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Screen Plays: How 25 Scripts Made It to a Theater Near You -- For Better or Worse by David S. Cohen
How Did This Crap Ever Get Made?
A review by Chris Bolton
Perhaps you can't even count the number of times you've been sitting in a movie theater, thinking of all the other things you'll never buy with your misspent money, and you turn and say to your equally dismayed companion, "How did this piece of crap ever get made?" A fascinating, detailed dissection of the screenwriting process, David S. Cohen's Screen Plays explores exactly that question — and wonders how the good ones survived the grueling process. Cohen devotes a chapter to each screenplay under scrutiny, interviewing the writer and exploring the sometimes torturous path from idea...
Morality Tale by Sylvia Brownrigg and Monica Scott
Stuck in second
A review by Aisling Foster
"Nobody wants to be a second wife . . . . It's like moving into a new house that still has half the previous owner's furniture in it. You'd like to get rid of the all-plaid living-room set, but somehow you're stuck with it, forever. "In my case, the plaid living-room set is called Theresa." Morality tales are never quite like this. This one is set in California, in "a country where a divorce occurs every thirty seconds"; each character is a blend of modern knowingness and storybook classic. The narrator is delightfully lacking in the preachy righteousness of the genre, describing the...
Shah by Abbas Milani
A Biography Review of "The Shah"
A review by Susanne Pari
Nearly every chapter in The Shah, Abbas Milani's skillful biography of Iran's last king, begins with a phrase from Shakespeare's King Richard II, about a tragic figure who believes he is ordained by God to lead his people. He likens himself to the sun and to the lion, is usually festooned in finery and jewels, and is surrounded by sycophants rather than sages. Not an evil king but an insecure one -- weak, indecisive and out of touch. Ultimately, by dint of his hubris, he is overthrown and dies. The divine right of kings is, of course, not a solely European notion. In ancient Iran...
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Incredible Change-Bots by Jeffrey Brown
Chee-Choo-Chuk-Chee-Choo!
A review by Chris Bolton
In our modern world, there are at least two ways to revisit one's cartoon-watching childhood: rent the DVD collection of the actual shows, which often leads to heartbreak and the inevitable realization that, as children, we liked a lot of truly stupid crap; or read an affectionate parody that captures the spirit of the original work, without all the truly stupid crappy parts, and adds a whole lot of funny. The latter is what Jeffrey Brown's graphic novella Incredible Change-Bots offers onetime fans of the Transformers cartoon series, toys, and comic books, which were pretty much...
In Gatsby's Shadow: The Story of Charles Macomb Flandrau by Lawrence Peter Haeg
A locked-up life
A review by Olivia Cole
Born in St Paul, Minnesota, Charles Macomb Flandrau might have had a career as spectacular as the city's most famous writer, F. Scott Fitzgerald; this, at least, is the suggestion of Larry Haeg in his biography of this almost forgotten literary figure. Whereas Fitzgerald had to fund his serious writing with sales of short stories for the Saturday Evening Post, Flandrau was comfortably well off, and had to be persuaded to contribute. He was something of a celebrity at twenty-six for his Harvard Episodes, a series of vignettes which exposed the high jinks of privileged students; after that...
Generation MySpace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence by Candice M. Kelsey
Babes in the Woods
A review by Caitlin Flanagan
[Ed. Note. This review discusses the contents and context of two books: Generation Myspace: Helping Your Teen Survive Online Adolescence and To Catch a Predator: Protecting Your Kids from Online Enemies Already in Your Home.] I spent the summer I was 19 at my parents' house on the north shore of Long Island, which was pleasant enough but hardly the last word in teenage excitement. When a friend called and invited me to spend a weekend with her family in Delaware, I was packed by bedtime. At first light, I was sitting at the Stony Brook train station with a round-trip ticket and a tin of...
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