C&C 9: Show Biz Books on Action Heroes, Peak TV, Mamet

One I liked, two I didn’t

If this project has a mission statement—I’m not saying it does—it would be a simple one. I want to recommend things. So much of value gets lost in this inundation of “content.” I want to speak up on behalf of what I’ve enjoyed. Which means that what I write here will tend to be positive.

This entry will be different.

Of the three titles I cover, two won’t be published until later this year. I didn’t care for either of them. But they’re show business books, which are in my bailiwick. (Have I mentioned that I’m half of Renee Patrick?) I already reviewed them for NetGalley, which provided the advance copies, so I may as well expand on those thoughts here.

The Last Action Heroes: The Triumphs, Flops, and Feuds of Hollywood’s Kings of Carnage, by Nick de Semlyen (June 2023). Empire magazine editor de Semlyen weaves together the tales of eight of the 1980s’ biggest tough guys in a breezy chronicle that revisits the cable TV staples of my youth. (I still can’t fathom that Predator [1987] was offering a glimpse of not one but two future governors in action.) The strongest material concerns the quartet of Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme, and Dolph Lundgren; their stories frequently overlap, and the first two engaged in a rivalry that yielded cinematic collateral damage when Ahnuld deked Sly into making Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot (1992). Jackie Chan looms over them all as a source of inspiration. The Bruce Willis sections, sad to read in the wake of his recent health problems, underscore how unlikely an action hero the wisecracking actor made. Chuck Norris comes off as a lovely, self-effacing guy, while Steven Seagal comes off as Steven Seagal. Lest we forget, this is the man who broke Sean Connery’s wrist during their training sessions for Never Say Never Again (1983). De Semlyen debunks an oft-told, highly unflattering story about Seagal in such thorough fashion, highlighting every detail, that he ensures the sordid saga will live forever. I was happy to learn that Lundgren “claims that his chemical engineering expertise has given him the ability to make an excellent cocktail.” De Semlyen writes that “the action fantasies of the 1980s and ’90s now seem somewhat one-note … (but) there’s something eternally comforting, in a world increasingly dependent on technology and artificial intelligence, where it’s easy to sometimes feel small and insignificant, about cheering on characters who don’t need superpowers to make the earth a better place—just bravery, brawn, and a well-placed kick.”

Pandora’s Box: How Guts, Greed, and Lust Upended TV, by Peter Biskind (November 2023). Biskind brings the reductive, sweeping-but-shallow approach of his film books—Easy Riders, Raging Bulls (1998) on New Hollywood, Down and Dirty Pictures (2004) on the indie era—to bear on modern television. Covering multiple streaming services/networks and dozens of shows, many already the subjects of their own individual books, he sets too broad a brief. He responds to the editorial challenge by indulging in finger-wagging, turning Pandora’s Box into a tiresome catalog of bad behavior. You’d never know that HBO’s The Larry Sanders Show is a landmark, given Biskind’s emphasis on the personality quirks of the “talented but very fucked-up Garry Shandling.” (For an insightful look at the comedian’s complexities, watch the 2018 documentary The Zen Diaries of Garry Shandling by his protégé Judd Apatow.) Whatever your opinion of Sex and the City, there’s no denying the show’s cultural impact, so naturally Biskind limits his commentary to the sexual misconduct allegations against actor Chris Noth.

Imbalance reigns. Biskind dismisses True Detective, HBO’s first big hit after a few fallow seasons, in a matter of paragraphs—which can all be boiled down to “Nobody liked Nic Pizzolatto”—while lavishing pages on the forgotten Vinyl so he can rehash the clash of egos between Martin Scorsese and Mick Jagger. Think the recently rebooted Justified is one of peak TV’s overlooked gems? All you’ll get are stories of star Timothy Olyphant not being prepared for fame. Biskind repeatedly wonders what a definitive Amazon Prime show might look like while never mentioning The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, and for all the material about Netflix there’s precious little about the streamer’s Emmy factory The Crown or Stranger Things, which almost single-handedly saved the service.

Biskind seems more engaged by the swinging-dick buccaneering in the C-suites. Sure, it’s somewhat interesting to hear an executive describe a contemporary as holding “a firm view that we should hold a firm view” or say of AMC at its Mad Men height that “there were no Michael Corleones in this company, only Fredos.” But the corporate shenanigans are too cliquish and petty to care about. Still, I couldn’t get enough of Michael Fuchs, who built up HBO, harbored affection for the network’s soft-core Twilight Zone knockoff The Hitchhiker, and summed up the current state of affairs aptly:

If I hear one more time that shareholder value means more than anything else, I’ll go to Chicago and piss on Milton Friedman’s grave because that fucking sentence has destroyed American capitalism.

The line forms behind Fuchs.

Despite the odd good line or savvy comment—most of them from Steven Soderbergh, who for some time has been comparing streaming to cryptocurrency—Pandora’s Box reads like it was written by a surprisingly well-connected maiden aunt with an ax to grind. Biskind’s film books have not aged well. His TV tome arrives already starting to turn. Still, anyone interested in the medium will have to read it, because he manages to talk to damn near everybody.

Everywhere an Oink Oink: An Embittered, Dyspeptic, and Accurate Report of Forty Years in Hollywood, by David Mamet (December 2023). I remain a Mamet admirer. When the Film Noir Foundation bestowed its Modern Noir Master Award on the playwright, filmmaker, and curmudgeon in 2020, I assembled a tribute in Noir City magazine from several writers extolling how his work, while not always expressly noir, exemplifies the form’s sensibility, the action unfolding in a world where the game is rigged and everyone lies. Recently, when Rosemarie and I were playing the New York Times’ Spelling Bee—yes, we tackle the puzzle as a team, and no, I don’t want to hear your complaints—one of us jokingly suggested ‘Mamlet’ as an answer and we spent the rest of the evening tossing off lines from Mamet’s take on the Bard, like “To be or not to be/Is that the thing?” and “Get thee to a nunnery? Get thee to a nunnery! WILL thee GET to a NUNNERY?”

But I’ve never been partial to Mamet’s gnomic nonfiction, and his unconventional memoir is no exception. He’s not kidding about the embittered and dyspeptic parts. Don’t expect stories about breaking into the business or writing The Verdict (1982). Mamet would rather deliver a series of oblique lectures about Art and Commerce punctuated by ancient jokes; if you get the punchline, maybe you get the point.

When he deigns to talk about craft, it can be compelling—he explains the power of withholding specifics from the audience so that our focus is “not the sick thrill of another’s dirty laundry but relief at the Hero’s release,” a paring-down technique that Mamet has extended to basic exposition—and frustrating in equal measure. He suggests that Ed McBain botched the ending to his 1959 novel King’s Ransom and that Akira Kurosawa didn’t fix it when he adapted the book as High and Low (1963), then modestly offers the resolution rejected by the producers who hired him for a potential remake. I wasn’t sold on it. But I’ll give him the improved finale he wants to append to the 2004 Denzel Washington/Tony Scott movie Man on Fire.

There are flashes of wisdom—“Trivia is gossip without malice;” the observation that the abundance of light in contemporary films, particularly comedies, “is devoted not to the creation but to the recording of a story;” an instructive lesson on gift-giving—but all too often the book veers toward incomprehensibility. Mamet claims that he “got sidelined because of my politics (respect for the Constitution, etc.),” but even his cranky asides about “Diversity Commissars,” “attack-puritans,” and the general humorlessness of younger generations are difficult to parse. His cartoons, conversely, are obvious and only occasionally funny.