Double De Palma an Exclusive on the Set Profile of the Controversial Director

by Susan Dworkin

Hardcover in very good condition. Jacket is lightly shelfworn with tanned inner flaps. Faint tanning on the pastedowns and endpapers. Pages are clean; text and images are clear. CM

Genres: Film

224 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1984

About the author

Susan Dworkin is an unlimited author. She writes books for everyone.

ARE YOU A TRUE HISTORY BUFF? Susan co-wrote the New York Times Best Seller, THE NAZI OFFICER'S WIFE, with Edith Hahn Beer, the woman who lived this amazing story of love, terror and courage in Hitler's Germany.

ARE YOU A SCIENCE FICTION FAN? Susan's thrill-filled novel, THE COMMONS, is set 150 years in the future, When an ancient plague threatens to destroy the wheat crop, a revolutionary coalition of farmers, scientists and courageous young rock stars must save the world from starvation.

ARE YOU A MOVIE ADDICT? Consider MAKING TOOTSIE, the up-close investigation which Susan wrote when she was the only journalist allowed on the set of the classic gender-bending comedy featuring Dustin Hoffman.

AT MS. MAGAZINE, Dworkin was a contributing editor for more than ten years, interviewing such celebrities as Meryl Streep, Danny Glover, Carol Burnett, and Whoopi Goldberg. She is also a leading AUDIOBOOK PRODUCER, publishing terrific voice versions of authors like Isaac Bashevis Singer, Edna Ferber, Cynthia Ozick and I.L. Peretz.

ARE YOU LOOKING FOR A SPEAKER? Susan is a delightful and much sought-after lecturer who has cracked up audiences from the Library of Congress to the Crop Science Society. You can hear samples of her speeches -- and find out everything else about her -- by going to her website: www.SusanDworkin.com.

Reviews

[William Dury · Rating 3 out of 5]

Reviewer Drew rightly points out Author Dworkin’s ambivalence about De Palma. That ambivalence is almost the theme of the book. She does sympathetic, insightful interviews with Griffith, Deborah Shelton and Annette Haven. She does good reporting on the staggering amount of work and the skills needed in big time film production. Permits alone are a nightmare. Interesting book, but one keeps coming back to the author’s ambivalence about her subject. She seems to like him as a person and to respect his skills. She clearly has reservations about the violence against women in so many his films but only quotes other people’s objections, not, as I recall, any of her own. She does it such a way that one isn’t sure if she wants to avoid offending anyone in the film business, or she’s she’s afraid of offending feminist critics. While not becoming the story is good journalism, in this case it’s unnerving. Mainly interesting for the nuts and bolts of actually creating a film.

[Drew Raley · Rating 4 out of 5]

Dworkin does little to hide her ambivalence about the value of De Palma's work, which is as it should be: Body Double is centrally about trash as art. An essential document of a moment in time where a director took over an entire city (LA) to make a movie about how that city was the worst place on Earth. Not as well-known as Julie Salomon's The Devil's Candy, but just as revelatory.

[Brad · Rating 4 out of 5]

An interesting look behind the work of Brian DePalma when he was at his peak of commerciality.You'll see the flaws that would come back to haunt him later in his career.