The Man Who Heard Voices: Or, How M. Night Shyamalan Risked His Career on a Fairy Tale (Hardcover)

~ (Author) "I started making occasional visits to the farm, for lunch and a talk in the farmhouse..." (more)
Key Phrases: breakup dinner, sale script, audition room, Chris Doyle, The Village, New York (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sportswriter Bamberger's frothy though unconvincing account of the tentative making of Shyamalan's latest film, Lady in the Water, won't make a lasting contribution to film history but may appeal to diehard fans of the moviemaker who hit it big with The Sixth Sense. Bamberger meets his fellow Philadelphian Shyamalan and his wife, Bhavna, at a party in 2004, and becomes intrigued with how this Indian- British immigrant came up with the idea that allowed him to persuade all the right people to make his first movie, at age 28, which grossed $1 billion worldwide and earned six Oscar nominations. Bamberger explores the themes of faith and heresy that run through Shyamalan's movies, including Unbreakable, Signs, The Village, and the little-seen coming-of-age dramedy Wide Awake, and reveals Shyamalan's latest inspiration, his original fable about a sea nymph. Essentially, Bamberger follows the secretive moviemaker around and tries to get a sense of his thoughts: "Night was trying to write this ambitious, crazy, inspired screenplay, and a lot of the time he had no idea what he was doing." A soup-to-nuts account of the making of the movie evolves with plenty of flashy names from coast to coast, but the whole isn't all that nourishing.
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Review

Stands alongside Lillian Ross’s Picture and Julie Salamon’s The Devil’s Candy as that rare inside look at how Hollywood actually works. -- The Philadelphia Inquirer --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Gotham; First Edition ~1st Printing edition (July 6, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1592402135
• ISBN-13: 978-1592402137
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 6.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #328,449 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

117 of 133 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars M. Night Shyamalan is a bad breaker-upper., July 26, 2006

By	racapowski (Great Falls, MT USA) - See all my reviews

I love Shyamalan's films, but I cannot lie - this book is a big blight on his image. It portrays him as a very unpleasant personality - the type who won't stand for less than constant adulation, takes everything, inculding professional talk, personally, and makes a ton of nasty personal remarks in retaliation.

Sportswriter Michael Bamberger is the ostensible author, yet the book is Shyamalan's manifesto; it includes countless internal monologues unknowable to a third party. Disingenuous, but the less disquieting of the two options; surely no human being, not even in marriages or cults, has been this fawning, this lavishly and unquestioningly worshipful of another.


"If [LitW] came together, it would be like Dylan and Clapton and Springsteen and Eminem and Kanye West and Miles Davis and Bonnie Raitt and Joan Armatrading and Jerry Garcia and every musician you've ever loved joining George Harrison and belting out the opening chord of 'A Hard Day's Night' at the same time."

[on demanding execs read his scripts on their days off] "[Shyamalan] was comfortable getting in the middle of people's weekend. He felt that the reading of his script should not be considered work. It should add to the weekend's pleasure."

"If you're a Bob Dylan, a Michael Jordan, a Walt Disney - if you're M. Night Shyamalan -"


The book exists to observe Shyamalan do something, then applaud his effortless skill. We learn what a good debator and actor Shyamalan is, what a good basketball player, how good he looks in a suit, how quickly he loses weight, how he has a better ear than the hired band, how perfect the grill lines are on his chicken breasts. (Is he modest? Yes, moreso than anyone the author's met.) Everyone else is a downtrodden failure, but Night takes them into his grace. Alas, they are mere humans and prone to grievous sin. The "freak" Cindy Cheung (she's 5'9" and Asian) is perfect, *perfect* for her role - until her agent wants a little more than the SAG minimum, whereupon she is "compromised" and a money-grubber. The venerable Mary Beth Hurt tries ad-libbing a couple lines; that's stunningly stupid. Much is made of how shlubby Paul Giamatti is, his biggest role to date supposedly a Nike ad. ("Sideways" doesn't count, apparently.) Later, he backstabs Shyamalan when he asks if he can stutter on a different syllable than the script indicates. Bryce Howard, the book admits, carried "The Village", but Shyamalan begins to dislike her, afeared she has lost her soul - "not right for the part, not the girl who hung on every word Night said". Her big offense? Becoming a vegetarian.

Then there's the actress who wasn't hired because Shyamalan didn't like the way she ate her Fritos.

And these aren't treated as minor annoyances; these flyspeck incidents constitute deep betrayals deliberately aimed to shatter the director's soul. Anything these scrubs manage to do correctly is at Shyamalan's instigation.

The worst is reserved for Nina Jacobson, Shyamalan's discoverer, whose (valid) criticisms of the LitW script prompted Night's break with Disney. Shyamalan's grievances date back to the delivery of the script by his assistant, Paula. Jacobson is having problems getting her kids to bed after an exciting birthday party and calls back four hours later; she has to read the script tomorrow.

"Now Paula was beyond shock. She felt like a pile of bricks had hit her. She wanted to throw up. She was accustomed to people treating Night with deference - with the respect he had earned - and now they weren't. She was accustomed to people doing what Night had wanted them to do. It was part of his aura."

This earns Jacobson the book's ceaseless playground mockery - not for a big head, but for a dead soul, a dull mind, unappealing looks, a "screechy" voice - "wah-wah-wah-wah-wah". In a follow-up, Bamberger decries her as a bad parent - in the same breath indicting her for not pulling her son away from the birthday party when Shyamalan demanded. Shyamalan's overreaction is flooring - for the rest of the book, he envisions his Disney bosses as demons inside his head, Furies bent on hounding him into madness and professional ruin. Night is portrayed as the victim of a deeply invasive crime he struggles every day to survive - all because his primary supporter didn't say she 100% unequivocally loved his latest.

Where is the honest appraisal of Shyamalan's creative process? We're told, in the *last ten pages*, that LitW received two sweeping edits in response to test screenings. We learn next to nothing on those overhauls where chapters are required. What of the failure of "The Village"? Shyamalan blames its denial of the supernatural after three movies affirming it. Those thoughts should have been explored, examined - but Bamberger can't. If we trust the book, Shyamalan takes any inquiry as treachery. This project has been...darned with overflowing praise.

I'll admit, Bamberger's prose is breezy and compulsively readable. The book does give step-by-step insight into how a director puts a movie together in the early going. And Bamberger eventually paints a thoughtful portrait of Giamatti - positive, insightful, yet not overdoing it.

Any reader, though, could've told Shyamalan that the hosannas at a quarter of their current length would still be unpalatable and discredit his side of the Disney breakup. If this is a conscious attempt, like the faux doc a few years ago, to skew his public image, then he gains nothing from labeling himself as petty and egomaniacal. And this book will surely cause hard feelings among his co-workers.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Interesting take on a self-important director, December 31, 2006

By	E. Lacey (Los Angeles, CA, USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This book is probably most interesting to people who know a fair bit about the film business. I found it fascinating, but think it needs an epilogue to examine the fallout from the movie's very disappointing reviews and box office.

M. Night Shyamalan can be whatever you want him to be here... a genius idealist, a brilliant filmmaker, or more likely, a man whose inflated ego and desperate attempt to do something important cause him to make a terrible career move and a terrible movie.

Shyamalan's arrogance is fascinating, as is his belief in what is clearly flawed material. However, his deep love for film and desire to make a film he believes in are certainly admirable.

Michael Bamberger is an interesting choice to write this book, because he's not in the film industry nor terribly familiar with the process of making a film. But I think that actually works, because he's at once infatuated with M. Night's celebrity and disgusted by the self-indulgence of his process. I think that a writer who knew more about Hollywood would have been tempted to make this an all-out character assassination (because there's certainly enough material to tempt a writer in this direction), but Bamberger's take is actually pretty balanced. This was a very interesting book that I thoroughly enjoyed.

15 of 16 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Great insight into an ego-maniac full of his own hype, September 25, 2006

By	S. Wicks (Toronto, ON Canada) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I'm not exactly an M. Night hater nor do I think he is the genius that some profess him to be (modern day Hitchcock? Please.). I loved THE SIXTH SENSE, was so-so on UNBREAKABLE, liked SIGNS (until the flawed ending), hated THE VILLAGE, and consider LADY IN THE WATER to be unwatchable (I had seen the film well before reading this book). Nor am I one to turn away from a good movie just because of the filmmaker's personality (I don't care what Woody Allen or Roman Polanski do when filming or not filming, or how big of a jerk a filmmaker is, if the movie is good then so be it). But what made this book so fascinating is the fact that M. Night comes off as essentially a big baby who can't accept any form of criticism. At one point, the book outlines how M. Night isn't looking for "yes" men/women, but he only wants people around him who believe -- but he definitely comes off as someone who indeed is looking for "yes" men/women and anyone who doesn't see his way is "lost".

In terms of M. Night's "fight" with Disney, this is one of the few exceptions where you come out siding with the corporation. Neither M. Night nor his assistant can't accept why the Disney execs won't drop everything in their personal Sunday lives to read the new script -- including taking a child to a birthday party, then settling him down afterwards -- then they get upset when Disney tells him they'll finance the movie and won't interfere with him at all! "We'll give you $60 million then see you at the premiere" offers Dick Cook. Offers like that are extremely rare, and I had no sympathy at all for M. Night during this "plight" when he feels he is betrayed by Disney. Disney's notes are not unreasonable, and actually are pretty much on the money. Then he gets upset when Giametti doesn't call him back immediately -- but M. Night has worked with the likes of Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson and Samuel L. Jackson. I guarantee they didn't drop everything and call M. Night immediately -- and this is something that I would have like seen in the book is how M. Night "manipulated" all these major stars in the past movies as the author claims he does. To me this book came off as a making-of a regular movie, with M. Night thinking that everyone was there to service him and that anyone who doesn't believe in him is lost.

I did enjoy the insight into the insecurties of M. Night, and you can definitely see where his ego stems from -- it's an extremely fragile ego indeed. Movie making takes a lot of courage and confidence, and M. Night puts up a good front, but his inner turmoil is so much more complex. For instance, the book constantly refers to the Disney execs comments as being a negative force that seem to stick to M. Night throughout the making of the film -- especially when something goes wrong. Jeff Robinov the creative power at Warner Bros. who is one of the smartest execs in the business, and is not one to gush over filmmakers. His "good job" to M. Night at a read-through although it bothers M. Night incredibly, is a great example of how Robinov lets the artists alone with their work unless circumstances call for Studio interference. That "good job" is in fact high praise.

Ultimately, I enjoyed reading this book. I love Hollywood, but I also love the foreign film and independent film worlds as well. This is a book that will definitely appeal to film lovers who liek insight into the creation process -- but will especially appeal to those types that love to trash Hollywood, and view the corporations, executives and producers that inhabit it as mindless drones (which is of course, definitely not the case).

The great irony is of course that LADY IN THE WATER is now considered a box office bomb, coming in a distant third on an opening weekend against -- wait for it -- a Disney film (PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 2) that was in its third week in release. In the end, Mickey Mouse gets the last laugh after all.