Grey probes the dark, sordid, stupid underside of the glittering, glamorous veneer of Hollywood. Packed with outrageous anecdotes, insider interviews, unbelievable skills and production sketches, this compulsively readable volume exposes the incredible scandals and lurid excesses at the heart of the film industry.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Amazon.com Review
Former punk rocker and unlikely Hollywood insider Ian Grey takes us on a cynical, self-loathing tour of the worst of Tinseltown in this gut-bustingly funny collection of evil little essays. From the overblown egos that manage the movies to the trend towards cleaned-up gore, Grey has the political savvy and film-world background to make incisive comments on the dumbest of art forms. Not to be missed are his essays on the life-affirming qualities of gore films, the love of plastic surgery, and the reminiscences of Oscar night, when everyone who wants something is essentially doing to everyone who has something what Monica Lewinsky did to President Clinton. Too much fun for one volume. --James DiGiovanna
From Library Journal
Contemporary Hollywood takes it on the chin in these two books, written from widely different perspectives. Fleming, who has written extensively on Hollywood for Variety, Newsweek, and Entertainment Weekly, tells the sordid story of producer Don Simpson, who helped create a string of blockbusters (Flashdance, Beverly Hills Cop, Top Gun) and whose box office figures gave new meaning to the phrase "gross receipts." Simpson died in January 1996 at the age of 52; his heart gave out after years of crash dieting, drugs, alcohol, and disfiguring plastic surgery. Fleming spares few of the gory details of Simpson's decline, and he's quick to tie his lifestyle up with that of other Hollywood miscreants like Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Farley. The book needs a better sense of Simpson's longtime relationship with partner Jerry Bruckheimer, as well as some perspective; Fleming barely acknowledges that the film business has always harbored and even encouraged hard-living dynamos like Simpson, as long as they were successful. Grey, described by his publisher as "once a Hollywood insider," offers a collection of brief essays and interviews about the state of films. Grey's chats with directors John Waters (Hairspray) and Wes Craven (Scream) highlight what's best about the book; the author's essays range from the provocative to the puerile. A discretionary purchase for most collections. [Fleming's book was previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 12/97.]AThomas J. Wiener, Editor,"Satellite DIRECT.
-AThomas J. Wiener, Editor,"Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
-AThomas J. Wiener, Editor,"Satellite DIRECT"
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Reads like a high school term paper,
This review is from: Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (Paperback)
Ian Grey is an angry man, and being angry has traditionally provided fodder for many fine writings. Grey is a disatrous exception. His writing style is that of a detached yet mock-interested outsider displying equal touches of naiveté and arrogance. Naiveté and arrogance works remarkably well in the wirtings of, say, Carl Hiassen, but Grey's ramblings read more like that of a pretentious high-school student.The similarities with high school do not end there. Like most high schhol term papers, Grey strives for too much and ends up with too little. The chapters show little, if any, cohesion and one must wonder who had bribed the proof-readers prior to their assignment on this book. When Grey does explore some interesting themes he is either a)uninformed (i.e. too lazy to do the research needed), b)too anxious to get on with the next boundary-breaking "insight" or c)both, as is most often the case. The real horror-story (or comic relief depending on your frame of mind) of Grey's work is his "field-work", i.e. 7 hastily conducted interviews with less-interesting people where one in every four questions concern the "fascinating" breast-implant phenomenon of Hollywood. In between these 7 interviews, presented for some daft reason in original transcript form as if to say 'Look, I Really did do these interviews', Grey tacks on various stories of encounters with friends of stars or has-beens in and around Hollywood that one does best in avoiding. Like a high-school student, Grey will mature in time, get a better perspective of things, develop his writing skills, find more interesting stories to write about and get some psychotherapy for all that 'anger'. Unless, of course, having this rubbish published gives him a big ego, in which case we'll have to brace ourselves for more incoherent ramblings from this 16-year old stuck in a grown man's body.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Reactionary Rant Against the Hollywood Movie Machine,
By
This review is from: Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (Paperback)
While few filmgoers today would dispute the idea that Hollywood cranks out dozens of pieces of garbage for every one truly good film that is produced, Ian Grey's SEX, STUPIDITY, AND GREED: INSIDE THE AMERICAN MOVIE INDUSTRY is not, as its title and cover promises, a daring examination of Hollywood that "splits the carcass of the American movie industry from gizzard to groin." Employing a sometimes vulgar invective--one that he would surely cite as socially or culturally subpar were it to show up as part of the dialogue in some recent film--Grey frequently pits recently produced films against those from the pre-MPAA era as a way of illustrating how the Hollywood movie has "devolved" over the past four decades. Reading between these lines, the astute reader can't help but conclude that it is not the American movie industry per se that Grey hates so much, but what angers him instead is the fact that recent movies--with all their newfangled technical FX and new methods for storytelling--have usurped the beloved films of his youth in the projectors at the local cinema, an attitude that makes this read more like a reactionary rant than an exposé.
If one can forgive Grey for using the book as a soapbox for his personal rant, it is still difficult to surmount the other obstacles within these pages. One of the most glaring problems with Grey's arguments is his constant use of AD VERECUNDIAM logical fallacies. At least two major chapters in SEX, STUPIDITY, AND GREED: INSIDE THE AMERICAN MOVIE INDUSTRY are built around interviews with "authorities" that have little expertise in the American film industry, one centering on a publisher of soft-core porn magazines and the other a psychiatrist who apparently treats patients with self-image issues. Another irritating aspect of the book is its overall style. Rather than reading like a formal book-length exposé from an industry insider--which is what the jacket declares the book to be--the writing style is more akin to that of an amateur internet blog, with the same sort of abrupt shifts in thought and subtopic that one often sees when reading online diaries and such. And there is an apparent lack of professional editing, too, as one comes across numerous grammatical and punctuation errors throughout the text (again, the same sort of errors one commonly finds when reading entries on an amateur web site). Also, the frequent comparisons of certain recently produced films against specific films from the pre-MPAA as a means of "exposing" the deterioration of quality and morality in Hollywood make it seem as if Grey is unaware of--or perhaps purposely ignoring--the history of filmmaking in America. With everything from the racism and blatant historical inaccuracies of D.W. Griffith's THE BIRTH OF A NATION (1915) to Roman Polanski's dalliance with an underage girl in the 1970s, the pre-MPAA movie industry in the United States certainly had its share of controversy regarding the morality and aesthetic quality of the films it produced and the people who produced them. Grey's arguments that such problems are something new to the industry simply fall flat in the face of history. SEX, STUPIDITY, AND GREED: INSIDE THE AMERICAN MOVIE INDUSTRY is not without its merits. The chapter discussing the establishment of the MPAA in the late 1960s and the frequently inconsistent application of its rating system is very eye-opening, and Grey's interview with the sometimes reviled actress Sean Young is also an interesting read. Yet despite these way-too-infrequent good points, Grey's purported exposé of the deterioration of aesthetics and quality in the Hollywood movie-making juggernaut is actually little more than the reactionary ranting of a man who is miffed because "they" don't make movies like "they" used to, and being such, it will be of little interest to anyone hoping to get a genuine look at the inner workings of the current American movie industry.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Life Imitates 'Art': Entertaining but Empty,
By Planetary Eulogy "Senior Fellow, Hessian Stud... (Asheville, NC USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Sex, Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry (Paperback)
Ian Grey has all the right ingredients for a first rate litary drive-by. He has perfected the self-righteous swagger of a master polemicist and he's got the staccato sarcasm down pat. He's glib and witty, and has just enough of the been-there-in-the-trenches (and see who I've rubbed shoulders with) authenticity (he's a failed rock star AND a failed screenwriter) to play the oucast insider the genre demands.
Unfortunately, he forgot to have a point worth making or anything resembling a solution to the problems he cites. So what we get are series of thematically linked essays concerned centrally with the artistic death of the American movie brought on by corporatization, the MPAA, the "200 vice presidents," Ronald Reagan and a host of other carboard boogeymen, held together with a handful of interviews with the fairly famous (Wes Craven), the nearly famous (Ulli Lommel) and the famous-only-to-the-self-appointed-cognoscenti demograpic (Julia Strain). The essays are, in general, interesting, if ultimately devoid of any real insight (what, the blockbuster syndrome hasn't been great for the prospects of art films? who'd have thunk it?). They're most entertaining when Grey sticks to innuendo and insult or to matter-of-fact portrayals of some of the more absurd effects of blocbuster bloat (Waterworld's budget, for instance). When he wanders into more 'serious' theoretical speculation, he reads like a high school student turned loose with publishing deal and no ability to critically analyze his own sources (he approvingly cites [at considerable length] a Peter Biskind essay from "Seeing Through Movies," without acknowledging that the piece in question is not only an antiquated exercise in academic Freudian maundering, but also includes the almost inconceivably retarded implication that George Lucas is in some sense responsible for the Reagan Presidency). Other times, Grey is undone by his own naked prejudice: he snidely attacks "Last Action Hero" on several occasions, but reserves voluminous praise for "Scream" - essentially the same film but with different subjects. The interviews, on the other hand, are simply terrible. In addition to mostly being made with peripheral figures of neither artistic nor commercial importance, they're filled with leading questions and Grey's own self-important ejaculations (not to mention his irritating habit of inserting his subjective reading of body language, voice tone etc. into the text of the interviews). Worse, many of his interview subjects share Grey's abominably self-congratulatory posture - at one point, Wes Craven compares "Scream" to Shakespeare without the slightest trace of irony (or any objection from fanboy Grey). Ulli Lomman is almost as bad. He seems to believe he is bringing the spirit of Fassbinder to the unwashed Americans (because, as we all know, "Bogeyman" is just a work of sheer, avant-garde brilliance). But what is most off-putting is the smarmy, masturbatory self-promoting glee with which Grey imbues the whole book. In the end, "Sex, Stupidity and Greed" isn't about exposing the failings of Hollywood or proposing a solution (which Grey implies lies with hipsterish, z-grade, ironically so-bad-it's-good horror schlock), it's about showing the world what an insightful, in touch, all-around awsome guy Ian Grey thinks himself to be.
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