There is a lot of good juicy gossip and interesting stories here. But the writing is frenetic, for lack of a better word. Lots of shouting, lots of italics, eight ellipses in just the short first chapter... It's overwhelming. It reads like Glen Berger wrote this book while on a Red Bull bender, desperate to tell you everything that happened. Nearly every chapter ends with a foreboding "We thought it was going well... Little did we know!!!!" that would be better used sparingly. But while that can all be sort of irritating, it's compulsively readable.
I spend all day telling students to think about bias in documents; intended audience, purpose, and point of view. This book goes out of its way to be grovelingly apologetic about how badly everything was screwed up in Spider-Man. Everything that goes wrong is because of Julie Taymor, because no one could listen, because the author was craven! was an idiot! was too stupid to see!!! It all gets to be a lot after a while. I would have liked him to stand behind the thing he spent years and years writing, instead of constantly trying to paint himself as an apologetic idiot, and Julie Taymor as a genius-monster. It's just so much editorializing that it left me wondering... but what would Julie say about all this?
Grade: B
#13 in 2017
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