Writes Jon Lewis in his introduction to his new book, “In counterculture Hollywood there were any number of road trips, and most of them … led nowhere, at least nowhere good.” The next 251 pages prove that true. But out of “nowhere good” comes greatness, because Road Trip to Nowhere: Hollywood Encounters the Counterculture is the smartest, most fascinating film book 2022 has brought.

Don’t be put off by its publication from University of California Press or Lewis’ day job as a college film professor; it’s as accessible as it is intelligent (mangling of Cybill Shepherd’s name as “Cybil Shepard” aside).

The second word of Road Trip to Nowhere’s title should be plural, for its structure is vignette-driven: four separate essays with the commonality of time, place and mood. At roughly 60 pages apiece, do the individual pieces of Lewis’ quartet flow into a whole? Not really. Do I care? Not a whit. Each chapter is utterly fascinating and intoxicating in its mix of criticism and cultural history, reminiscent of the pleasures of Charles Taylor’s Opening Wednesday at a Theater or Drive-In Near You: The Shadow Cinema of the American ’70s.

Lewis starts with the stories behind a pair of key youthquake movies. The first, Dennis Hopper’s independent Easy Rider, proved such a from-nowhere hit, it sent an empty-handed studio system into panic mode. The second, Michelangelo Antonioni’s Zabriskie Point, is one of the panic-spawned results — and proof the suits didn’t have a clue at how out of touch they were with the a-changin’ times. (For those interested in more on Zabriskie and the literal cult from which its doomed lead was cast, I highly recommend Ryan H. Walsh’s Astral Weeks: A Secret History of 1968.)

Next, “Christopher Jones Does Not Want to Be a Movie Star” chronicles the quick rise and quicker flameout of Jones, a troubled youth briefly turned into AIP’s top dog at the box office, thanks to a resemblance to James Dean — all in the face, not talent. After climbing from B-movie maven Samuel Z. Arkoff to A-list director David Lean, he walked away from it all … and into homelessness, yet another sad casualty of Tinseltown.

Chapter three is similar, but charts the paths of four actresses of varying fame: Jean Seberg, Jane Fonda, Dolores Hart and Barbara Loden. That only two got happy endings says a great deal about the system’s meat-grinding machinations; that one of those happy endings required getting thee to a nunnery says a great deal more.

Finally, Lewis considers Charles Manson. And really, how could he not? As Lewis posits, “Being counterculture in Hollywood meant one thing before August 1969 and something else again afterward.” Rather than simply revisit the details of Sharon Tate’s slaughter, Lewis tells a cautionary tale of Hollywood with “unsavory characters” in its orbit, from Manson back to the horrific dissection of Black Dahlia Elizabeth Short in 1947 and the unsolved murder of actor William Desmond Taylor in 1922. The line from one to the next is so smoothly drawn, it may as well be the Pacific Coast Highway.

With Road Trip to Nowhere somehow being my first exposure to Lewis, I grew anxious when I hit its halfway point, facing an inevitably end. Immediately, I ordered two more Lewis titles of film history, Hard-Boiled Hollywood and Hollywood v. Hard Core. For Road Trip, I can think of no finer praise than that. To borrow chapter four’s last line, “The defense rests.” —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon.

Paul Downey’s The Shark Is Roaring achieves the impossible: making me want to rewatch Jaws: The Revenge. Subtitled, simply enough, The Story of Jaws: The Revenge, the BearManor Media trade paperback dives deep deep deep into everything you never knew about the 1987 sequel because, well, who wanted to?

Obviously, Downey did. Even if, like me, you dislike or perhaps downright loathe the franchise-killing third sequel, its backstory is undeniably entertaining; there’s more to tell than Michael Caine’s oft-repeated crack about the house he earned for time served. As the author details, the project was a rush job with a mere nine-month turnaround to meet the cart-before-horse date Universal had staked in 1987’s summer-movie calendar. Initial chapters weigh too heavily on a press kit-style recitation of facts and figures before getting to the good stuff of shooting down rumors and amplifying lesser-known info. Hey, who knew Miracle Mile’s Steve De Jarnatt was hired to write a script?

Reviews of Revenge were — how to put this? — unkind. Downey reprints excerpts of critical reaction for the record, your honor, with Roger Ebert’s diss of the shark looking like “canvas with acne” being particularly choice. Even Jaws: The Revenge director Joseph Sargent gets his own licks in, via an existing interview: “How do grown men with rather good credentials in terms of their training, their worldliness, how do we get involved with something that idiotic? It still puzzles me.”

Downey offers oodles of differences between the script and screen, as well what changes between the feature’s various cuts. For example, a BBC broadcast in an improper ratio inadvertently revealed wires and other nuts-and-bolts evidence never meant to be glimpsed; meanwhile, the AMC cable cut carries a title card seemingly written by Criswell: “When there is no factor motivating an event, no case of cause creating effect; what triggered the action? Fate or circumstance?” Such a philosophical/metaphysical question surely was better suited for Hank Searls’ infamously voodoo-driven novelization, also discussed at length.

I wish The Shark Is Roaring carried a narrative throughline, but at least its topic-organized contents makes it a breezy, in-and-out read for lunch hours. Late chapters veer into Jaws cash-in video games and post-Revenge shark movies. Unfortunately, among these pages is an overly snide guest chapter from podcaster and moviemaker B. Harrison Smith, delivering a “fuck you” (his words) to the film. That the writer and director of Zombie Killers: Elephant’s Graveyard rants about “demanding better of our entertainment” than this “lowest of shit food” delivers is hypocritical at best, and sours Downey’s otherwise fairly fun party. —Rod Lott

Get it at Amazon or BearManor Media.