You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (Paperback)

by Julia Phillips (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description
The first woman producer to win a Best Picture Academy Award describes her rise in the motion picture industry and reveals behind-the-scenes gossip about some of Hollywood's hottest stars. Reprint. NYT.

Product Details

• Paperback: 656 pages
• Publisher: Signet; Other Printing edition (March 3, 1992)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0451170725
• ISBN-13: 978-0451170729
• Product Dimensions: 6.7 x 3.9 x 1.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.4 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (40 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #307,972 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

20 of 22 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A savage, bitter, ultimately tragic self-portrait., June 2, 2002

By	M. Chapman "superedit" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

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.

11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Lunch in the Fast Lane, March 25, 2002

By A Customer

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.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Over the Top, December 18, 2006

By	Susan Bock (Ontario) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again (Paperback)

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.