Sex Stupidity and Greed: Inside the American Movie Industry

Rating:
Summary: A non-book
Review: I'm flabbergasted to learn that some readers actually enjoyed this pointless bit of piffle. Truly, there's no accounting for tastes. Here's the deal: this Ian Grey guy was briefly, peripherally involved in screenwriting. He's been in the same room with a few third-tier celebrities. He doesn't like think very highly of the movie business. Oddly, Grey seems to believe that this all adds up to some sort of sensational now-it-can-be-told muckraking extravaganza. It's a bit like a meter maid writing a tell-all account of the inner workings of the justice system. How these aimless drivelings ever found a publisher is a complete mystery. If you feel like rolling around in some real insider sleaze, read Charles Fleming's "High Concept".

Rating:
Summary: funny and very, very smart
Review: Ian Grey answers the question everybody asks themselves as they exit the multiplex: why do movies suck ? He also has ideas about what to do about it. And if you don't feel like doing anything... he'll make you laugh instead of grinding your teeth. Some of these interviews and essays are fabulous (Wes Craven, the life-affirming qualities of gore, yes... the Oscar night, Sean Young, Ulli Lommel...). Others are "merely" great, and the whole book is enlightening and immensely entertaining. It should be a must read for moviemakers, for moviegoers, and for all those who have stopped going because, well, indeed, movies suck.

Rating:
Summary: Reads like a high school term paper
Review: Ian Grey is an angry man, and being angry has traditionally provided fodder for many fine writings. Grey is a disatrous exception. His writing style is that of a detached yet mock-interested outsider displying equal touches of naiveté and arrogance. Naiveté and arrogance works remarkably well in the wirtings of, say, Carl Hiassen, but Grey's ramblings read more like that of a pretentious high-school student.

The similarities with high school do not end there. Like most high schhol term papers, Grey strives for too much and ends up with too little. The chapters show little, if any, cohesion and one must wonder who had bribed the proof-readers prior to their assignment on this book. When Grey does explore some interesting themes he is either a)uninformed (i.e. too lazy to do the research needed), b)too anxious to get on with the next boundary-breaking "insight" or c)both, as is most often the case.

The real horror-story (or comic relief depending on your frame of mind) of Grey's work is his "field-work", i.e. 7 hastily conducted interviews with less-interesting people where one in every four questions concern the "fascinating" breast-implant phenomenon of Hollywood. In between these 7 interviews, presented for some daft reason in original transcript form as if to say 'Look, I Really did do these interviews', Grey tacks on various stories of encounters with friends of stars or has-beens in and around Hollywood that one does best in avoiding.

Like a high-school student, Grey will mature in time, get a better perspective of things, develop his writing skills, find more interesting stories to write about and get some psychotherapy for all that 'anger'. Unless, of course, having this rubbish published gives him a big ego, in which case we'll have to brace ourselves for more incoherent ramblings from this 16-year old stuck in a grown man's body.

Rating:
Summary: Full of Sound and Fury, telling Nothing
Review: Ian Grey starts off "Sex, Stupidity and Greed" with a bang and quickly fades to a whimper. Instead of giving us the inside scoop on Hollywood, how it works, how it thinks, who's who in the zoo, he takes every opportunity to take a potshot at the Reagan-Bush years, parroting the liberal screed we've all heard ad nauseam,(and believed to be true until the advent of the nineties when suddenly the "greed" of the eighties became the "wonderful economy" of Bill Clinton).

Pa-leeze. When we buy books about Hollywood, we want to read about Hollywood. If we want to hear what a rotten job Ronald Reagan did twenty years ago, we'll buy political books.

Rating:
Summary: No Holds Barred
Review: In this book, Ian Grey explains how tripe blockbusters like "Waterworld" get made, and why there hasn't been a breath of fresh air in the entertainment industry in years.

Ian knows many insiders and people whose ideas have been rebuffed by some 25-year-old suit who has no idea what originality is. He also advances theories on vanity projects and stars-turned-director/producer and why this is a bad thing. He pulls no punches in giving us the insider's view on today's rash of bad movies and movies with the same tired plots.

Especially intriguing and interesting is Ian's interviews with the Hollywood B-movie set and several well-known horror movie wunderkinds.

Ian writes very sharply, sarcastically, and with huge amounts of sardonic wit. He's not angry - he's aghast!

Incidentally, Ian is also a terrific fiction writer. He has a horror story in "Embraces: Dark Erotica", an anthology edited by Paula Guran. Check it out!

Rating:
Summary: Required reading
Review: Should be mandatory for film students and anyone else who wants an inside look at the Hollywood meat grinder.

Rating:
Summary: Made to cause open eyes and grimaces before laughs
Review: This book really makes you sigh, in the end. It has been said for years that cinema is where art and commerce meet...and in the eighties art went home. Ian Grey basically explains how the little piggy that went home that is art--people with something to say--in American cinema, was told to go, and why it still is staying there.

The anecdotes can be funny; the social commentary is often fascinating. The double standards and schizophrenic ideals concerning the standard for portraying violence in film is such a powerful social statement on our society that it is worth the price of admission by itself (irony thy name is horror movie ratings system: the message behind the standards do more harm to society than the films that fall beneath it). The only problem is what is easily detectable in Ian Grey's outlook or personality. Ian sounds a lot like the famous preachers obsessively pointificating on the wages of sin in front of the bordellos: you know, the ones who are on a first name basis with the madams and the most expensive of the employees! In other words, there are few times in the book that you don't get the impression that he is one gig or sold superficial action movie screenplay away from refuting virtually all of what he wrote here and living it up with the very people he is trashing. There is a thin line between simple insiders and true heretics; Ian seemingly wrote a book that, instead of having him hung in effigy by the elite and run out of town, will seemingly merely have him be heretofore excluded from only all of the very Hollywood parties he no longer wants to go to. Which means, well, the obvious: the real elite of elites in Hollywood are having as much fun with his book as he is.

Just the same, whether the leit motif of sour grapes is or is not running through this symphonic critique of the devolution of the art form of American movies over the past two decades, you learn a lot about how the business is run--or how this Frankenstein runs itself. When I think of how difficult it must be to get a screenplay or acting career established in Hollywood, his book simultaneously deflates a lot of secret hopes, and reinspires a belief in the redemptive power of artistic integrity over fame. And then it makes you laugh with a new sense of hope; after all, if some of these characters in the business could actually become famous and successful, anyone could!