Description:
This delightful memoir by acclaimed film director Paul Mazursky is not strictly an autobiography. Rather, it's a series of anecdotes told without regard to chronological order--a fluid, surprising structure that allows Mazursky to focus on the highlights of his life. He tells tales of directing cinema celebrities, stories about his family members, and accounts of his work as an actor and writer, all with equal humor and facility. As the picture of his remarkable journey from Brownsville, Brooklyn, to the Hollywood director's chair develops, we visit the sets of I Love You, Alice B. Toklas, Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice, An Unmarried Woman, Tempest, Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Moscow on the Hudson, and Enemies: A Love Story. Mazursky offers wonderfully comic views of his grandparents, Orson Welles, Danny Kaye, Peter Sellers, John Cassavetes, Stanley Kubrick, and many others, including the great Italian director Federico Fellini, whose correspondence he publishes here. In the most fascinating and poignant chapter, entitled "The Ones I Never Made," Mazursky talks about film scripts the studios never greenlighted. Show Me the Magic relates the triumphs and failures, the insights and joys, in the remarkable life of a veteran film director. --Raphael Shargel
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