Customer Reviews

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again

5 star:		(17)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(9)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(10)

 

 

In her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Picture, Julia Phillips described herself as a "nice Jewish girl from Great Neck." Well, she got 2/3 of it right. But nice? No way.

This book is one of the greatest acts of literary self-immolation ever published. It's hard not to feel sorry for Phillips at first, suffering as she does from a toxic mother, a workaholic father, insomnia and a Talmudic intellect.

But you get over that feeling in a hurry, as Phillips bullies, maneuvers, sleeps and stomps her way to the top, winning an Oscar for The Sting at the unheard-of age of 29. Her motto: overcompensate; overachieve. If you can't be best, be first.

As she notes, no young person is ever ready for massive success, and her career crashed just as quickly. After being more or less fired from Close Encounters by Steven Speilberg, her life became a broken record of drug abuse, failed relationships, financial problems and closed doors gleefully slammed by those she used and abused on the way up. Through it all she makes it all seem like a big game, but the human wreckage strewn across the landscape will give the reader pause.

It's hard to know whether Phillips' broadsides at anyone and everyone with whom she had contact are simply through spite, or whether we'd all be better off if Hollywood simply disappeared in the next big quake. Phillips claims that she's just being honest, but snide remarks about a crewmember's physical deformity make her seem only nasty.

Hate it as she did, Phillips revelled in the politics, the backstabbing, the lies and shallowness, the feeling of power that came with the title of Producer. She learned fast ("Always negotiate the height and WIDTH of your [on-screen] credit," she advises, after her on-screen credit for The Sting is "willow thin.") Her films (Taxi Driver, The Sting, Close Encounters, among others) were good, though one gets the sense it was in spite of her take-no-prisioners approach.

One wishes at the end that Phillips would "get it," but instead she reaps what she sews. There was to be no Hollywood redemption for her. Phillips' death this january was untimely, but no human being could possibly survive for long carrying around so much bile. Very much worth the read, even only as a cautionary tale.

I recently picked up "You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again" at my local Store ...after all, I like a change from the fantasy of novel reading, to the fantasy of stars and their satelites. If it's cheap enough. I enjoy the irony of the tales of wealth and excesses of people who have (& abuse) so much, while we mere mortals are stressing over the next rent payment, thankful we aren't among the homeless and hungry.

I expected standard Hollywood dirt-dishing. I was unprepared for the vengeful & venomous whining from a woman who'd once set a new standard for women in 'the industry', yet never saw she'd helped create the viper's nest she later exposed in over 600 paqes of difficult to read complaining.

Yet I read it all. I thought the bitter and mean-spirited texture of the book, with it's raw self-revelation/loathing theme, would have some gentler conclusion, message, or lesson learned by the author. It didn't. As tough as Julia Phillips was, she never beat her addiction...to Hollywood.

Julia lost sight of the fact that though she was singular in a particular era of film making, she was not unique in the battle with the temptations of self-medication, or the quest for happiness we all make. This "but I'm so special as a woman" sexist vein is the glue that held this book together, and would have been acceptable to the reader if we could feel at the end that Julia ever really "got it". I found the book drew me into the nastiness, though it seemed obvious the fine details of every deal or friendship were written for insiders. Name- dropping as the weapon of choice.

We all love the movies; have our favorite actors and directors; we like to believe there really is some impossible magic, and that true artistry will win out and be noticed in a flood of wannabes. Julia tells us that's not the case. One must admire the uncompromising dog-fight honesty of her book, if not the mercenary sour grapes.

Last night, watching the 2002 Oscars, I learned that Julia had died. And I saw Robert Redford's moving speech, with his plea for freedom of expression. I hope that is possible; Julia's book makes me fear it's not. Is Sundance still as unsullied as at its original conception?

Julia would not have missed the irony of me finding her book in the [local] store, in barely read condition.

A girl brought up in New York in the 1940s and 1950s by liberal, educated parents comes of age during the dawn of youth culture and the rock and roll era. She matriculates from Mount Holyoke College, finds work in magazine publishing and soon makes a lateral move into the film industry. As half of a husband-and-wife production team, she co-produces "The Sting," "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" and later becomes a studio exec. Never secure in her unique male-dominated business/creative Hollywood environment, she divorces her co-producer, spends heavily, and spirals into drug addiction with a series of financially dependent live-in boyfriends.

There are a number of things to like here. Julia Phillips was bright, witty and articulate. We learn something about how business is done in Hollywood, how egos are flexed and about the junior high social games and power plays, such as deliberately showing up late for scheduled meetings: for all the mirror gazing done by people in the industry, there is little seeing of oneself, she explains. Glimpses of Redford, Coppola, DeNiro, Beatty, Madonna, Penn, Scorsese, Spielberg, Geffen and Erica Jong (and, bizarrely, an evening with G. Gordon Liddy and Timothy Leary) are compelling. When this book was published in 1991, this book was overhyped as an expose'. Nothing here rises to the level of shock (except that she hid her cocaine freebasing, and the substance abuse of her live-in boyfriends, from her ex-husband for years as she retained custody of their young daughter). Ms. Phillips bluntly criticizes some well-known, powerful people in her book, but never without an explanation, and without sparing herself.

While apparently a talented manager and hard worker, Ms. Phillips had the arrogance of a New Yorker and a directness that alienated some of her business associates. Her directness unfortunately does not translate to her narrative. The style overwhelms the story, to the point of obscuring what exactly is going on, and unclear prose keeps this biography safely out of the "can't put down" category. For example, she drops far too many first names of unknown casual friends and business associates, without ever developing or illustrating their importance to her story, if any, until she enlightens us later...sometimes. Certain passages ranging in length are set apart and told in a detached third person. Still other, shorter portions are formatted like a movie script. Much better writers can use these kinds of narrative shifts only with difficulty. At least this story is mostly chronological. The hardback edition (573 pages) should be at least 150 pages shorter. Ms. Phillips' story, a good story, is not particularly well-told.

Superior reading may be found in Robert Evans' "The Kid Stays in the Picture" and in Joe Eszterhas' "Hollywood Animal." (2.5 stars)

Poor Ms. Phillips. The voice of this memoir comes across as brutally honest - perhaps too honest. The book is too long. I found the author's meteoric rise to fame fascinating and it proves the belief that the road to fame and fortune is often quirky to say the least. How many magazine editors reach the top of the heap in Hollywood? - not many I would guess. She was a fast learner but she must have also possessed charm. I kept thinking, these people don't even go to lunch unless they're stoned. I must lead a sheltered life as I had no idea the drugs were that rampant. But they destroyed her in the end. Anyway, the lesson to be learned is that the movie business is not for the faint of heart. The fact that it's full of phoney, disloyal, back-stabbing people is nothing new so there is a banal feeling throughout the book. After all, they aren't inventing a cure for cancer - they are just grossly overpaid people who create stories to be watched on a screen so that the masses can escape their dreary lives. She does go on and on about her friendship with Steven Spielberg - she obviously idolized him. It's too bad she was an addict because it certainly derailed her career prematurely.

This is a funny, brutally frank autobiography of a Hollywood insider who made it quickly to the top (The Sting, Close Encounters of a Third Kind, Taxi Driver) and her slow agonizing trip down to has been. Julia Phillips tells a sometimes painfully comic tale about her Hollywood life, her neurotic friends (naming names), her sex life (naming names) her drinking and her drug addiction (free-basing cocaine long before Richard Pryor). Her writing style is similar to Hunter Thompson, manic and self-centered but then like Hunter Thompson, her life has been very interesting so maybe the similarities make sense.

You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again meets all the advertising promises...powerbrokers, scandal, drugs, sex, great films, bad films, and the names of the folks involved...all in Hollywood over the past thirty years. But the book is also far, far more. In fact, You'll Never Eat Lunch... knocked me out. First, it's beautifully written. How refreshing to read something by an author who loves words, makes them fly and sing, do pirouettes, and then lulls you with the beauty of their precision. It's also the rich, complex story of a woman who figures out who she is. Slowly, in page after page of fascinating events, she reveals herself to herself in an intimate portrait of pain and growth, hilarity and insight. Julia Phillips has done one hell of a job. But then, she's a helluva broad. And I thank her for sharing.

How does one evaluate something like this, which is rather unprecedented?

A blurbed review cited on the cover refers to this as "the Hollywood Chainsaw Massacre," and the description fits. Julia Phillips - R.I.P. - is clearly not a writer, and the clunky prose does drag in places, but I didn't go into this looking for Proust. The dirt she dishes is truly spectacular - moreso for her chutzpah in revealing it all than for any of the actual content.

Her description of her drug decline is grueling and lurid, but I suppose the reality was considerably worse, so her communication on this front is vivid and effective. Her descriptions of the behind-the-scenes politics of Hollywood could scare half of today's film students into rethinking their career aspirations. And it's worth it all for the inside details into the making of 'Taxi Driver' and 'Close Encounters.'

-David Alston

Do you want to know what really goes on behind the scenes? Behind the doors of oversized mansions that house beautiful antiques, Van Gogh masterpieces, and people who want you to love them, but not know them? If you don't mind having your idol's foibles laid bare for the whole world to see. Read this book. Simply put, read this book.

I bought this book hoping to find some juicy tales of Hollywood high-ups running amok, but the price is far too extravagant: wading through pages, if not chapters, of self-absorbed twaddle by this thoroughly uninteresting woman. Only the people mentioned in this book will have the self-interest to read all the way through. If you want to read much more entertaining accounts of Hollywood improprieties, I recommend "Hit and Run" or "Easy Riders & Raging Bulls" or even the very poorly edited (but enjoyable) "High Concept".

I first saw Julia Phillips on a Phil Donahue episode, sometime back in the early '90s. If I recall correctly, she was there to promote this book at the time. Julia's on air presence was so intriguing, I wanted to buy the book. It was some thirty years later, I actually did so, but the wait didn't disappoint. This book reveals more than just some hollywood gal arm candy making statements about who's who in Bollywood. Julia Phillips stood out because she was a woman,who, in spite of her oftentimes self destructive habits...she was a woman who had a brain and wasn't afraid to use it. This book also reveals a woman who was trying hard to learn from her own mistakes...a woman who also wanted to help others along the way. Julia Phillips could be cold as ice, tough as nails, but could crumble at a moment's notice as well. Her wit rivaled the old seasoned comics like Groucho Marx or Lenny Bruce. This book is also worth reading because of Julia's sensitivity to social issues of equality. This is not a book to skim through and you'll find yourself pulling it out time and time again, recalling a name and situation here and there. Oh, and about the namedropping in this book...try to keep up, lol.