Rating: 
Summary: The best guide to the way movies get made today.
Review: "The Gross" is the best, most comprehensive and most approachable overview of the current filmmaking world that I've ever seen. It deserves a place next to "Adventures in the Screen Trade" and the wonderful Aljean Harmetz "Casablanca" and "Wizard of Oz" books as essential reading for anybody who wants to know how films are actually put together. Bart shows how every 1998 film was the result of personality interplay, of business decisions (bad and good), of sheer luck. He brings out the drama inherent in every film's conception, production and eventual fate. The new trade paperback edition has an index, unaccountably missing from the hardcover original, and Bart has updated the book with a new chapter analyzing the summer of 1999. I wish that, as future editions come out, Bart would continue to add new chapters to keep it up to date.
Rating:
Summary: The best guide to the way movies get made today.
Review: "The Gross" is the best, most comprehensive and most approachable overview of the current filmmaking world that I've ever seen. It deserves a place next to "Adventures in the Screen Trade" and the wonderful Aljean Harmetz "Casablanca" and "Wizard of Oz" books as essential reading for anybody who wants to know how films are actually put together. Bart shows how every 1998 film was the result of personality interplay, of business decisions (bad and good), of sheer luck. He brings out the drama inherent in every film's conception, production and eventual fate. The new trade paperback edition has an index, unaccountably missing from the hardcover original, and Bart has updated the book with a new chapter analyzing the summer of 1999. I wish that, as future editions come out, Bart would continue to add new chapters to keep it up to date.
Rating:
Summary: An Insightful Read On The High Stakes Summer Movie Season
Review: Anyone who follows the motion picure industry from either the position of film buff to budding or established industry insider should read Peter Bart's "The Gross". Bart, a former executive at Lorimar, Paramount, and MGM, takes a look at the summer of 1998 slate of studio releases, covering films as diverse as "Armageddon", "The Truman Show", "Godzilla", and "There's Something About Mary", and the process leading up to their release, from script development at the studio level to the precise steps studio executives now follow such as determining whether a film will fail or succeed based on its opening night East Coast grosses and what kind of legs a film will have on both the domestic and worldwide fronts. As compulsively readable as Bart's "The Back Lot" column in Daily Variety, "The Gross" is trenchantly informative, as one might expect from a former studio executive reporting from an outside world perspective. Film buffs, infrequent filmgoers, and individuals about to enter the business side of the industry often find themselves wondering how three-hour love stories focusing on the afterlife and soulless adventure films ever see the light of day; "The Gross" will provide plenty of answers.
Rating:
Summary: An Insightful Read On The High Stakes Summer Movie Season
Review: Anyone who follows the motion picure industry from either the position of film buff to budding or established industry insider should read Peter Bart's "The Gross". Bart, a former executive at Lorimar, Paramount, and MGM, takes a look at the summer of 1998 slate of studio releases, covering films as diverse as "Armageddon", "The Truman Show", "Godzilla", and "There's Something About Mary", and the process leading up to their release, from script development at the studio level to the precise steps studio executives now follow such as determining whether a film will fail or succeed based on its opening night East Coast grosses and what kind of legs a film will have on both the domestic and worldwide fronts. As compulsively readable as Bart's "The Back Lot" column in Daily Variety, "The Gross" is trenchantly informative, as one might expect from a former studio executive reporting from an outside world perspective. Film buffs, infrequent filmgoers, and individuals about to enter the business side of the industry often find themselves wondering how three-hour love stories focusing on the afterlife and soulless adventure films ever see the light of day; "The Gross" will provide plenty of answers.
Rating:
Summary: A book about Hollywood that reads like a thriller
Review: Bart's THE GROSS is the best book about Hollywood I've read in ages. Focusing on the Summer of 1998 (remember that? GODZILLA, ARMAGEDDON, THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE X-FILES, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, THE AVENGERS, etc), Bart takes us behind the scenes in production meetings, with directors and studio heads, on sets, into special effects studios...everywhere the action is. He fills his saga with anecdores, often pithy biographical snapshots, interviews, and informed opinion (with which I often strongly disagreed). After an introduction to the studios and their suits, Bart takes us behind-the-scenes for glimpses at at the makers and the making of each major film. He then tracks---week by week---how they fare in the market horse-race. Bart writes well and structures his book so that it develops irresistable suspense. If you care about the movies, are interested in Hollywood, or just wonder, as you sit through one of these "blockbusters", what were they thinking?, then this is the book for you.
Rating:
Summary: Scary, but true!
Review: Being a 20 year veteran of feature film post production, this book gave confirmation to all of our worst suspicions and paranoias about what goes on in the world of the "suits". It clearly illustrates how the business people's daily convulsions affect how we do our jobs and contribute to an atmosphere of total chaos. This should be required reading at film schools.
Rating: 
Summary: In bad need of work
Review: Having read some of the other reviews, I tend to echo some of those sentiments. While this was a relatively quick read, there were a number of things that struck my attention. First of all, the book could have used a good editor. There were all kinds of spelling and grammatical errors. Second, the book could have used a fact-checker. There are too many instances of incorrect information, some mentioned in the other reviews, but some that were downright blatant. The author confuses "Ghosts of Mississippi" with "Mississippi Burning", mentions actors as featured in movies they did not appear in, and sometimes seems to be confused as to who did what in a particular instance. Third, I found it annoying and more than a bit hypocritical that an author who will take a filmmaker or actor to task for their ego will find it so completely necessary to feed his own ego by mentioning how intimate he was or is with several of the big names in Hollywood. It's fine if Mr. Bart, in his official capacity as editor of Variety, goes right to the source, but if he thinks that the reader cares, my guess is he's mistaken. Fourth, the book could really have used an index. I wanted to refer to a previous chapter somewhere towards the middle of the book and had to thumb through the pages until I found it. Lastly, to again echo some of the other reviews, it's more than a bit ironic that someone who feels that movies suffer from the manipulations of the studio executives in trying to make some films over into what they were not intended to be has (I would venture) published a book that is probably not what he intended it to be. I'm sure Mr. Bart could shrug it off as being emblematic of Hollywood, but I sure came away with a little of the glitter worn off.
Rating: 
Summary: Grossly Entertaining
Review: I am a avid movie lover and so enjoyed Peter Bart's fun trip through the summer of 1998. Reading it now in the spring of 2001 I really already forgot that summer had so many really awful films. And Peter Bart does a fine job saying how they came to be. It does look like coporate Hollywood has done a fine job of killing off Hollywood. I was interested to note my favorite film of that summer, Smoke Signals,was only mentioned twice in passing. My other favorite Everest was not mentioned at all. But the point of the book was just that... Hollywood wants the dumb down block buster. After reading this I'm glad I missed Godzilla. If you like the movie industry and how and why things get made and marketed you will find this an intersting few hours read.
Rating: 
Summary: Flopzilla!
Review: I love this book and read it about once a year. Yes, it's shallow and superficial (it's hard to be "deep" when you cover as much ground as Bart does in this book), and yes, there are some errata and other mistakes which could have been easily fixed, but were not (and least in the edition I have), but so what? "The Gross" is not hard history, it's an gossipy, insider's stab at the business of movie-making. If you take as much schadenfreude as I do from watching arrogant and venal studio suits make fools out of themselves, it's a hell of a lot of fun, and I'm pretty sure that is what Bart intended it to be.
"The Gross" examines the blockbuster year of 1996 ("The summer that ate Hollywood") and how it affected all the major studios. It follows the various big-budget movies from the idea phase to completion and their lives -- or deaths -- at the box office. Included are "Armaggedeon" "Deep Impact" "Saving Private Ryan" "The Truman Show" "There's Something About Mary" "Bulworth" "Out of Sight" and many others. But my favorite part of the book, bar none, is about "Godzilla."
"Godzilla" to me represents everything bad about Hollywood. I am not simply referring to the movie, which is unwatchable garbage,
but to the process by which it was made, and the deafening, in your face 24/7 marketing campaign which accompanied it. Commercials, billboards, toys, fast-food tie-ins, T-shirts, promotional junkets....Hollywood pulled out every stop in order to sell this movie, and the suits involved were riding a wave of smug self-confidence that threatened to drown the whole industry. And then it crashed. Hard. Egos were savaged. Fortunes were washed down the drain. Reputations were wheeled off to ICU. Bitterness went around like the Asian flu. And I laugh harder every time I read the tale. There's nothing quite like watching a bomb explode in the face of the shmucks who put it together, especially since they planned to shove it down our collective throat.
"Godzilla" aside (I'm laughing as I write this!), I enjoyed "The Gross" for its gossipy look at the big players -- studio heads, suits, actors, writers, et al -- as well as the savage and merciless process of getting a movie "green-lighted." The story of "Bulworth", Warren Beatty's pretentious vanity vehicle that caught fire in the driveway, is another howler, since to this day nobody, absolutely nobody, knows who green-lighted it...or if they did, will admit it.
"The Gross" is kind of like movie popcorn. If you eat it expecting a meal, you'll be very disappointed (not to mention slightly sick to your stomach); if you take it for what it is, it's a finger-lickin' good time.
Rating:
Summary: Lazily hobbled together account of bad movies
Review: It's funny that Peter Bart's book was so hastily written, so filled with typos and factual errors. He obviously rushed it into print to beat some deadline. The book is about all the lousy movies made far worse by producers rushing them to meet the summer deadline. There are such frequent errors that I knew about that it made it difficult to trust him on stuff I don't know much about. The writing, too, is horrible: Confusing sentences, bizzarre chapter structure that flips back and forth through time so randomly that it's hard to follow the tale. I frequently had to put the book down and grunt about how mad it made me. Sadly, it is a sign of the poor state of Hollywood writing that this is, in fact, one of the best accounts out there. It does allow the reader to see the process of green-lighting a movie from the executives perspective. It's just sad that the book shows why there are such few and low-quality films available and it, itself, is a low-quality book and only one of a few.
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