You'll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again

great

Ah, Julia. I was sorry to get to the end of this book and my journey with you through this amazing record of your path through Hollywood as a smart, ambitious woman in the 70's. There are many key players who fell several notches in my esteem and several who behaved exactly as I would have expected. It was great to see the younger generation embrace you as you started writing; hope some of them made it to power positions to change things, but after the emailhacking scandal of a few years ago,I am not so sure. This book was like a kaleidoscope of thoughts, flashbacks, ideas, strategies, and cliffhangers. I loved it and ended up loving Julia, who is told repeatedly in the book nthat she is hard to love. Would anyone ever even think to say that to a man in business? Arghh, the chutzpah! So glad she wrote a sequel!

If you care to read about the cesspool from whence our movies emerge, this is the book for you. While Jools is neither as clever, as educated, as talented or as important as she thinks she is, her honesty makes the book worth enduring. This princess whines about her own mother's honesty while never once expressing regret about staying drugged and absent from her young daughter's life. Here is self-absorption, here is self-importance, here is a woman who really imagines she is worth reading about when in fact the only value of her memoir is that it documents the moral abyss into which our culture has fallen. That this failure of a human being is published and read proves my claim that most of what is published is trash, published not because it's good, but because of the gender, connections, loyalties and origin of the writer. I mean here is a woman who has lunch and attends parties for a living, stayed high for most of her life while nannies raised her daughter and spent her 40's and 50's working out, running and picking outfits to wear to lunch---and her book is read by millions. Why? Because she drops names? Our culture---and we---are hilarious. She says the producer is the only one with no job to do and she's right. She did nothing to earn her fame or her Oscar, nothing but be born and marry right---and there lies the key to understanding Hollywood.

The director as auteur era of the 1970's in Hollywood that spawned such directors as Spielberg, Scorsese, DePalma, Coppola, and others is exposed for its successes and its failures due to wretched excess in drugs and self indulgence. Julia Phillips, an admitted druggie-burnout, spares nothing in her expose. She is also a great writer and has an eye for detailed memory of her experiences as the co-producer of Taxi Driver, The Sting, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Her stories are rich and penetrating. A great read for anyone interested in an insiders look on the era when young directors were given the keys to the kingdom and how some of them managed to change Hollywood forever, ie., the $100 million gross of Jaws by Spielberg.

In her Oscar acceptance speech for Best Picture, Julia Phillips described herself as a "nice Jewish girl from Great Neck." Well, she got 2/3 of it right. But nice? No way. This book is one of the greatest acts of literary self-immolation ever published. It's hard not to feel sorry for Phillips at first, suffering as she does from a toxic mother, a workaholic father, insomnia and a Talmudic intellect. But you get over that feeling in a hurry, as Phillips bullies, maneuvers, sleeps and stomps her way to the top, winning an Oscar for The Sting at the unheard-of age of 29. Her motto: overcompensate; overachieve. If you can't be best, be first. As she notes, no young person is ever ready for massive success, and her career crashed just as quickly. After being more or less fired from Close Encounters by Steven Speilberg, her life became a broken record of drug abuse, failed relationships, financial problems and closed doors gleefully slammed by those she used and abused on the way up. Through it all she makes it all seem like a big game, but the human wreckage strewn across the landscape will give the reader pause. It's hard to know whether Phillips' broadsides at anyone and everyone with whom she had contact are simply through spite, or whether we'd all be better off if Hollywood simply disappeared in the next big quake. Phillips claims that she's just being honest, but snide remarks about a crewmember's physical deformity make her seem only nasty. Hate it as she did, Phillips revelled in the politics, the backstabbing, the lies and shallowness, the feeling of power that came with the title of Producer. She learned fast ("Always negotiate the height and WIDTH of your [on-screen] credit," she advises, after her on-screen credit for The Sting is "willow thin.") Her films (Taxi Driver, The Sting, Close Encounters, among others) were good, though one gets the sense it was in spite of her take-no-prisioners approach. One wishes at the end that Phillips would "get it," but instead she reaps what she sews. There was to be no Hollywood redemption for her. Phillips' death this january was untimely, but no human being could possibly survive for long carrying around so much bile. Very much worth the read, even only as a cautionary tale.

This book is brutally honest and compelling, truly un-put-down-able. The drugs are more evilly destructive, the sex-and-feuds-and-chaos more amazingly tempestuous, the rise and fall more precipitous. If you ever thought something is perhaps not quite right with Hollywood, these two books will forever confirm your suspicions. Phillips spares herself nothing in telling her amazing and painful story, leaving nothing out and letting the chips fall where they may. Along the way, she produced such great films as "The Sting", "Taxi Driver" and "Close Encounters of the Third Kind". She won the Oscar for "The Sting" at the age of 29, can you imagine? This book is a rather bitter cautionary tale, but a rip-snortingly good read. Enjoy it without guilt, perhaps even with a bag of potato chips at the beach. Or even popcorn.

I know this was an old timey book but was interested in it as I was curious about her adventures in Hllyd. This was one of the weirdest books I have ever read -- I slogged thru many pages -- trying to get a sense of what it was all about and also curious about her comments about the famous people she knew. What I got is a very intelligent woman who probably overestimated her value as a Producer of some good films. She, however, was a very shallow lady who was focused on what expensive label clothes she would wear, how thin she was or how fat?, her very negative comments about everyone she met (under the guise of humour), and how she was so important that the trendy restaurants (in the day) always kept a table available to her. This was more important to her than anything else. Her descriptions of the drug use she and apparently most of Hollywood folks imbibed in was an eye-opener to me -- not sure now -----but??? Also so much of her back and forth was totally confusing to me -- I just moved on and didn't read of some of this stuff -- waaaay too boring. A very sad end for a woman who actually had a good brain but was too messed up to make a good life for herself!!

Look, this is a hilarious, honest, ultimately sad tale of ambition and frantic energy rewarded creatively and commercially. Julia P. produced, THE STING, CLOSE ENCOUNTERS, TAXI DRIVER and generally raised hell and money in Hollywood. She was a good looking woman with a good education, a marriage and a kid. Plus a house in Malibu which is all enough for most people. But the combination of the drugs, up to and including crack and the possibly even stronger drug of a voracious hunger for recognition and wealth plus the slippery trail of a business that is a capricious meritocracy at best, a bad odds gambling table at worst, brought Julia P. down to a sorry level of dependency and chaos. But she recounts her adventures with verve and self knowing and a crackling spirit and it , the book , is an entertainment in itself.

Excellent read, one I keep going back to

This is my third reading of Julia Phillips' Hollywood inside story. 150 pages in, it is the writing style that hooks you in as much as the starting point for so many big movie names of today. In today's Hollywood she would have written a screenplay, produced and directed it herself, but sadly she did not live that long : that is also a true life expose.

For my reading entertainment.

The stuff of legend, all the gossip you've been dying to hear about Hollywood in the 70s. Coke, sex, adultery....

Julia Philips drives herself through this biography fuelled by drugs, ambition and more than a little savvy and street smarts. The excesses of the era are captured as is the razor tongue comment on her contempories, actors, directors, drug dealers and movers and shakers. A woman who is ballsy but won't be everyone's cup of tea, her story is well worth a read, the first woman producer to win an oscar in a male dominated, sexist environment of back stabbers, wannabes, losers and winners, it is a great read and worth a movie in itself.