Book review - "One Helluva Ride" by Michael Douglas (2026)

 Douglas had such an amazing life and career even the most basic recap would be interesting. This is not terribly well written but fascinating. There was a fair bit I didn't know - childhood, his hippe youth. I knew he shagged Kathleen Turner but not Diane Morgan and Jeanne Tripplehorn. He talks affectionately of Turner, Danny de Vito. He slags off Joe Eszterhaus for carrying on during Basic Instinct, likes Joel Schumacher, adored Karl Malden, got to like his dad but had proper fatherhood from his step dad, is still annoyed at his first wife, is affectionate about Brenda Vaccaro.

The Jane Fonda part in China Syndrome was offered to Richard Dreyfuss.  Walter Hill was 1st AD on Hail Hero. He once drunkenly insulted Julia Roberts. Debra Winger lost Romancing the Stone by biting him.

Douglas was very blessed in many respects - played leads in his first three films, got a part in a fat TV hit. He deserves immense credit for Cuckoo's Nest and China Syndrome and Romancing the Stone. He attributes Coma to improving his attitude in films (he stuffed a sequence through laziness and never did again) and encouraging him to cast Fonda in China Syndrome. 

He doesn't mention Ghost in the Darkness, Disclosure, Wonder Boys, Don't Say a Word, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, Made in America. Talks a lot about Danny de Vito, Behind the Candelabra, his son Cameron, Catherine Zeta Jones.

Book review - "Sitcom: a Memoir" by Chuck Lorre (2026)

 Highly entertaining. Short. Full of gossip. Charlie Sheen was good for seven years then went heywire. Brett Butler was mad from the get-go. Cybill Shepherd went mad after one season. Casey-Werner backed the stars. Ana Faris was... unspecified problems. Les Moonves comes out of the book bad but also good. Lorre's career was amazing. It's a type of TV that doesn't exist anymore. Entertaining. Wobbly written in a few places, his inexperience with prose shows. The scripts at the end was so tight and good - that's his real strength.

Book review - "The White Album" by Joan Didion

 She's an excellent writer. This is a collection of pieces over the years. Love the stuff on The Doors and also shopping malls.

Movie review - "Studio Affairs: My Life as a Film Director" by Vincent Sherman (1996)

 Highly entertaining book. Sherman was a good director with a second-tier career. This book explains why - he was constantly given "go" projects that weren't always the best and it seems he wasn't too crash hot on script but he was excellent with actors. He would be called in to help on troubled projects.

The book is enjoyably non-discrete - he had affairs with Rita Hayworth, Joan Crawford and Bette Davis.  He did one of Errol Flynn's best movies and I wish they'd worked together again. He was blacklisted. Admits he was a shit to his wife.

Book review - "The Mad Emperor" by Henry Sidebottom (2022)

 Exhaustive. Very well researched. A more linear approach may have been better. A bit academic-y in that it takes a historiagraphy approach a lot of the time instead of getting into character. A serious work though.

Book review - "Roll the Calls" by Ari Emmanuel

 Starts off brilliantly, written in a pulpy, brief stacatto style, and Emmanuel is full of energy. As it goes along it gets tiring. The feuds. The persistence. The varying moral stances. A person of great ability and tenacity and the book gives you a sense of that. But it began to drag. At least he has a sense of humour. 

Book ereview - "Montgomery Clift: A Biography” by Patricia Bosworth

 Excellent deep dive on Clift's life and careers. So many people on the record  - lovers, friends. Often harrowing reading. Everyone says Clift was smart, brilliant, funny. But also weak, addictive, whiny, annoying. Given great advantages that he threw away, kept blaming other people (his mother, Hollywood).

Book review - "Elizabeth and Monty: The Untold Story of Their Intimate Friendship" by Charles Cassilio

 Montgomery Clift comes out of this badly - bitchy, self pitying, smart, whining about his loss of beauty, a junkie, a pain. People loved him though. And even people he annoyed worked with him again. Liz Taylor comes out of this wonderfully. Brave, funny, loyal, smart.

Gossipy but done with scholarship. And you know something? The small size of Clift's manhood is not insignificant. 

Each film the two made together were iconic in their way - Place in the Sun, Raintree County, Suddenly Last Summer and (in planning) Reflections in a Golden Eye.  But sorry Clift was a bit of a loser.

Book review - "The Andromeda Strain" by Michael Crichton

 Admire it. Never been huge fan. Great opening - the town wiped out - and ending - ticking clock. In between it's a medical drama, trying to figure out what caused the illness. Tremendous sense of realism though. You can see why it was a sensation.

Book review - "Roddy McDowall" by Samuel Bernstein

 Bernstein does another very good biography of an underrated queer actor Roddy McDowall, on top of the one he did for Caesar Romero. The two actors had many things in common - foreigners who flourised in Hollywood, seem like genuinely nice people, hugely long careers, Batman villains. McDowall had more long term romances and possibly better luck with movies - every decade he managed to appear in a classic. How Green Was My Valley, Compulsion, Camelot, Cleopatra, Planet of the Apes, The Poseidon Adventure. It's incredible. 

Worthy book for a person who deserved it. 

Book review - "Cesar Romero: The Joker Is Wild" by Sam Bernstein

 Loving look at a man who sounds like a genuinely terrific person - underrated actor, handsome, polite, hard working. Never seems to have been linked to a romantic relationship, although something may have happened with Tyrone Power. Well researched, fun - half the book is the filmography!

Book review - "Disclosure" by Michael Crichton

 I appreciate all the research that went into creating the computer program and it's not Crichton's fault it was about CD Roms which became obsolete. But I hated all the characters. 

Also Meredith the baddy - I get she wanted to bring Sanders on side. But she's a psycho - to try to seduce him then assault him. Here she's seducing him for leverage but she also does it at other firms, is that right.

I'm not sure middle aged white men who've been divorced a bunch of times and are multi millionaires shouldn't write books about sexual harassment. 

The book does hold as a story, just a regular corporate melodrama. It's long - a lot of the interrogations, cross examinations and editing could have been trimmed. As per the editorial about how tough it is men can't pick up kids in the bath. 

Book review - "Death of a President" by William Manchester

 Got into this reading a Vanity Fair account of its writing. I'd actually never heard of it but it's renowned as a classic of reporting, made with Kennedy involvement only they backed off.

Exhaustive, feels accurate. Powerful. So believable. I began to get angry reading it at the conspiracy theorists. Maybe that was just trauma dealing. Of course it was. The truth too uncomfortable but we see it so clearly now. Hostile press. Mad city. Anti-commie rhetoric. Incel with a gun. Trained by marines. Wants to kill someone. Hates his wife. Looking for a place in a world. Wife leaves him for another woman (I totally didn't know this.)

Very thotough.

Book review - "Rumpole and the Angel of Death" (1994) by John Mortimer

 These stories weren't based on scripts.

• "Rumpole and the Model Prisoner". A different setting always works well - here Rumpole defends a prisoner accused of attacking a guard. Some lively satire of prison theatricals.
  
• "Rumpole and the Way Through the Woods"- Rumpole at the world of hunting foxes. Some comedy with a dog. I like it when Rumpole figures out the real killer and tells them.
  
• "Hilda's Story" - from Hilda's POV.
  
• "Rumpole and the Little Boy Lost"
• "Rumpole and the Rights of Man"
• "Rumpole and the Angel of Death"

Book review - "Airframe" by Michael Crichton (1996)

 Entirely decent mystery-thriller investigating an airplane accident - only a few people died which feels relatively tame so the stakes are raised by having the airline wanting to sell to China and a woman must investigate what's going on. Plenty of authentic seeming research into airlines - wings and stuff and what goes wrong. Crichton seems more alive in bagging the media who are doing a hit piece on it - they're doing their job, mate, but he's obsessed with the old days when the media supposedly reported what happened and didn't rush to judgement or something. Well, things weren't going to get better, Mike! And the plane company does have dodgy people in it.

The baddie is a female producer - who like the female hero has a fuck buddy. I guess this is Mike being progressive?

It moves at a fast pace, the corporate intrigue is clever, it's a solid yarn.

Book review - "The Great Train Robbery" by Michael Crichton (1975)

 Crichton having fun. Really loves slang from the era. Maybe too much. Still can't create characters - Pierce is just a part for a movie star, his girlfriend is paper thin, etc. But the detail is wonderful, the research entertaining, the twists clever - sourcing keys, dressing as a dad man to get on the train, etc.

Also while Crichton makes a point that sometimes people just want money it's very clear that a lot of the crime committed by people in this are driven by society. 

Book review - "Electronic Life" by Michael Crichton (1983)

 A non fiction book about computers - an A to Z on various aspects of computing. It shows its age at the time but Crichton writers cleanly, smartly with common sense; much of what he did ages well, and still applies. The last few chapters are programs for IBM and Apple; they're a little dull.

Movie review - "Micro" by Michael Crichton and Robert Preston (2011)

 Thrilling, exciting, a great read. I don't know who did what between Crichton and Preston. I'd rank this book higher than many later Crichton works. The villain is just Bad and maybe the toy aeroplanes are too much but it's such a page turner, a silly concept - shrinking people - leading to a series of fantastic set pieces. Tremendous action and a decent sized cast of characters so they are always getting knocked off - by ants, birds, wasps. Many memorable encounters. I would make a fantastic film although an expensive one. I like how the group of scientists included a coward and a whiny guy who became hero.

Really liked it. 

Book review - "A Murder in Hollywood" by John Lange (Michael Crichton) (warning spoilers) (2026)

 Written in 1973, published in 2026. I wonder why? Maybe Crichton was worried about lawsuits. Story seems inspired by The Man Who Loved Cat Dancing - a death during a film shoot in the West. Here it's a screenwriter. Crichton has digs at the macho star (Burt Reynolds?), the horny female star (Sara Miles?), an idiotic critic who pitches his story ideas (who was he?), a director who flew planes (surely George Roy Hill). Technical details about making a film. A Sherlock Holmes like super investigator. The unit publicist is Watson, which is cute.

Not a bad mystery - about a TV episode standard. Decent twists - they figure out who did it but then it turns out to be someone else.  A read it very quickly, had a good time.

Book review - "The Book of Sheen" by Charlie Sheen (2025)

 Starts off interestingly - the son of Martin Sheen, growing up in Malibu, hanging out with the Penns (Chris more than Sean), being on set in Philippines for Apocalypse Now, discovering paid sex on the streets of Santa Monica (!), a rapid rise to acting work - a part in Grizzly 2 (which meant he had to turn down the lead in Karate Kid), a strong experience on Red Dawn and Ferris Bueller then the casting in Platoon. After that the book wobbles with Sheen whining incessantly about his work on Wall Street then it goes into free fall with tales of drugs, and women, and rants. Sheen comes across as a completely unpleasant person - a narcissist like so many junkies who brags about all the drugs they took and interventions they've had and wagons they've fallen of, who dribbles away about his suffering.  He clearly lives in a world with too many jesters and has little respect for his craft of acting. He's constantly disparaging the films he appears in - ego trips, badly written, etc - though he has some nice words for the writers and co stars of Spin City and Two and a Half Men. He owns some of his mistakes but only some and basically just dribbles.

Despite the people he's worked with some character sketches come through - Johnny Depp trying to seduce him into smoking on Platoon, Oliver Stone's tension trying to make the movies, Chris Penn, his parents. But so many people are vaguely drawn incuding his own brother. The book also assumes the reader knows about many of the incidents - maybe that's true for a typical reader but some context wouldn't go astray. Also the spelling of "dood" and "fukken" gets wearying. Like Sheen and this book.