Fervent fans of their subject, Louis R. Pisano and Michael A. Smith have joined forces to tell the story of Jaws 2: The Making of the Hollywood Sequel, published in both hardcover and paperback by BearManor Media. To be brutally honest, the tale was told much better in another BearManor release, 2009’s Just When You Thought It Was Safe: A Jaws Companion, in which author Patrick Jankiewicz covers Universal’s entire shark-flick franchise.

To Pisano and Smith’s collective credit, they have interviewed damn near everyone still alive who was involved with the inferior (yet still beloved and highly profitable) sequel. Their passion for the finished product shows. They have uncovered a wealth of storyboards and photos from the set to satisfy the most ardent of Jaws 2 admirers. They even wrangled Carl Gottlieb, co-screenwriter of the first three films, to provide the foreword.

If only their work had gone through a judicious edit, as the book is filled with inconsistencies, repeated information and unprofessional passages.

The sloppiness is subtle at first, as a mention of Steven Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind morphs into 3rd Kind just three paragraphs later. Little things like that start popping up with greater frequency, like spawn of the Surinam toad. If it’s not awkward phrasing (“of the filming of the original film”), it may be a run-on sentence that could have been saved with a single comma: “Prior to heading to Martha’s Vineyard to shoot the cast spent countless hours every day learning to sail under the watchful eyes of Ellen Demmy.”

Instances of the authors’ “narration” (I don’t know what else to call it) struck me as especially bizarre, as they stop to address the reader in a manner that half-assumes said reader doesn’t understand how a book works, such as the concept of progressing from one chapter to the next. For example: “You will learn much more about the Florida shoot, throughout the stories of the cast and crew, later on in the book. To mention certain things here would only spoil your upcoming reading. No one likes to know what happens before they read a book or watch a movie. Read on and we promise, you won’t be disappointed.”

And yet, I was, greatly. The major behind-the-scenes events of Jaws 2’s troubled production were covered really well in Jankiewicz’s earlier text, particularly the story ideas that never came to be, the dismissal of original director John Hancock (Let’s Scare Jessica to Death), Roy Scheider’s disgust for reprising his starring role of Chief Brody, and Scheider’s fisticuffs with replacement director Jeannot Szwarc (1984’s Supergirl).

Even if I had not read the Jankiewicz book, however, I still would have to take issue with the way such stories are presented by Pisano and Smith, which is to say “twice.” So many anecdotes are repeated in full. Take, for instance, their recounting of producers Dick Zanuck and David Brown recruiting Howard Sackler for screenplay duties. First, from page 2 (with their errors intact):

“Not dissuaded, the producers contacted Howard Sackler. Sackler, a playwright whose works include The Great White Hope, winner of both the Pulitzer Prize and the Tony Award for Best Play. A friend of Browns’, as a favor Sackler had done a re-write on Benchley’s original script for Jaws and was familiar with the material. It was Sackler who suggested that the character of Quint’s hatred toward sharks stemmed from his being a survivor of the attack on, and sinking of, the U.S.S. Indianapolis towards the end of World War II. The scene where Quint recalls the event, later re-written, in part, by Gottlieb and actor Robert Shaw, remains one of the most memorable in film history. Keen on the idea, Sackler met with Zanuck and Brown and suggested, not a sequel but a prequel. What if the film detailed the mission of the U.S.S. Indianapolis …”

Now, four chapters later, from page 53:

“Before 1975, if you knew the name Howard Sackler it was because he was the author behind the 1969 Broadway play The Great White Hope, which won Sackler the Tony and New York Drama Critics Circle award as the year’s Best Play as well as the Pulitzer Prize for Drama. A friend of film producer David Brown, Sackler accepted the offer to do a re-write on Jaws author Peter Benchley’s script for the film version of his novel. Sackler’s main contribution to the story was the back story that the shark fisherman, Quint, derived his hatred for sharks from having survived the sinking of the U.S.S. Indianapolis in July of 1945. … When Brown and his producing partner, Richard Zanuck, approached Sackler about writing Jaws 2, Sackler’s first idea was to write about the Indianapolis incident.”

Similar duplication occurs with stories of other Jaws 2 contributors: Gottlieb on pages 3 and 55; Lorraine Gary and Murray Hamilton, pages 4 and 9; Jeffrey Kramer, pages 4 and 11. I stopped keeping track, but their regurgitation is inexcusable.

The authors’ coup, as it were, is in interviewing so many of the “Amity Kids,” from both the Hancock and Szwarc regimes about their recollections. Much overlap exists here, too, yet that’s somewhat expected since they’re all talking about the same topic. Still, their answers appear to have printed verbatim, and could have been trimmed for better flow. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.

Just a Hair shy of 800 pages, We Can Be Who We Are: Movie Musicals from the 1970s is a brick. Available in hardback and paperback, the BearManor Media release by Lee Gambin is nothing if not a giant love letter to the cinema’s arguably most experimental decade of that once-sacrosanct genre. Going year by year, Gambin dives deep into each and (one assumes) every film that either is a full-fledged musical or dependent upon music; from those rated G to those rated X, he examines them with one eye toward history, one eye toward criticism and both ears toward their tunes. All the obvious titles are here, but what makes the book special is the inclusion of the lesser-knowns and obscurities, such as Son of Dracula (with Harry Nilsson and Ringo Starr), The First Nudie Musical, White Pop Jesus and assorted nuggets from the world of prime-time TV (e.g. The Paul Lynde Halloween Special). With the occasional doozy à la “Racquel Welch,” spelling is the author’s second greatest enemy, bested only by a tendency to let his interviews read as transcripts in need of a good trimming. Then again, when someone pours as much passion onto the pages as Gambin has here, I can understand his desire to impart as much here’s-what-happened knowledge as the spine glue allows.

As bright and colorful as its cartoon-concessions cover, Movie Night Trivia would work as a gift to a film-loving friend, but why not you, too? Across half a dozen categories, Robb Pearlman (with true-or-false assistance from Shane Carley) has written 400 questions to test your knowledge of yesteryear’s classics, today’s blockbusters and a bunch in between. These “brain-benders” range from easy (“Name Chuck Noland’s quiet, yet faithful, friend from 2000’s Cast Away”; it’s even multiple-choice) to hard (“Name the two races that join together when The Dark Crystal is restored”) to arguably misleading/not entirely factual (“Hitting theaters between 1998’s Star Trek: Insurrection and Star Trek: Nemesis [2002], _____ is often called the best Star Trek movie ever made” — the answer is Galaxy Quest; “never made” would be playing fair). Skill level be damned, the Cider Mill Press paperback is a visual treat, with many items getting their own well-designed, full-bleed page featuring photography from the flick in question. It’d make a killer app.

Clearly, Bruce Scivally has done his homework for Dracula FAQ: All That’s Left to Know About the Count from Transylvania. While the trade paperback touches upon the vampire’s literary roots and subsequent stage adaptations, it’s the prince of darkness’ numerous incarnations in the movies — reverent and irreverent, Universal and Hammer — that form the book’s focus. The most satisfying aspect of this is how these sections read like miniature making-of articles on the films, whether John Badham’s Dracula, Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula or the comedy Love at First Bite. Television runs a distant second focus, with looks at various comic books, Drac-influenced music and merchandise bringing up the rear, all illustrated with a wealth of photos and poster art. Being of the opinion that vampires don’t sparkle, I could do without the entire chapter devoted to The Twilight Saga; still, in the end, Dracula FAQ proves one of the very best entries from Backbeat Books’ ongoing FAQ line of pop-culture crash courses. Other recent titles tackle The Twilight Zone and TV finales; coming up are Rocky Horror and M*A*S*H.

Horror Films by Subgenre: A Viewer’s Guide is a rather drab title that doesn’t exactly get the saliva flowin’. Hiding behind it, however, is a fun work of reference presented uniquely. Spouses Chris Vander Kaay and Kathleen Fernandez-Vander Kaay have chopped and divided the world of fright flicks into 75 distinct categories of That Which Scares You, whether animal attacks, environmental disasters, invisible beings, serial killers, old folks, puppets, carnivals, tools, twins — you get the idea. And if you don’t, well, therein lay the book’s purpose: introducing the reader to a very specific type of terror. Each chapter begins with a brief essay about that subgenre, followed by the meat: reviews of three or four movies that Team Vander Kaay believes are among the best representations of that subject vs. the best quality. Part of the fun of reaching each is predicting which movies they might cover; while you’re apt to guess at least one correctly, they throw in their fair share of left-field choices, too. While you could flip only to those subgenres that interest you, the McFarland & Company trade paperback is also perfectly readable as a front-to-back experience. If horror isn’t your thing, perhaps one of McFarland’s several other serious-minded film texts of the season may be: Tim Burton: Essays on the Films, A Galaxy Here and Now: Historical and Cultural Readings of Star Wars and Wizards vs. Muggles: Essays on Identity and the Harry Potter Universe, to name just three. —Rod Lott

Get them at Amazon.

Like its subject, Sharon Tate: A Life debuts with much promise before things go south. In Tate’s case, it wasn’t her fault; in counterculture icon Ed Sanders’ book, the fault is all his.

Since the Valley of the Dolls star died so young — at age 26, slaughtered in the murder spree of Charles Manson’s “Family” in the summer of ’69 — her life story prior to marrying enfant terrible director Roman Polanski (Rosemary’s Baby) is hardly household knowledge. It’s a largely charmed existence from loving military family to accidental model-cum-actress — a woman who, despite incredible beauty, was less interested in the world of glitz and glamour in which she found herself than settling down and raising a family.

Sharing that anti-Hollywood story is why Sanders’ biography starts strong, even considering his penchant for the hyperbolic; many a sentence begins carrying the weight of overimportance, e.g. “The Fates had their say …” Clearly, his writing voice is a unique one, given to spontaneity and whimsy, such as his freewheeling description of Polanksi, “obviously propelling himself Up Up Up. … He could Get It Done! He was a picture-per-year triumph.” It begins to work against Sanders, though, especially with his habit of sporadically repeating one particular thought/sentence throughout the text:
• “The past is like quicksand,”
• “The past — often like quicksand,”
• “The past can be like quicksand,”
• “Quicksand of the past”
• and, in eventual shorthand, “Quicksand.”

We get it.

Larger cracks in the narrative appear earlier, in the form of needless tangents. For instance, it’s one thing to discuss Tate’s audition for the classic movie musical The Sound of Music, as that was something I did not know. But since she didn’t get it, what point is there is then diving into a couple paragraphs of plot synopsis, complete with mentions of the performers who were cast, not just in Tate’s role but all the other major parts?

Even a film in which Tate did star in, Polanski’s 1967 horror comedy, The Fearless Vampire Killers, why devote several pages going through its plot, scene by scene, beat by beat? It’s almost as if Sanders wants us to know that he actually did his research — something readers automatically assume of nonfiction. He tells us anyway: “In the course of writing this book, I watched a DVD of Fearless Vampire Killers …” I should hope so!

And then there’s the curious case of 1969’s The Thirteen Chairs (aka 12+1), a forgotten Italian farce in which Tate starred opposite Vittorio Gassman. Sanders again gives us a full synopsis, but what sticks out this time around is … well, just read this two-paragraph excerpt first …

Sharon and Gassman track the chairs to Paris and then to Rome. They run into an assortment of unusual characters, among them a driver of a furniture moving van named Albert (Terry-Thomas), a prostitute named Judy (Mylène Demongeot), the head of a roaming theater company that stages a strange version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (Orson Welles), the Italian entrepreneur Carlo Di Seta (Vittorio De Sica), and his curvy daughter Stefanella (Ottavia Piccolo.) [sic]

The chase for the jewels concludes in Rome, where the chair containing the treasure finds its way into a truck, and is collected by nuns who auction it off for charity. With nothing much left to do as a result of the failure of his quest, Mario travels back to New York City by ship, as Pat/Sharon sees him off and waves goodbye to him.

… and now compare what you just read to the summary on the film’s Wikipedia page:

… the two then set out on a bizarre quest to track down the chairs that takes them from London to Paris and to Rome. Along the way, they meet a bunch of equally bizarre characters, including the driver of a furniture moving van named Albert (Terry-Thomas); a prostitute named Judy (Mylène Demongeot); Maurice (Orson Welles), the leader of a traveling theater company that stages a poor version of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; the Italian entrepreneur Carlo Di Seta (Vittorio De Sica); and his vivacious daughter Stefanella (Ottavia Piccolo).

The bizarre chase ends in Rome, where the chair containing the money finds its way into a truck and is collected by nuns who auction it off to charity. With nothing much left to do as a result of the failure of his quest, Mario travels back to New York City by ship as Pat sees him off and waves goodbye to him.

Hmmm.

These off-course flights happen regularly, putting Sharon’s life story on hold to a point that the reader wonders if Sanders forgot about whom he was writing. Most egregious is the procedural account of Robert F. Kennedy’s assassination, tying Tate to a conspiracy theory — one of several (another being an underground sex-film ring) that Sanders never quite knots.

With its last third, Sharon Tate: A Life ceases being even moderately compelling, giving itself over to rehashing the misdeeds of the Manson Family — not just the grisly slayings of That August Night, but in general; all of that, of course, is material well-trod before, from Vincent Bugliosi’s seminal Helter Skelter to Sanders’ own acclaimed book on the topic, 1971’s The Family.

Photographs related to the Manson Family’s carnage pepper these pages, but oddly, don’t seek pictures of Tate. Instead, Sanders has commissioned the highly talented comic book artist Rick Veitch (Swamp Thing) to provide illustrations. This creative choice would be more welcome if it didn’t leave such a bitter aftertaste; Veitch’s last drawing depicts Sharon and unborn child in heaven, hovering over her gravestone, in a classless manner that suggests you could purchase a velvet painting of it from a dude in a van parked in the lot of that abandoned gas station on the corner. Sanders himself contributes to that ill feeling by closing the book with a poem from his own pen, reading in part:

O Sharon
Your son’d be
what
well into his 40s by now
& you’d be
if still acting
playing comedic grandmother roles

Quicksand. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.