You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again

Rating:
Summary: 1 star is too high praise for this book
Review: This book is the biggest waste of paper and ink I've ever read. The book purports to be an autobiography; it's actually written in third person and nobody but the author could understand it. She brings up about 3 new people per page and doesn't explain who they are. I wish I had read a biography of the author so I could know what she was talking about!

The author rambles unashamedly about her drug use. I think she must have shared some with the editor and publisher of this book.

Rating:
Summary: I didn't like it
Review: This book was not a good read AT ALL. She wrote real nasty things about me!

Rating:
Summary: A funny, brutal look inside the movie making business.
Review: This is a funny, brutally frank autobiography of a Hollywood insider who made it quickly to the top (The Sting, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Taxi Driver) and her slow agonizing trip down to has been. Julia Phillips tells a sometimes painfully comic tale about her Hollywood life, her neurotic friends (naming names), her sex life (naming names) her drinking and her drug addiction (free-basing cocaine long before Richard Pryor). Her writing style is similar to Hunter Thompson, manic and self-centered but then like Hunter Thompson, her life has been very interesting so maybe the similarities make sense.

Rating:
Summary: Funny, Intelligent, Spastic
Review: This is a Hollywood tell-all from a woman who keeps calling herself a New Yorker. Uhmmm, no. New Yorker's don't end declaritive sentences with the word, "Babe," as in, "I'll ring you tommorow, Babe. Ciao." That's Hollywood.

The book is interesting. Good insights, interesting subject matter. But I got the impression reading it, she wrote every paragraph on an index card, threw them in the air, stapled them together, then gave them to her publisher as a 'book.'

There's such a thing as flow. Continuity. Most paragraphs in a book generally have something to do with the paragraph preceding and following them. The author seems like the kind of person Ritalin was invented for. I got the feeling she drank 3 pots of coffee before she started typing.

A manic-depressive without the depression. If Bette Midler or Liza Minelli took a lot of crystal meth then wrote a tell all, it would come across like this. A series of asides and name dropping pasted together. But the story is interesting.

I got the book because it was mentioned in "How to lose friends and Alienate people" by Toby Young, which was a very funny book about the magazine publishing world. Also name dropping, short asides, but working as a writer as opposed to producer/promoter, he knows about flow, even if he's also another manic type.

That said, I recommend this book. The author is very intelligent and funny, the subject matter interesting.

It's just that Hollywood types annoy me as superficial speed freaks with no attention span unless they're discussing money.

Rating:
Summary: this is one self-absorbed author.
Review: this was shallow, poorly written book. the writer has the insight and maturity of a self-absorbed nine-year-old. every paragraph begins with "I did this" and "I saw this person". the writer has no interest in anyone else but herself. the index tells it all, entries are who sat across the room from her at a restaurant. you'll come away with no insight about anyone except the author. read "easy rider, raging bull," it's a masterpiece compared to this trash.

Rating:
Summary: Dishy and Fun
Review: YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN (1991) was/is a touching autobiography written by the recently departed Julia Miller Phillips, born 1944, died New Year's Day, 2002. She was the first female to receive a Best Movie Academy Award. She got it for THE STING (1973) at age 29. She also produced CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) which featured French producer Francois Truffaut who died in 1984 at age 52. Phillips was 57 years old when she died. Part of the hugh army of Hollywood big shots who never made it to age 60.

Her 1991 autobiography book, YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN was surrounded by publicity stating "Julia Phillips has come out of retirement to write this book." She was 47 in 1991. People don't "retire" at 47, and certainly don't "emerge from retirement" at that age. She had lost all her money living the fast track Hollywood life, and decided to sell her privacy and that of others she knew over the years in Hollywood. The result was a best selling book which made the number one slot on the New York Times Best Seller (non-fiction) list. The book earned Phillips a lot of money, which she needed badly.

Julia Phillips wrote a follow-up book in 1995 titled DRIVING UNDER THE AFFLUENCE, another attempt to cash in her willingness to engage in autobiographical tale-telling about Hollywood, big money, and her travails. Unlike YOU'LL NEVER HAVE LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN (1991), the 1995 book had no index and generally was/is difficult to read easily and understand. About half of YOU'LL NEVER HAVE LUNCH AGAIN IN THIS TOWN (1991) suffered from this problem, but the remaining part was/is quite readable, interesting, and curiously touching.

Both books were quite obviously written by a Hollywood burn-out lady going down for the third time. Going down in flames. Part of the text in the 1991 book and all of it in the 1995 book are veritable screams of pain and despair, pathetically and incompetently wrapped in failed guise of smiling and humorous story telling.

The two books constitute a detailed obituary far more informative and valuable than those which appeared a few weeks ago in most nationally important USA newspapers (I write this in late January 2002). An obituary written by a person obviously about to die, a person who knew her fate, and explained it in writing, in these two books.

Yesterday, I completed an Amazon.Com review (not published yet, as of today, Jan. 15, 2002) about the HIGH CONCEPT (1998) postmortum analysis book by Hollywood author Charles Fleming about BEVERLY HILLS COP/TOP GUN movie producer Don Simpson (1943-1996) who died at age 52 sitting on the toilet of his 4 million dollar Bel Air, CA home, reading a book about Hollywood (a bio about movie director Oliver Stone). YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN (1991) contained a 10 page description of a 1972 trip author Julia Phillips and Don Simpson, both then still in their late 20's, took together to NYC while both Warner Bros. employees. It was a business trip.

The next year, Phillips won the Best Picture Academy Award for THE STING (1973). Eight years later Simpson was made the head of the Paramount Pictures movie studio in Hollywood reporting to Michael Eisner (then #2 man at Paramount Studios, not yet the Disney #1 man he later became), three years before Don Simpson and partner Jerry Bruckheimer began an independent movie producer partnership which resulted in 10 movies over a 13 year period which would earn three billion dollars at the boxoffice and in video stores, and provide Simpson personally with 40 million dollars income between 1983 and 1990 (and more between 1990 and his 1996 death at age 52).

Now Phillips and Simpson are both dead.

YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN (1991), DRIVING UNDER THE AFFLUENCE (1995), and HIGH CONCEPT (1998) are valuable books explaining at least partly the deaths of two productive, creative, intelligent people, children of the 60's who might have helped us all in important ways had they survived into the years of their old age. It's a shame these two people are now dead. Not just for their families and those close to them during their lives, but for us all.

Rating:
Summary: ANOTHER BIG TIME HOLLYWOOD DEATH BEFORE AGE 60: R.I.P. JULIA
Review: YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN (1991) was/is a touching autobiography written by the recently departed Julia Miller Phillips, born 1944, died New Year's Day, 2002. She was the first female to receive a Best Movie Academy Award. She got it for THE STING (1973) at age 29. She also produced CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND (1977) which featured French producer Francois Truffaut who died in 1984 at age 52. Phillips was 57 years old when she died. Part of the hugh army of Hollywood big shots who never made it to age 60.

Her 1991 autobiography book, YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN was surrounded by publicity stating "Julia Phillips has come out of retirement to write this book." She was 47 in 1991. People don't "retire" at 47, and certainly don't "emerge from retirement" at that age. She had lost all her money living the fast track Hollywood life, and decided to sell her privacy and that of others she knew over the years in Hollywood. The result was a best selling book which made the number one slot on the New York Times Best Seller (non-fiction) list. The book earned Phillips a lot of money, which she needed badly.

Julia Phillips wrote a follow-up book in 1995 titled DRIVING UNDER THE AFFLUENCE, another attempt to cash in her willingness to engage in autobiographical tale-telling about Hollywood, big money, and her travails. Unlike YOU'LL NEVER HAVE LUNCH IN THIS TOWN AGAIN (1991), the 1995 book had no index and generally was/is difficult to read easily and understand. About half of YOU'LL NEVER HAVE LUNCH AGAIN IN THIS TOWN (1991) suffered from this problem, but the remaining part was/is quite readable, interesting, and curiously touching.

Both books were quite obviously written by a Hollywood burn-out lady going down for the third time. Going down in flames. Part of the text in the 1991 book and all of it in the 1995 book are veritable screams of pain and despair, pathetically and incompetently wrapped in failed guise of smiling and humorous story telling.

The two books constitute a detailed obituary far more informative and valuable than those which appeared a few weeks ago in most nationally important USA newspapers (I write this in late January 2002). An obituary written by a person obviously about to die, a person who knew her fate, and explained it in writing, in these two books.

Yesterday, I completed an Amazon.Com review (not published yet, as of today, Jan. 15, 2002) about the HIGH CONCEPT (1998) postmortum analysis book by Hollywood author Charles Fleming about BEVERLY HILLS COP/TOP GUN movie producer Don Simpson (1943-1996) who died at age 52 sitting on the toilet of his 4 million dollar Bel Air, CA home, reading a book about Hollywood (a bio about movie director Oliver Stone). YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN (1991) contained a 10 page description of a 1972 trip author Julia Phillips and Don Simpson, both then still in their late 20's, took together to NYC while both Warner Bros. employees. It was a business trip.

The next year, Phillips won the Best Picture Academy Award for THE STING (1973). Eight years later Simpson was made the head of the Paramount Pictures movie studio in Hollywood reporting to Michael Eisner (then #2 man at Paramount Studios, not yet the Disney #1 man he later became), three years before Don Simpson and partner Jerry Bruckheimer began an independent movie producer partnership which resulted in 10 movies over a 13 year period which would earn three billion dollars at the boxoffice and in video stores, and provide Simpson personally with 40 million dollars income between 1983 and 1990 (and more between 1990 and his 1996 death at age 52).

Now Phillips and Simpson are both dead.

YOU'LL NEVER EAT LUNCH IN THIS TOWN (1991), DRIVING UNDER THE AFFLUENCE (1995), and HIGH CONCEPT (1998) are valuable books explaining at least partly the deaths of two productive, creative, intelligent people, children of the 60's who might have helped us all in important ways had they survived into the years of their old age. It's a shame these two people are now dead. Not just for their families and those close to them during their lives, but for us all.

Rating:
Summary: A Tour de Force
Review: You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again meets all the advertising promises...powerbrokers, scandal, drugs, sex, great films, bad films, and the names of the folks involved...all in Hollywood over the past thirty years. But the book is also far, far more. In fact, You'll Never Eat Lunch... knocked me out. First, it's beautifully written. How refreshing to read something by an author who loves words, makes them fly and sing, do pirouettes, and then lulls you with the beauty of their precision. It's also the rich, complex story of a woman who figures out who she is. Slowly, in page after page of fascinating events, she reveals herself to herself in an intimate portrait of pain and growth, hilarity and insight. Julia Phillips has done one hell of a job. But then, she's a helluva broad. And I thank her for sharing.