Customer Reviews

On Spec: A Novel of Young Hollywood

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(6)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Extremely well-written, engaging and inescapably funny, the final resolution ties together a plot that is fufilling and rewarding. Even for someone who lives in the Beltway and could care less for the intricate details of mass-produced culture, this book was a great introduction to just how non-meritorious the entertainment biz seems to be.

this is hollywood high-concept at its most obscene. less a novel than a pasting together of journal entries by stock characters who include a screenwriter, agent, producer, studio head, actress, and "d-girl," on spec soars on the wings of the author's gift of mimicry and dialogue. it was pitch perfect, in my estimation; he got the psychotic and neurotic, the egotistical and shameless comings and goings of players within the movie business realm in ways that should make any screenwriter cringe in envy. the passages are hilarious and brilliant, and quite credible. what doesn't work in the end is the plot; to state his satirical case, the author keeps upping the ante until mild satire becomes outright slapstick. but perhaps he needed to make a point that is all too obvious--how else to explain an industry that will spend a hundred million dollars for a remake of "the flintstones" or "the adventures of rocky and bullwinkle." any industry that takes itself so seriously and yet continues to deceive itself by foisting onto the public works of utter garbage, almost defies being satirized. this book though belongs on the same shelf as the player, the day of the locusts, and the pat hobby stories by fitzgerald.

ON SPEC is a novel very much of its time and place. It had the misfortune of being released at a time when the US reading public wasn't in the mood for acidly funny satires of Hollywood development hell, not that most people care about that kind of thing anyhow, despite the recent book OPEN SEASON which purports to theorize that Joe Average knows about big box office. But Rushfield is a warm, compassionate writer with a knack for creating humorous characters, a kind of Max Shulman of the 1990s, and his book should have done better. Hell, even KENNEL BREAK wound up sounding like a good feature film. Its writer, Stu Bluminvitz, gets treated terribly by everyone around him (except his Mom and Dad) and yet, like Candide, he just doesn't seem to notice.

It's a book which makes you wonder--why write at all? ON SPEC was advertised as being like Bridget Jones' Diary, but the truth is, it is more like a Terry Southern novel than anything written in the past thirty years. Some have evinced the novels of Bruce Wagner, but Wagner is playing in a different ballpark altogether. It is to Rushfield we turn to when we want to find how things were done under the desks of Hollywood bigwigs in the decadent days before 9/11.

A very witty, totally cliche oriented tale of Hollywood. It's impossible to not see the humor in his over-the-top story of various Hollywood players. From the almost Producer, to the Uber (in love with himself) agent to the hopeful actress who will do anything to be a star, this movie has it all. It's written in diary form by all the characters and relates the same events from various participants. At first it's difficult to follow but eventually the storytelling is very funny as you learn more of the characters.

Of course the most sympathetic character is the poor mistreated writer since a writer wrote the book. But this character is so pathetic; he almost deserves everything coming to him.

One more tale of a supposed good story that Hollywood jerks around till it looks totally different. At least that we know to be true in real Hollywood. I actually would rate this 3 1/2 stars if I could.

This "diary entry" novel is a quick read that provides many laughs. As a person thinking about getting into the screenwriting business, I think this book offered me a little reality as to what to expect if I go through with it. Writers are the peons of the Hollywood scene, this book shows that in a very funny light.

On Spec is a great look "inside Hollywood" and is sort of an interesting companion piece to Entertainment Weekly's current special issue on "making it" in the movie biz. Rushfield has an excellent sense of humor and a great ear for dialogue or, in this case, monologue, since each chapter is a first-person diary or dictaphone entry. My only problem was that while some of the characters' voices were clearly differentiated, others sounded so alike had to turn back to the beginning of the chapter to remind myself who was speaking. No doubt people ape each other's lingo, expecially in such conformist cultures as LA, but there must be a literary way of making this point while still differentiating the characters. My favorite characters were the hapless screenwriter and the scheming starlet.

Richard Rushfield tells On Spec in diary form from the points of view of five different people in the film industry of Hollywood, CA during the big blockbuster boom era of the 90's. The book is all about the shallow, materialistic, cutthroat and money/power-hungry world of cinema.

This book flew under the radar as it was released sometime around the 9-11-01 attacks, which stopped the world and so on, thus making a book like this come off as rather poor taste. It was not promoted much and quickly forgotten.

Which is a shame, because it's an entertaining gut-check on what Hollywood is really like. Though it's written as a farce, Rushfield is a former screenwriter and film assistant, and one has to conclude that there's a great degree of truth to his borderline-caricature characters. One can even speculate that the mystery assistant's experience with Todd Hirtley is based on personal experience.

The easy narrative makes this book a quick read. The book doesn't start slow, but it can be a bit disarming as you get to know the main characters. You may even need to go back and re-read the beginning chapters once you know who's who. The running gag in this book is that you see a scene from one character's POV, and of course the character speaks highly of him/herself, but then you cut to another character who starts by retelling the same scene, while speaking very badly of that previous narrator. That itself gives this book great entertainment value.

As the pitch and rewrite process continues in its train wreck way, the plot appears to spin its wheels in place, but things pick up and derail completely once production begins. The ending is open ended and epiloguish. The end result of the movie, like many of the book's moments, is laughingly predictable.

The characters are stock-typical, and it almost is what's best about this book, as their typicality leads to funny moments.

I strongly recommend you find a copy of On Spec and give it a quick read. You won't get James Joyce, but if you put your pretentions aside for a few hours, it may get you to laugh at our often laughable mainstream film industry.

One problem with all these satires on the Hollywood scene is that the world described is so unfamiliar that we don't know what is being satirized and when the description is realistic. It's like Stella Fitzgibbon's "Cold Comfort Farm" or Lewis Caroll's verse parodies where we find the pastiche funny but don't know the originals. It's the story of the making of a movie flop told in the first person by the various characters (agent, actress, producer, writer, d-girl) involved. It is written in Californian with many obscure dialect words. Part of the merriment of the jest lies in the author's use of this patois. It includes an admixture of Spanglish and dropping the first syllables of words. I often suspected he introduced his own neologisms for comic effect. Above all it's very entertaining and very very funny.

Strongly recommended. "On Spec" is the real deal--an extremely funny and deft rendering of Hollywood ambition and absurdity. A modern-day "What Makes Sammy Run?"--but even sharper, more fun, funnier. Each voice--starlet, screenwriter, agent, producer--is dead-on, scathing. A must-read primer for anyone who has ever thought they'd like to make it in show-biz...it'll make you sweat with recognition. I'm ready for the next one--write on, Richard Rushfield. Simply a great read. Enjoy!

Read this book in tandem with Joe Eszterhas' Hollywod Animal, and you'll see that Rushfield is write-on. Toss in Hollywood Interrupted and you have the Unholy Trinity of Truth about this city--even though one --Rushfield's -- purports to be fiction. well maybe in parts, but like Dominick Dunne, this guy knows how to hide the truth in fictional frosting so he won't get his ass kicked, or worse yet have to start asking if you'd like that double latte decafe'd...

His stuff in Vanity Fair is funny too...