The Cinema of Eisenstein Book

"They would fight every day, break up every day... that's been their style - screaming continuously." (one Guber-Peters employee) "They are incredibly different, almost antithetical. One is like a machine, the other is like an animal. One is mind and the other is heart. And that's why they're so good together." (Stan Brooks)

"The Japanese, when they give a guy a horse and a suit of armor, they expect you to go out and die for them... they expect you to go out and fight to the death. And Guber was just renegotiating his contract. For Guber, the point was to make as much money as he could. There was no sense of dying for the Japanese, there was no sense of shame." (a filmmaker on Peter Guber)

"Get the funk up!" (Prince - "Batdance")

At times this is a lot of fun to read, though not consistently. This was actually going to be a 3 star book until a key point, and I'll get to that, but first let me lay out that this book is fascinating and it can end up being a page-turner, but it's for a particular audience. There are a LOT, I mean to emphasize that in capital letters, a MEGA-TON LOT, of numbers in this book, a lot of wheeling and dealing, and that may be expected by some. This isn't only the story of producers Jon Peters and Peter Guber and their uncanny ascendancy to the chairmen of the board of Columbia-Tri-Star-Sony et al, it's the story of that particular studio, and to say that it's only about these guys is like saying that 'Final Cut' is all about Heaven's Gate. It's hook and a big part of the meat, but there's other toppings and sauces to the burger that makes up Griffin and Masters' research.

The book starts off strongly as it does go into the backstories/histories of these sort of, maybe, okay not exactly unique individuals: they're the products of the American system to varying degrees, with Peters being a street kid who got abused by his father and was left to fend for himself, and had the unlikely talent and career to become a barber and hairdresser, ultimately leading him to Hollywood and Barbara Streisand (he may end up being the most butch/hetero hairdresser you'll ever encounter in non-fiction, which maybe makes him, uh, gayer? okay, not really, moving on). Guber, on the other hand, is the product of the upper-middle class: well-educated, only caring about money deep down, and already becoming a yuppie, if that's possible, during the 70's when (partially) overseeing productions like The Last Detail at, oddly enough, Columbia. What we don't exactly see is a burning desire and passion to become filmmakers - this is, I think, a key distinction from, for example, Down & Dirty Pictures and its portrait of the Weinsteins, also a quasi Good-Cop-Bad-Cop team of moguls.

Their rise as well as a GIANT cast of people to look through - people who worked at Columbia at the top like David Begelman and Frank Price and Dawn Steel and many others; the sleazy rats working in tangential things like the record industry, which Guber-Peters also get their feet wet in, at Casablanca records; some film directors like George Miller and Steven Spielberg and Tim Burton (the former they drive bloody nuts, the middle won't talk to them, and the latter ends up crying and yet is clearly the genius of Batman, with Peters contributing sort of to that film's blockbuster power, seemingly his one real time outside of 'A Star is Born); oh, and exes like Barbara Streisand and then... well, one other notorious woman, which I'll get to momentarily.

So there's a lot of good stuff at the start that engrosses you if you're interested in knowing more about the movie business, or a particular portion of it (and certain arms and tentacles like Steve Ross at Warners)... but there is a section which is about the lead up to the sale of Columbia to Sony, with a whole host of other characters including Walter Yetnikoff, that is sort of interesting but not as much as what came before. I think it was on my end feeling impatient with the pacing of this middle section, with a whole heap of back-history (some of it compelling, some not) about how Sony came to be in Japan and that whole group of characters (some will play a role to come when G&P take control, others not). It did start to get back up to speed once the main players get into the picture and the backstabbing and double crossing that goes on between Gubers, Peters and their "boss" at Warners, Ross. You do get, I must stress once more, a LOT of numbers and figures and minutae. Some of that worked for me as far as learning something new about how points and percentages and the simple give-and-take of businessmen huddled in rooms doing such a dance. Some of it didn't.

But then it comes around to the main portion - which is about, oh more than halfway in, so that's another mark against it - and it gets good and interesting again. Reading about the many films, some successful and more, it seems, that aren't or outright bomb (Hudson Hawk, oy vey), is the stuff that I was really digging into as a movie geek, and learning about the ins and outs of these productions, and the tempers flaring or sometimes (often) cooling depending on if it was Peters or Guber at the helm, it all makes for a wonderful portrait of excess. These guys thought they could use this extravagant, mind-blowing the deal (the kind that must've made Lucas and his Star Wars 77 contract go 'Wow. That's a deal. Wish I thought of that'), and then lavish filmmakers and talent to entice them to the studio(s), and then.... not do anything with them. It's an All-American story that made me more interested as it went, and Griffin and Masters are at least competent and often are skillfull journalists as much as non-fiction writers (this has the grist of true journalism). But it was still hovering at like 3 1/2 stars due to that mid-section.

.... and then came chapter 28, 'How they Built the Bomb' and to an extent chapter 29 'Heidi-Ho'; the former is about the production of just one film, LAST ACTION HERO, while the latter is about the scandal (which I only was vaguely aware of sad to say) about Heidi Fleiss, the "Hollywood Madam." The Fleiss chapter is good, in large part because it ends up bringing together a lot of these *MEN* (and it's important for these women writers, though they don't push it explicitly, that they are men and they are women wrting about it - again they're such good reporters you could forget that and not notice it). But chapter 28 on LAH is a marvel of cinematic making-of storytelling, almost on par with the best parts of 'Final Cut'. It's a five and a half star chapter in this book, as these authors really dig into what Mark Canton, who comes off as the kind of man who needed and craved attention all he could (all those pictures of him with stars on the wall, oy vey), and how, yes, Arnold Schwarzenegger kind of comes out as the actual hero of the story, as the guy trying to keep things upbeat and not the 'unqualified disaster' level that the production ends up spiraling at.

Could that movie have been saved and been a hit? Certainly going up against Jurassic Park was a death knell, the book argues convincingly, though all the hubris that goes into making the success it seems ends up going into the flops (except for Hudson Hawk, seriously, screw Bruce Willis and his antiunion ass, but I digress). These couple of chapters, and indeed the book as a whole as it ramps up and goes into its 'dark' period from like late 1992 into the rest of the years detailed, is astonishing work and kept me so entertained I finished practically the rest of the book in one sitting - 200 pages in all(!)

So it's not overall the best of the movie books I've come across, but it's a damn fine piece of work that manages to condense really closer to fifteen years of history - lets say from around 1980 to the mid 90's, though the 60s and 70s get their time too for detailing how Guber and Peters became who they were personality wise - and also details just how Hollywood worked then. It's also great to think about and compare to how it is today, how despite the extravagant budgets and over the top things done for these films that did get made (whether successful or not), there was more room for the middle budget films, the middle-level risks, and that fascinated me just as much to read about how those movies did (or didn't, as sometimes happens) get made. And as these two personalities it makes for a helluva reading, an in-depth take on what can be gained and perverted by what American greed and excess allows... and, not to mention, how the Japanese respond or take it all in.


PS: there's a section about Peter Guber and OWL CREEK, and a small incident that caused someone to write an op-ed for the paper complaining about him - "We demand that our county authorities insist that Peter Guber's illegal chalets be dismantled log by log and that he be taught that ours is not the sort of community of sycophants and whores with which he is so accustomed to dealing." (p 351) - ... the writer of this op-ed isn't named. C'mon, ladies, it's Hunter S Thompson, right? He was in Owl Creek, he'd call Guber a 'whore' to his face and mean it. Anyway, I take glee in picturing it's him.