Latest Readings by Clive James

to write it off. But Bach’s rueful narrative is a demonstration of how it is possible to understand every stage of a disaster and still be forced to go along with it to the end.
    It ended in bad reviews and an empty box office. I still remember seeing it, and feeling my life growing shorter in a way that I don’t feel even now, when it is. After the smoke cleared, United Artists was in ruins and Michael Cimino changed gender. Steven Bach went on to write this marvelous book. His book about Leni Riefenstahl is also very good, although I won’t be reading it again: her movies were monstrous, but so was she, so there was no discrepancy between aim and result, and hence no lesson. Heaven’s Gate was all lessons; and today, in its afterlife, it exists on no other level. The strangest and most long-lasting of the lessons, however, was that some of the critics managed to convince themselves that a shapeless movie—and not justshapeless in its general outline, but shapeless from scene to scene—was some kind of masterpiece. There have been several attempts to resuscitate the reputation that it justly never earned. One concludes that in the field of movie criticism there is a sucker born every minute. Were he still alive, Steven Bach would have the grace to say that the same applies to movie executives. Since his book came out in 1985 I have taken pleasure in recommending it to anyone who shows signs of being interested in the popular arts, or, indeed, in any kind of arts at all.

Women in Hollywood
    ONE OF THE encouraging developments in Hollywood in recent times has been the rise to influence of women behind the camera. Hollywood will always be a sinkhole of cupidity, but there are some respects in which justice pays, and women were unlikely to be held back forever in a context where talent can be translated into cash. (A big difference, there, between Los Angeles and Saudi Arabia.) In Hello, He Lied the producer Lynda Obst gives us a lesson in what intelligence and sensitivity can do when combined with the near-military practical sense needed to organize a movie. This is the second time I have read her book and I enjoyed it even more than the first time, perhaps because by now the trend she helped to inaugurate looks like part of the atmosphere, instead of just another rebellion that might wither and die. (The career of Ida Lupino used to be cited as a trend, until it was sadly realizedthat the trend consisted of one person.) Especially in the television branch of the filming world, women’s names are now everywhere among the leading credits; and in the film branch, even though it is still a jungle, not everyone behind a powerful desk is a male gorilla; some of them are female gorillas, and much more fastidious in their habits. Obst is very good on the subject of the diligence required to take meetings and phone calls all day long. Sleepless in Seattle is one of her projects: the movie stays good, but one of the reasons is that she was good at phone calls.
    Similarly, in the film world a meeting is a civilized battle, but there is no point to being civilized if you can’t fight in the first place. To that extent, she is not ladylike; but only if you think that ladies should sit still to be overruled. The only element missing from her gift for the useful rule of thumb (“Never go to a meeting without a strategy”) is that she is not especially funny. Lighthearted, yes: but not hilarious. Julia Phillips, who pioneered the format of the female executive vade mecum with her brilliantly entertaining You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again , was hilarious. Reading it again, I find that her book still is, though more than ever it generates too great a sense of waste. The producer of Taxi Driver, The Sting , and Close Encounters could have done even more: run studios, run for president. But the cocaine got her. Sometimes I think I might have been a Puritan all along. I drank too much, smoked cigarettes and cigars like an