Rating: 
Summary: It's enough to make you retch
Review: Under the guise of writing an insider's guide to Hollywood, Lynda Obst has written a self-serving book that illuminates nothing so much as her own ego.Obst, producer of such drek as "Bad Girls" and "One Fine Day", purports to give us an insider's glimpse of a producer's life. But everything is filtered in such a way to display herself in the best possible light, rendering the rest of what she has to say of questionable value. For example, whenever Obst describes firing somebody, an inevitable occurrence for a producer, she will shift responsibility onto that person, saying "So-and-so had to be let go because he wasn't lighting the picture properly". (I'm sure So-and-So thought he was doing just fine!) She can't take responsibility by saying "I fired So-and-So because I thought he was doing a lousy job" As a producer who has never produced an exceptional picture, never ventured off the well-trod path, Obst, whose sole criteria is expediency, can't even begin to conceive of the courage of a Saul Zaentz, who could tell Twentieth Century Fox to take a flying leap rather than cast Demi Moore in "The English Patient". Zaentz's courage forced him to close down production - and won him an Oscar! When Obst whines about how women are mistreated in Hollywood, it's important to remember that whereas it is true that women in general have historically been mistreated, Obst herself enjoyed preferential treatment owing to the connections of her (much older) literary-agent husband. Many an aspiring player would kill to receive the kind of access that she enjoyed owing to her connection. For a far better book on what it's like to be a working producer, read Art Linson's "A Pound of Flesh"
Rating:
Summary: Obst is "Part of the Problem"
Review: We used to have a saying during the halcyon days of the 60's, "If you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem". Obst is clearly the latter. She cynically justifies and defends Hollywood's archaic and byzantine practices as if they were the result of some divine inevitability, rather than acknowledging the reality that they evolved by accident and that they serve no purpose. I agree wholeheartedly with the Reader who found her account self-serving. Obst is never wrong about anything. She is truly a legend in her own mind! That's too bad, because she has some valid points to make. You would be far better off reading a book by a true movie maker, director Sidney Lumet. It's called "Making Movies".
Rating: 
Summary: A must read for Hollywood Veterans and Rookies
Review: Where to begin! This book helped me better understand the industry I work in tremendously! I only wish I would have read it the day it was published. Lynda does a great job of weaving real-life experiences with observations of other people within her inner circle. If you've ever wanted to understand how a person juggles the life of a movie producer, parent, and friend...THIS IS YOUR BOOK!
Rating:
Summary: A must read for Hollywood Veterans and Rookies
Review: Where to begin! This book helped me better understand the industry I work in tremendously! I only wish I would have read it the day it was published. Lynda does a great job of weaving real-life experiences with observations of other people within her inner circle. If you've ever wanted to understand how a person juggles the life of a movie producer, parent, and friend...THIS IS YOUR BOOK!
Rating: 
Summary: Removes any doubt as to why Hollywood movies are so lousy.
Review: While Lynda Obst certainly knows her way around Hollywood and has survived and even prospered in an arena where megalomaniacs, narcissists and pathological liars abound and indeed make the rules, her book is most useful in describing why good business makes for lousy art. Obst again proves the observation that 'Hollywood is high school with money'. Ambitious and driven (and obviously intelligent) though Obst may be, the deal-making she painstakingly describes is the art form, the pictures themselves mere adjuncts. Shopping witless scripts to a tiny group of hugely overpaid stars and directors insures a steady stream of 'product' and little beyond the most common entertainment and certainly rarely anything approaching art. Sheer persistence overcomes all. A project moves forward only when the right people are 'attached'. Risky, personal pictures do not fit into this equation and subsequently rarely get produced. Instead the motion picture audience receives a steady stream of generic diversions, soulless to the extreme, dull, predictable and adolescent, near perfect reflections of their creators.
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