine the writer's place in the Hollywood machine. Unfortunately, he strays from the material that he is uniquely equipped to handle and wanders uncompellingly into film criticism, book reviews and digressions about column writing. It is an odyssey easily forgotten. Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this slim volume of essays, novelist/screenwriter McMurtry offers his refreshing views on movies, both junk (yea) and art (nay), Hollywood and its populace, the process of filmmaking, the power of money, film audiences, and critics. His experiences and thoughts on screenwriting, adapting novels, adapting one's own novels (a bad idea), and on the craft itself contain more useful information than a pile of how-to manuals. As in his novels, McMurtry is by turns witty, acerbic, and thoughtful; the pieces are surprisingly stylish in that the bulk of them (17 out of 21) were spun off on monthly deadlines (for American Film magazine, in 1975-77), and McMurtry admittedly can't remember writing most of them. A fine collection, from a fine writer.David Bartholomew, Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Review
William Murray The New York Times Book Review These pieces are very well written, witty, and, on the whole, vastly entertaining...Unlike too many literary people, Mr. McMurtry has few illusions about Hollywood and he is not kind to the place. He finds it full of "self-praise, defensiveness, insecurity, and megalomania." Larry McMurtry is my kind of moviegoer.
Book Description
A noted screenwriter himself, Pulitzer Prize-winner Larry McMurtry knows his Hollywood. In Film Flam, he takes a funny, original, and penetrating look at the movie industry and gives us the truth about the moguls, fads, flops, and box-office hits. With successful movies and television miniseries made from several of his novels -- Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, Lonesome Dove, and Hud -- McMurtry writes with an outsider's irony of the industry and an insider's experience. In these essays he illuminates the plight of the screenwriter, cuts a clean, often hilarious path through the excesses of film reviewing, and takes on some of the worst trends in the industry: the decline of the Western, the disappearance of love in the movies, and the quality of the stars themselves. From his recollections of the day Hollywood entered McMurtry's own life as he ate meat loaf in Fort Worth to the pleasures he found in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, Film Flam is one of the best books ever written about Hollywood.
About the Author
Larry McMurtry, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for fiction for Lonesome Dove and many other awards, is the author of more than twenty novels, two collections of essays, and more than thirty screenplays. He lives in Archer City, Texas.
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