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One Hundred Films And A Funeral
By Michael Kuhn (Thorogood, £19.99)
Birth,
Betrothal,
Betrayal,
Burial”, it
screams above the title of this timely memoir by its esteemed British President of the now defunct PolyGram Filmed Entertainment.
Digested in the wake of the recent demise of FilmFour it makes even more poignant read- ing especially as both companies shared a smash hit, Four Weddings And A Funeral.
A subsidiary of the Dutch hardware giant Philips, PolyGram too briefly took on Hollywood in the nineties and seemed to be
winning when its parent “unex- pectedly and unaccountably” decided to sell PFE off to Seagram. “Death by owner,” Kuhn calls it.
During the company’s tilt at transatlantic box-office glory between 1991 and 1998, there was critical and popular success with films like Wild At Heart, Fargo, Elizabeth, Lock Stock & Two Smoking Barrels, Notting Hill, Bean and, of course, Four Weddings.
The overall slate in those years earned no fewer than 10 Oscars and 23 BAFTAs including one – the Michael Balcon Award for Outstanding Contribution to British Cinema - for the author.
He writes in conclusion: “The only note of sadness was that we still have no London-based film studio to compete with Hollywood. I still have the ambi- tion one day to put that right.”
Korda: Britain’s Only Movie Mogul
By Charles Drazin (Sidgwick & Jackson, £20)
Y
subtitle – what, for
example, about J Arthur Rank, Michael Balcon and Lew Grade? – but there’s no denying that Korda was, in his own right, an imperious film czar in the Hollywood tradition.
What separates Korda from, and indeed somehow lifts him above, his Hollywood counterparts who were resolutely desk-bound is the fact that he was a director too, often a very good one.
He could boast no fewer than 50 credits in a career that spanned more than 30 years – from the silent White Nights back in his native Hungary mid-Great War to An Ideal Husband in aus- tere post World War Two Britain. In between were historical treats like The Private Life of Henry VIII and Rembrandt.
With all this helming experi- ence no wonder he was also the epitome of the “hands on” pro- ducer as he guided haltingly the fortunes of his London Films – with that memorable Big Ben logo – and the bespoke Denham Studios.
From the author of In Search Of The Third Man, you’d expect and indeed get a painstakingly researched biography about this seminal figure in British filmmaking.
Ain’t It Cool?: Kicking Hollywood’s Butt
By Harry Knowles (Boxtree, £12.99)
If the
Internet is,
as some
have described it, the
ultimate democracy then Knowles, a kind of ginger-beard- ed Jabba The Hutt-lookalike is its First Minister of Film.
To call his website, aintitcool- news.com (named after a John Travolta line in a forgettable thriller called Broken Arrow) influ- ential is an understatement.
Peppered with reviews – many from test screenings – and gossip, it receives more than two million hits a month and gets more than 1,200 e-mails a day helping make the site a critical hotbed for film geeks and Tinseltown players alike.
Just 31, Texas-born Knowles has risen from once-bedridden buff to, astonishingly, a listing in Entertainment Weekly’s ‘Top 100 Most Powerful People In Hollywood.”
“Fans – geeks like me – are the one cultural antidote to these cynical times” opines the big guy in a timely memoir that manages to be wise and worryingly self- important at the same time.
Clark Gable
By Warren G Harris (Aurum, £18.99)
T
known in his
Hollywood
heyday –
would have been
100 last year. In fact he died three months shy of his sixtieth birthday after completing his 66th and last film, The Misfits.
Gable’s career spanned four decades and a quartet of wives including perhaps his one true love, Carole Lombard, who died tragically less than three years after their marriage. His only son, John Clark, born some four months after Gable’s death, is now keeper of the flame over- seeing a museum in the star’s birthplace of Cadiz, Ohio.
The man and many of the myths get a colourful retread in this readable biography.
Star Power: Internet Celebrity
By Sonya D Swinton (Writer’s Club Press, £13.99)
G
tising and
marketing on the
Internet to the entertainment industry. The author, a member of BAFTA East Coast, is a 10-year veteran of advertising and mar- keting management.
book reviews
by Quentin Falk
ou may quibble
with the
he King – as Gable
became
22
uide about adver-