I love Raiders of the Lost Ark, the Young Indy TV series and the original Star Wars movies, especially The Empire Strikes Back, and I was excited to hear that George Lucas had written a movie book. It turns out that George only wrote a one page preface, but he did apparently choose the 300 key movies covered.
Unfortunately, Alex Ben Block who edited Blockbusting and wrote most of the text is a godawful writer. At his best, he's straightforward and plain, but his best doesn't happen too often. The snarls he gets himself into sometimes make it difficult to understand what he's trying to tell us, and what he's trying to tell us in the one page alloted to each film is rarely insightful or meaningful, often pointless, and sometimes ridiculous.
In his discussion of Mutiny on the Bounty for instance, he tells us that the studio was nervous about the project because of "the lack of important women's roles"(among other reasons). He then goes on to say that Gable didn't want to do the film, but was talked into it by a producer "who pointed out that he would have the key romantic role." This is ridiculous on its face, as Gable always had the key romantic role by this stage in his career, and of course, the romantic role in Mutiny in the Bounty is, as the studio said, relatively unimportant,in any case. Whatever Gable's reasons for doing the picture, clearly, this nonesense has nothing to do with them.
In a book designed mainly as a reference work, it's disheartening to find careless mistakes such as confusing Robert Montgomery and George Montgomery, identifying the original version of State Fair as a musical in the unattractively designed standard format page under genre, and telling us that when Irving Thalberg died "he left behind many movie projects, including oversight of the highly successful comedy Animal Crackers." That's a very odd way to characterize Thalberg's accomplishments, even if he had supervised Animal Crackers, but of course he didn't. One assumes Block meant A Night at the Opera.
Going back to Mutiny on the Bounty, Block makes a point of saying that it was the first remake to win a best picture Oscar, citing In the Wake of the Bounty, released in 1933 as the original. This is a very questionable distortion, especially since Blockbusting is almost wholly concerned with American movies, and In the Wake of the Bounty was a little seen, barely professional Australian picture.
A final disappointment is the system used to calculate adjusted box office and production figures for the films. This is an area in which Blockbusting could have been really useful, but I can't understand the comments in the Notes to the Reader section which tell me that the difference between ticket prices and the Consumer Price Index result in Little Women's production adjustment being 1 million = 15 million in 2005 dollars, while the box ofiice revenue for the same film tells me that 5.1 million = 142.4 million in the same 2005 dollars. Aren't dollars, dollars in this book? I'd love to know how many people actually saw the chosen films based on ticket prices divided into total box office revenue, but since no effort is made to do this, I'm confused about the saliency of ticket prices to the adjusted revenue calculations.
In sum, this book is absolutely awful.The information is skimpy, frequently irrelevant, and generally untrustworthy. The writing is sophomore college level, and I'm insulting many fine sophomore writers when I say that.
What a disappointment!
Lansing Sexton
