Gross Out.

• Author: Kurtz, Steve
• Position: Review

The Gross: The Hits, The Flops - The Summer That Ate Hollywood, by Peter Bart, New York: St. Martin's, 311 pages, $24.95

There's probably not a person in the world better qualified to write The Gross than Variety editor-in-chief and former studio executive Peter Bart. For anyone interested in how Hollywood really works, this book detailing the cinematic hits and misses of the summer of 1998 is well worth checking out. Even though it contains some faulty analysis, was clearly a rush job (it lacks not only an index, but a table of contents), and evinces the breathless style that mars too much show-biz reporting (Bart ends paragraphs with phrases such as, "the days of reckoning were at hand" or "he had assembled the right team that knew how to get the job done and he knew they would bring home the prize"), The Gross is still compulsively readable.

That's because Bart is able to get behind the scenes and show the tortuous path each movie traveled to get made. The result is thoroughly entertaining, if occasionally depressing. Bart knows that Hollywood is basically just a big horse race, but one in which most jockeys never get past the gate. Indeed, some of last year's films took 10 (Godzilla, Small Soldiers) and even 20 (Deep Impact) years to get made.

No matter what the budget, every film production is filled with tales of intrigue and weirdness. Take, for instance, last summer's Saving Private Ryan. It started with Don Granger, a Paramount exec who wanted his studio to make a World War II film, though the era was no longer fashionable. Producer Mark Gordon brought in writer Robert Rodat, who wrote a script that attracted director Rob Cohen. Then suddenly (and secretly), Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg were interested. So when studio chief Sherry Lansing called to greenlight the project with Cohen at the helm, Gordon was put in the odd position of telling her that he wanted to hold off making the picture.

Or consider Warren's Beatty's Bulworth. Beatty had a "put" picture - that is, a deal with Twentieth Century Fox to make a film any way he liked as long as the budget stayed under $32 million; but for some reason, no one knew where he got this deal. He definitely had a piece of paper giving him total autonomy, but, according to Bart, no one knew the paper's provenance. (I find this story, widely circulated by the people involved, a bit flimsy. It's more likely that since the film flopped, all the executives were running away from it, trying to absolve themselves of any blame by saying their hands had been tied.)

Then there's Lethal Weapon IV. Smoothly run Warner Bros., long the studio of big-budget, big-star hits, had a rotten 1997. Almost every project had failed...