Rating: 
Summary: Grossly Entertaining
Review: Most of us love a good tidbit of gossip. If you do, you have 323 pages of movie behind the scenes snippets. I really enjoyed this book for what it was - gossipy, insightful and enlightening. Particularly enlightening to those of us who are saturated with movie "glamour" but are interested in how "not glamourous" the business really is. How fascinating that a business which is essentually about fantasy is really about the bottom line - money.
Rating: 
Summary: Hollywood Gossip Cental!
Review: Most of us love a good tidbit of gossip. If you do, you have 323 pages of movie behind the scenes snippets. I really enjoyed this book for what it was - gossipy, insightful and enlightening. Particularly enlightening to those of us who are saturated with movie "glamour" but are interested in how "not glamourous" the business really is. How fascinating that a business which is essentually about fantasy is really about the bottom line - money.
Rating:
Summary: Good Writing, High Gross
Review: Peter Bart, editor of Variety, penned this sketch of the Hollywood summer season of 1998, and offers insight and background information both useful to the interested moviegoer/home critic, and to screeenwriting professionals looking for strategies to break the script-reader barrier. As the title implies, he analyzes in-depth the dollar amounts going into studio movie projects from initial option monies to the screenwriter to post-production marketing campaigns and all points in between. There are a couple of things to be learned here: 1) that the Hollywood moviemaking process doesn't necessarily reward truly innovative and creative material; and 2) that the movie going public does. Hence, Something About Mary comes out of nowhere with a miniscule budget and scores big with the public, while Godzilla hopes to make back some of Sony's money overspent on a shove-down-your-throat marketing campaign the public didn't buy. The gist of this book is that a truly creative screenplay will find a way no matter what financial juggernauts happen to be cruising through Hollywood, with a little bit of faith, hope -- and luck.
Rating: 
Summary: Peter Bart Separates Facts from Flacks
Review: Peter Bart,ex-New York Times reporter,ex-executive of Paramount, now editor-in-chief of Variety,is the first journalist to tell why magazines have become insistinguisable from public relations . On page 196 of his book,"The Gross" he tells how PMK ,a PR agency,inserted a "lengthy profile " on Robert Redford in The New Yorker. Well , what a relief .Read "The Gross" for more proof that the American press is offten just a carrier of publicity material . Hurrah for Peter Bart.Now we know why the American press has become unreadable . Its all a press release, kiddies . Bart's book is a must . Just more "publicity material, " says Bart,
Rating:
Summary: Fun, enjoyable read but with two glaring omissions
Review: So as not to bore you with the same remarks regarding the finer points of the book, I agree with the previous two reviewers' assessments that Peter Bart's Gross is an eye-opening book about the studios preparation and releasing of its big summer hits. It was an immensely enjoyable book that makes you laugh out loud in some instances (Beatty's maneuvers with the studio) and shake your head in dismay at others (Godzilla).My main complaint about this book is its lack of an index (a book with so much name dropping of the most powerful in the industry should have one!) and citations. I know that Peter Bart didnt find all this information on his own, yet he only seems to cite quotes from articles in respect to reviews and box office predictions in the summer movie previews of certain magazines. As a journalist, I am sure Mr. Bart knows the importance of citing and crediting source material. Also, in spending a considerable amount of time on Godzilla, Mr.Bart talks about the massive media hype that took place before the film was released. Surprisingly enough, while throughtout the book he remarks upon his own personal experiences from his days as a studio exec. to his current position at Variety, he distances himself in the Godzilla sweepstakes, failing to even mention the glowing article he wrote about the Devlin/Emmerich team for, I believe, Esquire magazine. However, he deserves kudos for only bashing his perennial target James Cameron twice (judging from his Variety articles, he could have been more aggressive in his Titanic- aftermath assessment of Fox)
Rating:
Summary: Like a summer movie, The Gross opens big but loses momentum.
Review: The Gross details the furiously twisted process of pitching, producing, and releasing summer movies in Hollywood. Peter Bart's greatest achievement is in showing just how warped this process has become (for instance, how a $100 million movie can begin shooting without a script). Unfortunately, Bart's ego gets in the way of his reporting too much of the time, as he is a relentless name dropper ("Last week at lunch with Warren Beatty, he told me..." etc. etc.). At times, it seems the point of Bart's narrative is to convince the reader how many Hollywood stars he actually knows. Still, the week by week tallies of the summer movies' grosses is a real gas to read. You'll understand after reading The Gross why so many movies are plain awful.
Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but too many errors!
Review: This book is valuable for its insight into the studio process, but there are far too many factual errors to be forgiven. Simple things like "Titanic"'s final gross and the fact that Warren Beatty did NOT direct "Love Affair" -- despite Bart's contention that he did -- are embarrassingly misreported. Okay, so in the interest of rushing the book out, we don't get a useful index. But how long would it have taken to include a table of contents??!!
Rating:
Summary: entertaining
Review: This was an informative and readable book, with some inside dope on some famous movies. But Bart sets himself an impossible standard when, in the afterword, he says that the model for this book was William Goldman's book on a season in the 60's on Broadway, titled THE SEASON. THE SEASON is such a brilliant book, that THE GROSS is nothing by comparison. But it's a readable book.
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