Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time
True Stories from a Career in Hollywood
-
- USD 15.99
-
- USD 15.99
Publisher Description
One-of-a-kind filmmaker Barry Sonnenfeld tells stories only he can tell, from his blockbuster career with iconic actors, studio execs, and producers. His humor and insight provide an inside glimpse into how Hollywood really works, or how it doesn’t.
Best Possible Place, Worst Possible Time delivers a cavalcade of sometimes baffling, often enlightening, and always funny stories about Sonnenfeld’s many films and television shows. From battling with studio executives and producers to bad-script-solving on set to coaxing actors into finding the right light and talking faster, Sonnenfeld provides an entertaining master class in how to make commercial art in the face of constant human foible. Over four decades in Hollywood, the mega-franchises include The Addams Family and Men in Black; the critical favorites, Get Shorty and Pushing Daisies; the icons, Will Smith, John Travolta, and Michael Jackson; and the projects that got away, Forrest Gump, Ali, and anything starring Jim Carrey.
The true stories escalate from surreal to outrageous to unbelievable. And then there’s magic hour. But you’ll never see Hollywood the same way again.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Sonnenfeld follows Barry Sonnenfeld, Call Your Mother with another entertaining glimpse at his decades-long career as a film director and cinematographer. In short, punchy chapters—which largely avoid the uneven stabs at pathos that plagued his previous memoir—Sonnenfeld covers encounters with celebrities from Michael Jackson to a prepolitical Donald Trump and pulls back the curtain on his best-known movies, including The Addams Family and Men in Black. Especially captivating is the section on the 1987 dark comedy Raising Arizona, in which Sonnenfeld goes deep on his frugal camerawork and recalls a mother "react in horror when she saw her toddler take his first steps" during a casting call for babies who were only supposed to crawl. While the prevailing tone is buoyant and gossipy, Sonnenfeld is quick to acknowledge his missteps—he freely admits that 1999's Wild Wild West "wasn't a good movie"—and includes some lurid peeks at the darker side of Hollywood, including a mob-connected actor threatening murder over a casting decision. The result is an illuminating, sometimes hilarious look at how the Tinseltown sausage gets made. Movie buffs will be in heaven.
