Action! : A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic book
Review: Robert Cort has written a one-of-a-kind book of behind the scenes Hollywood action. Sure, it's fiction but no one could make up stuff this interesting. A must read for anyone who is interested in how the movie business REALLY works.

Rating:
Summary: Hollywood cattiness
Review: The main thing this book has going for it is the gimmick of inserting famous characters, like Steve McQueen, as characters. This is a readable, if sprawling tale of filmdom cattiness. The prose has no particular style, and it reads like one of those quickie Hollywood bios written from old newspaper clips. It's a pleasant time-waster -- the type of book that you can enjoy reading on an airplane but can toss aside at any point and not care if you get back to it.

Rating:
Summary: Name dropping to the nth...
Review: This book reads like the script for a James Michener miniseries or an epic blockbuster (it reminded me in parts of the film Giant). My biggest complaint is the incessant namedropping that at times is so gratuitious that I self-consciously found myself looking at the floor to make sure my feet hadn't stepped in any of it. I expect we will see this book on TV (HBO perhaps?) or maybe even on the big screen someday, since Cort is a major producer in Hollywood. Hopefully the real screenplay will do to this novel what central character AJ is supposed to be talented at doing: tightening a potentially good but ultimately sprawling story into a focused unit. It surely needs it. My advice? Wait for the screen version.

Rating:
Summary: Name dropping to the nth...
Review: This book reads like the script for a James Michener miniseries or an epic blockbuster (it reminded me in parts of the film Giant). My biggest complaint is the incessant namedropping that at times is so gratuitious that I self-consciously found myself looking at the floor to make sure my feet hadn't stepped in any of it. I expect we will see this book on TV (HBO perhaps?) or maybe even on the big screen someday, since Cort is a major producer in Hollywood. Hopefully the real screenplay will do to this novel what central character AJ is supposed to be talented at doing: tightening a potentially good but ultimately sprawling story into a focused unit. It surely needs it. My advice? Wait for the screen version.

Rating:
Summary: Great read
Review: This is a really cool read about Hollywood - lots of cool real people in it and an interesting way to see the dark side of Hollywood. It's a piece of fiction - nice that way - as opposed to one of those pretentious tell-all books. But for me, it's the great story that I love - AJ and his family are really a crazed bunch who fight at home and at work.

Rating:
Summary: Finished the last page wanting more
Review: This is a wild ride, a page turner. I read it in two days and it only took me that long because my eyes were unaccustomed to the workout. The last act is dynamite. Superbly crafted. Can't wait for the movie to come out.

Rating:
Summary: Self-Referential Junk!
Review: Why is it that people in the movie business (as opposed to filmmakers, who are artists) think their lives are interesting and/or important? Cort's weaving of numerous real people into his story does not (contrary to Lesley Stahl's blub on the jacket) even come close to Doctorow's achievment in "Ragtime." On the contrary, it's not enriching, and it's pretentious and amoral in that he puts dialogue into the mouths of real people, many of whom are still alive (and a few of whom I happen to know). One has the sense that this writer is doing a lot of score-settling, and that his story is self-referential in the worst possible sense. The author is certainly an accomplished producer, but you won't learn anything about what the business is like except that to make it big in Hollywood you have to act like a monster. The big question a reader must ask himself after wading through this morass of superficial charcterizations: "Why on earth should anyone care?"