Joe Eszterhas's provides a blunt-edged tell-all about the movie business, the history of Hollywood, and how to write screenplays that make millions.
Critic Reviews
|
Favorable
|
Bookslut Brian M. Dunn
This is no guide to negotiating, but a rude, crude call to battle; an artless, guilty pleasure of a book. You might not want to go into your first script meeting club in hand, but after reading The Devil's Guide to Hollywood, at least you can't say Eszterhas didn't warn you.
|
|
Favorable
|
Los Angeles Times Steve Ryfle
While The Devil's Guide falls short as a battle plan for screenwriters, there's a bawdy humor that makes it highly readable, a humor that was lacking in "Hollywood Animal," the 2004 cathartic, acidic autobiography Eszterhas wrote while battling throat cancer.
|
|
Favorable
|
Booklist Kristine Huntley
Aspiring and practical would-be screenwriters looking for good advice will find this offering inspiring and hilarious. [15 Sept 2006, p.15]
|
|
Mixed
|
Publishers Weekly
A dishy, catty mix of reminiscences and Hollywood trivia in the guise of a handbook for wannabe screenwriters. [24 July 2006, p.52]
|
|
Mixed
|
Daily Telegraph Robert Colvile
A fair percentage of the stories here – drawn from gossip, memory and often other books – are worth the cover price on their own. Actual writing advice, however, is thin on the ground, displaced by the force of Eszterhas's personality and the various axes he is determined to grind.
|
|
Mixed
|
The Guardian Peter Bradshaw
His new book, a punchy, belligerent, sometimes banal but often hilarious collection of anecdotes and pointers, is an attempt to deride these parasites while at the same time muscling in on their territory with his own fantastically aggressive "advice"...It is the literary equivalent of priapism mixed with anger non-management.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
The Observer Robert McCrum
The best you can say about The Devil's Guide is that at least he did not write it to settle alimony commitments.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
The New York Times Book Review Joe Queenan
A lengthy series of axioms, anecdotes, exhortations, accolades, admonitions and insults, the book does not need to be read in the order in which it was written. Rather, much as in the case of the Old Testament, which it greatly resembles in its stylistic delicacy and unquavering jeremiadic tone, the reader can dip in anywhere.
|
|
Unfavorable
|
Wall Street Journal Jonathan V. Last
Mr. Eszterhas fashions himself as a mountebank who has shrewdly beaten Hollywood at its own game. That role, if played well, would have a certain rogue grandiosity. But on the page, at least, Mr. Eszterhas comes across as much more loutish, bullying and common.
|
|
Terrible
|
Daily Telegraph Catherine Shoard
After a few hours in the company of Eszterhas's book, 60 minutes crouched in a loo starts looking a lot less grubby...Where once there was a certain bluster and understandable ego about the man, now there is nothing but coarse jealousy and an awful, cocky incontinence.
|
|
Terrible
|
The Independent Christopher Fowler
What Joe has done here is produce a bullet-pointed Reader's Digest-style volume so desperate, egotistical and venal that I found myself willing him to implode before page 50.
|
|
