One of my coworkers and I love to chat movies. When his birthday came this year I went on the hunt for a book about Hollywood that I thought would be up his alley and while I couldn’t put my hands on my first choice for him Pictures at a Revolution by Mark Harris (a book I read back in 2008 before my time with Cannonball and LOVED) quick enough, I went browsing shelves at the bookstore and Box Office Poison by Tim Robey jumped out to me and a copy was purchased for my friend, and I put it on my own library request in for later in the year.
I’m glad that this is the book that I chose for that occasion because it has a nice balance of movies that you’ve heard of, and some you haven’t. Robey gives each book about 10 pages, tracking the history of how it became a flop – was it a production run wild with overspending, did it miss the boom for its particular genre, was it just bad – and uses that to talk about how the machine of Hollywood can be understood through it. This is a 3.5 rounded down for me because it does get a bit repetitive in format even though Robey works to not pick the most obvious and does stay away from things that are thought of as flops which in fact broke even (Battlefield Earth apparently falls into that category). And while it starts with silent movies and has at least one movie from every decade starting in the 1910s, there are FAR more movies talked about from the 2000s than any other decade which makes sense given the author’s age and career, but it meant that a lot of ground was covered repeatedly in those chapters.
Bingo Square: Borrow. This one came from my lovely library – as most of my books do – and its excellent ILL program with libraries throughout neighboring counties. Supporting libraries is important always, but especially now.
Bingo #2: Arts, Borrow, Citizen, Work, White