Waxman's book examines the careers of directors Steven Soderbergh, Quentin Tarantino, Spike Jonze, David O. Russell, David Fincher and Paul Thomas Anderson.
Critic Reviews
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Favorable
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Publishers Weekly
These men possess a daring vision, which the author skillfully depicts, simultaneously offering an illuminating view of motion picture politics.
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Favorable
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Booklist Gordon Flagg
A sympathetic but clear-eyed account. [1 Feb 2005, p.928]
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Favorable
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Salon Andrew O'Hehir
But while Waxman never conceals her own tastes and sympathies, she's a reporter to the core, and like all good reporting Rebels on the Backlot ultimately opens up its subject for debate and leaves the final verdict to the reader.
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Favorable
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Kirkus Reviews
Waxman's grasp of the interior of the studio world, and her ability to make the workings of closed-door deals comprehensible, raise her work from text book to something truly absorbing.
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Favorable
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Washington Post Robert Sklar
Her book is a triumph of journeywoman legwork.
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Mixed
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Library Journal Stephen Rees
Well written though overlong, the book should have included more on women and minority directors (notably Sofia Coppola). [15 Feb 2005, p.134]
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Mixed
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Entertainment Weekly Benjamin Svetkey
It's a fun, sometimes nasty read, although a bit sloppy with the facts in spots.
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Mixed
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Los Angeles Times David Freeman
A lively book with gossipy and readable stories about some obsessive guys who are as much rascals as rebels. [23 Jan 2005, p.R2]
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Unfavorable
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The New Republic Elbert Ventura
Waxman has shown a workmanlike talent for getting the money quote, the meaty anecdote. Less apparent is an ability to contextualize and critique, to bring the information she digs up under insightful scrutiny. In a Sunday arts feature, such failings may be negligible; in a book, they can be fatal.
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Unfavorable
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The New York Times Book Review Ken Tucker
The sloppy language is consistently distracting in a book that has all it can do to prove the assertion of its subtitle... Rebels might have been a classic of show-business reportage had Waxman had only two things: a better editor and a willingness to let loose with what she really thinks about some of these gifted jerks.
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Terrible
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The Onion A.V. Club Nathan Rabin
Waxman's vicious gossip-as-history approach—which echoes Peter Biskind's compulsively readable, utterly trashy Hollywood epics "Easy Riders, Raging Bulls and Down And Dirty Pictures"—can be invigorating and exciting in small doses, but becomes suffocating and toxic over the course of an entire book. Waxman's got a wonderful, meaty story to tell, but it's strangled by the ugliness and mean-spiritedness of its telling.
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