The Gross: The Hits, the Flops...the Summer That Ate Hollywood

by Peter Bart

Book Overview

A backstage glimpse of the realities of the new Hollywood focuses on the film releases and strategies of the summer of 1998, showing why Godzilla was fated to fail and how Spielberg triumphed. This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0312198949
• ISBN13: 9780312198947
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: St. Martin's Press
• Length: 311 Pages
• Weight: 1.35 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

The best guide to the way movies get made today.

"The Gross" is the best, most comprehensive and most approachable overview of the current filmmaking world that I've ever seen. It deserves a place next to "Adventures in the Screen Trade" and the wonderful Aljean Harmetz "Casablanca" and "Wizard of Oz" books as essential reading for anybody who wants to know how films are actually put together. Bart shows how every 1998 film was the result of personality interplay, of business decisions (bad and good), of sheer luck. He brings out the drama inherent in every film's conception, production and eventual fate. The new trade paperback edition has an index, unaccountably missing from the hardcover original, and Bart has updated the book with a new chapter analyzing the summer of 1999. I wish that, as future editions come out, Bart would continue to add new chapters to keep it up to date.

Scary, but true!

Being a 20 year veteran of feature film post production, this book gave confirmation to all of our worst suspicions and paranoias about what goes on in the world of the "suits". It clearly illustrates how the business people's daily convulsions affect how we do our jobs and contribute to an atmosphere of total chaos. This should be required reading at film schools.

A book about Hollywood that reads like a thriller

Bart's THE GROSS is the best book about Hollywood I've read in ages. Focusing on the Summer of 1998 (remember that? GODZILLA, ARMAGEDDON, THE TRUMAN SHOW, THE X-FILES, THERE'S SOMETHING ABOUT MARY, THE AVENGERS, etc), Bart takes us behind the scenes in production meetings, with directors and studio heads, on sets, into special effects studios...everywhere the action is. He fills his saga with anecdores, often pithy biographical snapshots, interviews, and informed opinion (with which I often strongly disagreed). After an introduction to the studios and their suits, Bart takes us behind-the-scenes for glimpses at at the makers and the making of each major film. He then tracks---week by week---how they fare in the market horse-race. Bart writes well and structures his book so that it develops irresistable suspense. If you care about the movies, are interested in Hollywood, or just wonder, as you sit through one of these "blockbusters", what were they thinking?, then this is the book for you.

Peter Bart Separates Facts from Flacks

Peter Bart,ex-New York Times reporter,ex-executive of Paramount, now editor-in-chief of Variety,is the first journalist to tell why magazines have become insistinguisable from public relations . On page 196 of his book,"The Gross" he tells how PMK ,a PR agency,inserted a "lengthy profile " on Robert Redford in The New Yorker. Well , what a relief .Read "The Gross" for more proof that the American press is offten just a carrier of publicity material . Hurrah for Peter Bart.Now we know why the American press has become unreadable . Its all a press release, kiddies . Bart's book is a must . Just more "publicity material, " says Bart,

An Insightful Read On The High Stakes Summer Movie Season

Anyone who follows the motion picure industry from either the position of film buff to budding or established industry insider should read Peter Bart's "The Gross". Bart, a former executive at Lorimar, Paramount, and MGM, takes a look at the summer of 1998 slate of studio releases, covering films as diverse as "Armageddon", "The Truman Show", "Godzilla", and "There's Something About Mary", and the process leading up to their release, from script development at the studio level to the precise steps studio executives now follow such as determining whether a film will fail or succeed based on its opening night East Coast grosses and what kind of legs a film will have on both the domestic and worldwide fronts. As compulsively readable as Bart's "The Back Lot" column in Daily Variety, "The Gross" is trenchantly informative, as one might expect from a former studio executive reporting from an outside world perspective. Film buffs, infrequent filmgoers, and individuals about to enter the business side of the industry often find themselves wondering how three-hour love stories focusing on the afterlife and soulless adventure films ever see the light of day; "The Gross" will provide plenty of answers.