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.
