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Rating: 
Summary: Informative, but way too congratulatory and uncritical
Review: Dino DeLaurentiis is certainly one of the most interesting characters in the history of motion pictures, though you wouldn't know it by reading this well-written, but way too congratulatory and uncritical biography. Granted, this combination of P.T. Barnum and Malcolm McLaren has produced some genuine cinema classics ("La Strada," "Blue Velvet"). However, the bulk of DeLaurentiis's filmography consists of overblown, over-budgeted box-office bombs ("Waterloo", "Dune") or sleazy big-budget exploitation films ("Mandingo," "Death Wish," "Hannibal"). This isn't a criticism, mind you, as DeLaurentiis has produced some of the most entertainingly tasteless movies of all time. While Tullio Kezich's and Alessandra Levantisi's biography has some interesting trivia and facts about DeLaurentiis, it rarely focuses on probably DeLaurentiis's most significant achievement, namely, the incredible ability to walk away from some of the biggest financial disasters in cinema history unscathed and richer. The authors rely too much on DeLaurentiis's own version of events and rarely allow other voices to provide their interpretations of the same events. For example, DeLaurentiis's mid-1980s attempt at running a studio (the ill-fated DeLaurentiis Entertainment Group or D.E.G.) is given minimal attention in the book and leaves one with the impression that if DeLaurentiis had been allowed to run the studio his way, it would have been a success. For a much different, more detailed, and hysterically funny account of the D.E.G. debacle, you should track down Mark Frankel's August 1989 Spy magazine profile which gives the impression that DeLaurentiis is either one of the most inept studio heads in movie history or one of the craftiest hucksters the world has ever seen. A perfect example of this (chronicled in Frankel's article, but missing from the book) is when DeLaurentiis decided in 1986 to produce "King Kong Lives," a horrendously cheesy sequel to his already dubious 1976 "King Kong" remake. Since DeLaurentiis owned the rights to "King Kong," he, um, generously sold the rights to D.E.G. (a publicly traded company which he also headed) for $21 million. However, Frankel advised that when the film brought in only $4.7 million, DeLaurentiis "graciously" reduced his fee to $10.2 million. There's a really great story here, but Kezich and Levantesi only scratch the surface. Given the generous amount of space provided to DeLaurentiis telling his own story, one gets the impression the authors were seduced by their subject the same way DeLaurentiis has seduced studio heads and financiers into investing millions of dollars into productions of questionable merit and taste over the past several decades.
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