Books, 2/24.

"Only Fellini could dream this: 'Sophia Loren has drowned in her bathtub. Weeping, I'm the one who has to tell Carlo Ponti.... I note that he has a wig of thick hair on his head, and that he looks pretty good with it on.'" For Vanity Fair, Bruce Handy previews The Book of Dreams.

David Mamet is "the greatest American playwright of his generation," declares Jeremy McCarter, but Ira Nadel's David Mamet: A Life in the Theatre isn't the biography we need: "The definitive biography will need to cut more finely, separating not just successes from failure but success from success. Mamet has written a scathing play about sexual politics, Oleanna; the screenplay for a brilliant and (I'd wager) timeless political satire, Wag the Dog; and an uproarious courtroom farce, Romance. But these all pale next to American Buffalo and Glengarry Glen Ross." What's more, "the definitive Mamet biography will above all need to give a full accounting of his voice. Mamet, according to [Gregory] Mosher, 'worked the iambic pentameter out of the vernacular of the underclass.' For all the comparisons to [Harold] Pinter, there is nothing like Mamet's profane poetry in modern drama."

"Relying almost exclusively on secondary sources, Nadel has constructed a very shaky edifice upon which to discuss Mamet's singular career," agrees Marc Weingarten in the Los Angeles Times.

Back in the New York Times: Upton Sinclair "flirted with Hollywood for most of his long life," notes Anthony Arthur, who lists several of the writer's projects ranging from 1914 through 1967 as well as his friends: Charlie Chaplin, Douglas Fairbanks Sr and Sergei Eisenstein. "But Sinclair, the author of more than 90 books, never made the big movie strike he hoped for." Now, of course, There Will Be Blood. "What is there about Oil! that has made it, by proxy, such a gusher?" Related: Jennifer Schuessler at Paper Cuts.

"I've never been a fan of [Derek] Jarman's art or even his films, many of which feature in a new exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery," writes Michael Collins. "As a native Londoner with a link to the neighbourhood that Jarman made his home in the 1970s, and with a passion for the Kent coast around Dungeness where he lived in the years before his death in 1994, I prefer his diaries (Modern Nature, Dancing Ledge, Smiling in Slow Motion) and the early Super 8 footage in which he documents his impressions of these landscapes."

Also in the Guardian: Simon Callow on Patrick Newley's The Amazing Mrs Shufflewick: The Life of Rex Jameson and Michael Coveney on Michael Munn's Richard Burton: Prince of Players.

The Observer's Philip French recalls meeting Paul Bowles and becoming an advocate: "I once tried to persuade John Boorman to film The Sheltering Sky, and even offered to collaborate on the screenplay, but he thought it was unfilmable. Fortunately Bernardo Bertolucci didn't agree."

Charles Matthews on Pictures at a Revolution: Five Movies and the Birth of the New Hollywood:

The conventional way of writing about five movies would be to devote a section of the book to each. But [Mark] Harris does something more difficult and far more illuminating: He weaves together the stories of how each movie was conceived, crafted, released, critiqued and received. He writes about the five or six years in which the filmmakers, some of them old pros and some of them rank novices, struggled with a studio system in collapse, an audience whose tastes and enthusiasms seemed wildly unpredictable, and a culture being transformed by volatile social and political forces.

Related online listening: Harris is a guest on On Point.

Back in the Washington Post: "Charlotte Chandler's new book, Not the Girl Next Door, tries to refute the image of [Joan] Crawford as a domestic fiend by telling the star's side of the story as gleaned from extended interviews with her in the mid-1970s," writes John Epperson (Lypsinka). "Perhaps it's very Joan Crawford of me to expect a book to be tidier and more disciplined (imagine the neatness hell that Crawford put her editors and co-authors through when she wrote her own books, A Portrait of Joan and My Way of Life), but I will give in to my (possibly neurotic) desire for perfection and report that a fully satisfying Crawford biography has yet to be written."

And Mark Athitakis reviews Dennis McDougal's Five Easy Decades: How Jack Nicholson Became The Biggest Movie Star In Modern Times and Eric Lax's Conversations With Woody Allen: His Films, the Movies, and Moviemaking.

Posted by dwhudson at February 24, 2008 8:00 AM